The Amateur Ideal and the (Relative) Poverty of Chinese Music

A Familiar Sound

If you’ve spent any time in China, you’ve almost certainly heard the piece above. The first few seconds are unmistakable — the crisp, percussive strikes of the pipa, the shredding tremolo, the rush of notes that seem to evoke galloping horses or clashing blades. It’s a piece that feels woven into the cultural fabric, and it’s instantly recognizable to almost anyone who’s grown up in China.

Ask any Chinese person what it’s called and they’ll answer without hesitation: 十面埋伏 Shí miàn mái fú — “Ambush from Ten Sides.” But ask when it was written, or by whom, or which pipa virtuoso is best known for performing it, and you’ll almost certainly get a shrug, a silence, or maybe a puzzled confession. I didn’t know either. I had to look it up. Wikipedia tells me that the piece first appeared in 1818 in a collection of lute scores compiled by Hua Qiuping from Wuxi, though earlier versions existed as far back as the late Ming or early Qing. The lineage is murky, the authorship unknown. The piece is a marvel of technique and drama, but it’s anonymous — as so much of traditional Chinese music is.

In fact, ask any Chinese person to name a famous musician from before the modern era, and at most they’ll offer up semi-mythical names, said to be good on the zither: Zhuge Liang or Zhou Yu of the Three Kingdoms period, perhaps Emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1126) of the Song Dynasty. But these men were not known primarily as musicians: They were statesmen or strategists, ministers or rulers. Most Chinese people would find it hard to name anyone from China’s imperial past who was famous primarily as a composer or a musician.

That’s always struck me as odd. By the early 1800s, Europe had produced a long roster of composers whose names every half-educated person still recognizes: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. Many more who were famous in their day will be familiar to music historians. In China, there are few, if any, premodern names that ordinary people can associate with specific compositions. Ambush from Ten Sides is as famous as anything in the Chinese canon, yet it belongs to no one in particular.

The Broader Puzzle

For me, this raises a real question about the different paths musical culture took in China and the West. By the time Hua Qiuping was compiling his pipa anthology, which I only just learned about this morning, Western music had already gone through centuries of formal development: harmonic theory, polyphony, orchestration, and, crucially, the professionalization of composition and performance. The great composers were celebrated in their own lifetimes and remembered after their deaths. Their work formed an evolving canon, each generation building on the last.

China’s musical tradition, by contrast, remained largely anonymous, collective, and relatively static. It was either courtly and ritualistic, thus rejecting change or innovation; or it was popular and vulgar, with its performers and even its composers relegated not just to anonymity but to low, nearly untouchable social status, down there with itinerant actors and prostitutes. The beauty of the Chinese music I like lies in its timbre, its subtle inflection and phrasing, in tone color rather than harmonic richness. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s an aesthetic of restraint and inwardness (except when it shreds and kicks ass, like Ambush from Ten Sides). But it’s striking that China produced no class of composers or performers who achieved lasting fame for their music.

Why? That question, I’ve come to believe, can’t be answered purely in musical terms. It has to do with the deeper structures of Chinese cultural life, like what was and wasn’t valued, what was considered an art of moral cultivation, and what was “merely” a craft.

Joseph Levenson and the Amateur Ideal

Joseph Levenson has probably shaped the way I think about Chinese intellectual history more than any other scholar. (For those of you who’ve read my recent piece “The Great Reckoning,” you may recall my intellectual indebtedness to him and his ideas). Reflecting on Levenson was actually the inspiration for this little essay. His notion of the “amateur ideal,” which he develops in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, has always stayed with me. In the Confucian world, the highest type of person wasn’t the specialist or professional but the cultivated generalist — the junzi or “gentleman” who could write a decent poem (extemporaneously, while drunk), paint bamboo, birds, or a shanshui landscape, play a few tunes on his seven-stringed qin, and govern a district, all without appearing to try too hard. Mastery was never meant to look like labor. The true gentleman dabbled effortlessly in many arts but was defined precisely by his distance from professional skill.

