Music in China

Chinese

The most complete ancient system arose here; but, although it existed from a very early date, soon, like other institutions, it became so conventionalized and minutely regulated as to preclude further advancement.

Beginning with Huang Ti (B.C. 2697) Chinese music assumed its characteristic form. The Emperor Shun (B.C. 2255) composed the piece called Ta Shao, which sixteen hundred years later so deeply impressed Confucius that for three months "he did not know the taste of meat". The great restorer of ancient virtue, Confucius was, himself, an enthusiastic musician. Already in his day (c. 550 B.C.) the true old music was less practised, and three hundred years later it was lost beyond recovery in the reign of the vandal Emperor Shi-Huang-Ti, the destroyer of books.

The Many existent treatises, of which the earliest dates from the eleventh century B.C., show the speculative character of the Chinese mind. Tradition ascribes the division of the octave into twelve parts to the famous musician Lyng-lun. Wandering in the forest, he was attracted by the song of a male and a female bird, who sounded respectively the six odd and six even tones of the octave. These tones he immediately fixed by tuning a separate banboo reed to each. The pentatonic, however, is the only scale now in common use; but this may be based upon anyone of the accepted tones, according as notated.

The Chinese think of their scale as descending rather than ascending like ours, a characteristic common in older systems, and, with the customary union of art and politics, they give the individual tones names from state institutions.

• Kung - The Emperor === Tonic
• Shang - The Minister === Supertonic
• Chiao - The People === Mediant
• Chih - Affairs of State === Dominant
• Yu - Material objects === Submediant

The most pervasive number in Chinese philosophy is five, and the tones of the pentatonic scale ocrresong also to the five planets, five points of the compass, five colors, five elements, and so on.

The melodies have a peculiarly wandering character, since the Chinese centre the interest in the color rather than the progression of individual tones; and of these tone-colors eight varieties are distinguished, according as the material from which they are derived is skin, stone, metal, baked earth, sild, wood, gourd, or bamboo. The instruments fashioned from these are both fanciful in workmanship and symbolic in character, with those of percussion in the great majority; and especially noteworthy are the King, an organ made of sixteen carefully-seclected stone plates struck by a mallet, which give out a sound described as "less tart than metal, brighter than wood"; the Bell Organs, similarly made but with bells instead of stones; the Sheng, a precursor of our reed organ, made by inserting twenty-one bamboos, each having a metal reed, into a gourd, which is blown into through a mouth-piece; and the many varieties of drums, in some of which the tone is altered by the insertion of rice. The combination of these instruments into orchestras is common.

Outside of its use in religious functions Chinese music is cultivated only by the lower orders. The most characteristic melodies, therefore, are either ancient hymns or the fold-songs of the sailors and mountaineers.

Kindred Systems

The most important of these are found in Japan, Java, Siam, and Burmah; and in all of them the pentatonic scale is common, although it undergoes many modifications. In Japan the instruments include the Samisen, a three-stringed lute; a rude violin called the Kokiu; an oboe used as a trumpet, and made by inserting a tube in a seashell; and a number of other stringed instruments, of which the Koto is the most important. Women are admitted into both religious and secular orchestra performances; and the music is poetic and popular in character, sometimes founded upon a scale approaching our chromatic form. The native music, however, is in danger of extermination, on account of the general adoption of the European system into the public schools.

The Javanese have a number of instruments; and in Burmah the instrumetns include bell and gong organs of twenty-one tones each, and a wooden crocodile with three brass strings on top. In Siam orchestras are numerous, and the characteristic instrument is the Ranat, consisting of wooden or metal bars played with a hammer.