Improvisation occupies a paradoxical position in guqin culture. While classical ideals celebrate spontaneity, personal expression, and responsive play, contemporary practice and pedagogy tend to emphasize fidelity to established scores. This paper proposes “forgetting the score” as method: a way to reconcile guqin’s richly notated tradition with the improvisatory techniques explored by modern masters.

The author’s wangpu 忘谱 (“forgetting the score”) series and related works explore how deliberate unlearning and spontaneous response can renew the instrument’s inherent improvisatory spirit. Earlier experiments with free improvisation revealed both the intensity and fragility of complete spontaneity: the reliance on solitude, external inspiration, and habitual gestures that limited creative and technical growth. The move toward structure emerged from this tension, drawing on East Asian models where improvisation unfolds within shared modal, rhythmic, and ritual frameworks, and where subtle stretching of time and timbre shapes the expressive field, alongside influences from jazz and Western contemporary art music. The aim is to develop a mode of creation rooted in qin aesthetics such as wu wei (non-action), dan (blandness), and xu (emptiness) rather than external idioms. This approach seeks a balance between philosophical depth and practical discipline, offering a framework that supports study, refinement, and technical development, and that could, much like the formalization of jazz education, be integrated into contemporary qin pedagogy and performance. 

This paper examines the structuring of improvisation as a method that operates in dialogue with traditional guqin aesthetics. Rather than displacing the past, this approach situates improvisation within the context of contemporary qin culture, aligning artistic practice with current modes of research, pedagogy, and creative development. “Forgetting the score” proposes a practice that integrates spontaneity with structure, allowing the ancient spirit to remain active within a modern artistic and educational environment.