This hierarchy of values had real consequences. It created an enduring cultural prejudice against specialization, and nowhere was that more visible than in music. There was a moral hierarchy in the arts. Poetry, painting, and calligraphy were noble forms through which moral sensibility could be expressed. Music, by contrast, was suspect. It was too physical, too easily tied to sensual pleasure, too close to the realm of performers and entertainers. To be known primarily as a musician was to risk association with servants and courtesans.

It’s not that the Chinese lacked musical sophistication. Far from it. But the idea that one might devote an entire life to composing or performing music professionally simply didn’t fit within the Confucian order of things. The great scholar-official might pluck a few notes on the qin in private to show his refinement, but he wouldn’t dream of earning a living from it. That invisible but absolute boundary shaped the place of music in Chinese civilization for centuries.

Music under the Amateur Ideal

When you trace the logic of Levenson’s “amateur ideal” into the world of music, you start to see how deeply it shaped not just tastes but institutions. For the junzi, to play music was to signal a certain refinement, but it was a private pursuit, done among friends or alone in contemplation, not something that put you on a stage. (If you’ve ever played one, you know how unresonant and dead they sound, and that no one more than 10 meters away’s going to hear a note you’re playing anyway!) The literatus might invite professional musicians to perform at a banquet, playing louder and less refined instruments — note how many of them, after Tang, are “barbarian” in origin: the erhu and the huqin both have “hu,” barbarian in their name; the pipa (a borrowed word, possibly onomatopoetic in origin), and many more. But he would never regard them as social equals, much less as moral exemplars.

That hierarchy left its mark on the art itself. Chinese music, especially the classical traditions, prized subtlety over structure, gesture over development. It never built the harmonic or rhythmic sophistication that comes from large ensembles rehearsing and composing together under professional discipline. There was no real Chinese equivalent of the orchestra, no tradition of multi-part writing, no expectation that a composition would be “signed” and preserved in an evolving canon. Music remained oral, interpretive, intimate, and kind of declassé. It was cultivated, to an extent, but always circumscribed.

I don’t mean this as a value judgment. There’s real beauty in the understatement and fragility of the Chinese tradition, and I’ve always drawn on it in the bands I’ve played in in China, both Tang Dynasty and Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn). But you can also see what got lost. When a culture doesn’t elevate its musicians, when it treats music as an ornament rather than a vocation, it shouldn’t surprise us that it failed to produce its own Bachs or Beethovens — or even to remember the names of the musicians who might have come close.

The Modern Inversion: Western Music and Modernity

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the old amateur ideal was losing its grip. The confrontation with Western power had made clear that moral cultivation and calligraphic grace were no match for industrial strength, disciplined armies, and specialized knowledge. A new generation of reformers and artists began to look to the West for models of cultural modernity, and music was part of that transformation.

Western classical music seemed to embody everything China had lacked. It was complex and collective, built on technical precision and cooperation. It depended on institutions — conservatories, orchestras, concert halls — that rewarded professionalism rather than dilettantism. For educated Chinese in the early Republic, it represented not just beauty but civilization itself: the sound of a society that valued rigor, teamwork, and expertise. Listening to a symphony or learning the piano became aspirational, a way of participating in modernity.

Meanwhile, traditional music was increasingly seen as quaint, backward, and overly simple. Its elegance had come to feel like a limitation. When Chinese composers trained in the Western style tried to create a “national” music, they borrowed Western harmony and orchestration almost reflexively. The cultural hierarchy had flipped: the professional had triumphed over the amateur, and Western forms became the new measure of seriousness.

Lingering Echoes — The Amateur Ideal Today

Yet traces of the amateur ideal never quite disappeared. You can still feel it in the ambivalence that surrounds professional musicianship in China — a lingering discomfort with taking art too seriously, or making it your livelihood. In rock music especially, there’s a faint suspicion that commercial success must come at the cost of authenticity. The old hierarchy of values still hums quietly in the background, even in a scene that prides itself on rebellion.

