Couple of days ago, just discussed with my students the idea that analysis can be as much a creative act as composing and performing, and that creative acts in music are often a form of problem solving acts. Today I read with great fascination that transcribing ancient guqin scores (古琴普) can be a very high level of problem solving as well.

The article in 早报周刊 interviewed a Singapore guqin expert 纪志群, who described the process as involving tremendous interpretative work, drawing upon knowledge of Chinese ancient music history, archaelogy, historical editions, Chinese theories of tuning, Chinese literature, Chinese aesthetics, and, of course, historical forms of guqin notations and performance traditions.

I particularly like the metaphor he used to describe the relation between the transcriber and the notation. The latter is like the river bed, the former the living water that flows along: while the river bed more or less determines the course of the river, it can be altered by the flowing water. I suppose the same may be said of both a performance and an analytical interpretation--one literally sounded out, the other as sounded in the analyst's mind; if both are slavish 'reproductions' of the score/traditions, they would be 'without life' (无生气); yet ignoring traditions will result in undesirable groundlessness (无源之水， 无本之木). Transcribing guqin notation is no less a creative act!