A Critical Examination of Baisha Xiyue
Responding polemically to Mo Erjihu's 1991 article, which translated Baisha Xiyue as "Five Xiqin Fiddles" and called it essentially Mongol court music, Liu Lan mounts a point-by-point rebuttal. Examining the tune's legendary origin (a Mongol ensemble supposedly gifted by Kublai Khan to the Naxi chieftain Aliang in 1253), its nine competing name variants, the tragic eight-movement narrative it encodes (the Naxi "Black-and-White War" story of a princess, her doomed husband the White Prince, and her cruel father the Mu "Heavenly King"), its musical features (the "feiduo" ornamental vibrato, yu-mode tonality, unifying leitmotifs, and a "borrowed-sound" lyric technique), and its two anomalous instruments (sugudu and bobei, argued to derive from Persia via the southwestern Silk Road rather than Mongolia), Liu concludes Baisha Xiyue is a Yuan-era Naxi folk composition that absorbed genuine cross-cultural influence from Mongol, Han, Yi, and other traditions, but was never literally Kublai Khan's gift, and never involved a xiqin fiddle at all.
This page publishes the bibliographic record and the project's summary. The scanned article text belongs to its publisher and is shown to readers under a research-use policy; it is not reproduced in this record.