I’ve felt that tension myself. I’ve never really stopped thinking of myself as an amateur, in the original sense of the word — someone who does it out of love. But that hasn’t always been an advantage. When I played with Tang Dynasty in the 1990s, I was surrounded by musicians for whom there was no fallback plan, no day job waiting in the wings. For them, the band’s success was not a nice-to-have: it was how they made rent. I remember the sting of reading a review of our second album Epic (《演义》) that dismissed me as “吉他爱好者郭怡广” — “guitar hobbyist Guo Yiguang (my Chinese name).” It wasn’t wrong, exactly. I recognized the truth in it, and the irony that I, of all people, had become the living embodiment of the Levensonian amateur ideal.

That attitude — half pride, half inhibition — still shapes parts of Chinese rock today. There’s a romance to being the uncorrupted enthusiast, the purist who refuses to “sell out,” but it can also be a trap. Professionalism still carries the faint odor of compromise, while amateurism retains a kind of moral glow. It’s a beautiful idea, but one that can quietly hold a culture back.

After the Amateur Ideal

The triumph of professionalism in music hasn’t been an unalloyed good. On one level, it’s heartening — that joke about symphony audiences in America being made up mostly of people with either black hair or blue hair isn’t really a joke at all. Walk into any major concert hall in the U.S. and you’ll see that East Asians have kept orchestral music alive. That’s something to celebrate. But there’s a darker side too. How many Chinese or Chinese American kids have had their love of music squeezed out of them by compulsory piano or violin lessons, the relentless grind of competitions and recitals? For all the discipline and technical excellence, something of the joy can go missing.

And in the commercial sphere, professionalism sometimes curdles into perfectionism. Much of today’s Canto- and Mandopop is immaculately produced — the hooks impeccable, the pitch flawless, the mixes sterile. It’s technically perfect, but the perfection can feel airless and utter lacking in spontaneity. The pendulum has swung so far from the old amateur ideal that music can start to sound machine-made.

Yet the old impulse hasn’t vanished either. You can still hear it in how certain rock critics — especially those allergic to virtuosity — treat technical mastery as suspect, equating simplicity with authenticity, sincerity with lack of skill. As a lover of progressive rock, I’ve never understood that. To me, playing with complexity or ambition doesn’t cheapen feeling; it deepens it. But the reflexive mistrust of mastery is hard to shake. It’s as if the amateur ideal, exiled from the Confucian order, found new life in the cult of the unpolished and the naïve. The tension between amateurism and professionalism persists.

Levenson’s Echos

Levenson saw the amateur ideal as both the glory and the undoing of traditional Chinese civilization. It gave Chinese culture its refinement, its moral tone, its sense that the arts were extensions of character rather than trades. But it also placed invisible limits on what could be pursued to its fullest potential. In a world that rewards mastery and innovation, the cultivated dabbler— me, for instance — eventually finds himself outpaced by the dedicated professional.

When I think about Ambush from Ten Sides now, I hear that paradox in it — the brilliance of a tradition that prized expression without ego, form without fame. It’s dazzling, virtuosic, and utterly anonymous. Perhaps the piece has survived for centuries precisely because it doesn’t belong to anyone. Yet that anonymity, that resistance to authorship, is also what kept Chinese music from developing the kind of cumulative legacy that Western classical music did. What Levenson wrote about the crisis of the amateur ideal could just as well describe the fate of Chinese music: the loss of a whole moral world that once gave meaning to culture, but also the constraints that world imposed.

I still love Chinese music — its timbres, its melancholy, its sparseness. “Chinese music always sets me free,” sang Donald Fagan on the title track to Steely Dan’s Aja, “Angular banjoes sound good to me.” I love the amateur spirit that produced the music Fagan professed to love, though Steely Dan was anything but amateur. Still, I can’t help wondering what might have been if Chinese musicians had been free to treat their art not just as ornament, but as vocation. Perhaps somewhere, between the refinement of the literatus and the devotion of the professional, lies the balance that modern Chinese music — and maybe all of us who make it — are still trying to find.