Music in the Age of Confucius [Paperback]

Jenny F. So (Editor), Milo Cleveland Beach (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2000

Chinese archaeologists digging in central China in 1977 unexpectedly uncovered two of the earliest and most extensive groups of musical instruments in the entire ancient world, dating from nearly 2500 years ago. since these percussion, string, and wind instruments were in near-pristine condition - some still playable, others inscribed with musicological information - they provided hitherto unimagined possibilities for th study of music and the history of musical instruments in ancient China. Presented here are the insights of six specialists who describe these instruments' sophisticated tuning systems, techniques of manufacture and inscriptions revealing their musical and non-musical significance in ancient Chinese society. It has become apparent that different types of music existed in Bronze Age China (2000-500 BC) for state rituals as well as for private entertainment. The authors place this evidence in the context of recent archaeological discoveries and reassess it in light of classical history and the literature on Chinese music. The three main families of instruments are also examined in detail in individual chapters. Lovers of art and music, as well as enthusiast of archaeology, musicology, and cultural history, should find this a compelling and readable presentation of the latest research and ideas on one of the world's oldest and most profound artistic expressions.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jenny F. So is curator of ancient Chinese art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. She is coauthor with Emma C. Bunker of Traders and Raiders on China's Northern Frontier.

Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Smithsonian Books; First Edition edition (June 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295979534
• ISBN-13: 978-0295979533
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 8.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,446,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating glimpses into another time, April 27, 2002

By 

J. P. J. Stock (Sheffield, S. Yorks United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Music in the Age of Confucius (Paperback)

Imagine that the chief executive of a major record company died of a heart attack. His staff strangle all the members of the in-house orchestra, say the Vienna Philharmonic, chief conductor to the fore, laying them carefully in performance layout in an underground concert hall. The executive himself is placed with attendants (also strangled) in a fully-equipped recording room to one side. Next to each player was his (or, occasionally, her) instrument on which the murderer had first inscribed its tuning. Beside the bodies were illustrations of the musicians in performance, though sadly no scores. Then a roof was put up and the whole tomb encased in earth for a little over two-thousand four-hundred years.
This scenario may sound fantastic, it may even sound curiously tempting to some. It is also exactly what happened in central China. In the Winter of 1977 a unit of the Chinese People's Liberation Army was called in to level a small hill, such that a factory could be built near the town of Suizhou, which lies to the north of the city of Wuhan in Hubei Province. Breaking into a hitherto unknown burial pit of obvious antiquity, the soldiers quickly called in the archaeologists. The discovery that followed was the most remarkable in Chinese musical history to date, and one unparalleled among any of the other ancient cultures, whether in Asia, Africa, Europe or the Americas.
Laid out according to the model of a classical Chinese palace, the stone-lined tomb contained everything the Bronze Age despot would need for a successful, upwardly mobile after-life: an ornately lacquered wooden double coffin to shield both his bones and his dignity; several thousand weapons, pieces of armour and bronze chariot fittings; the bodies of twenty-one women (each strangled-presumably to keep her body pure) and a dog (method of death sadly unrecorded); and, best of all, a full set of ritual musical instruments, including a sixty-five-piece ensemble of studded bronze bells and thirty-two tuned chime stones. Inscriptions on the bronze implements identified the tomb's incumbent as Marquis Yi of Zeng, a minor and long-defunct state in central China. They also recorded that the bell set was presented to Marquis Yi by his powerful neighbour the King of Chu in the King's fifty-sixth year (i.e. 433 B.C.).
Superbly well-preserved in the central "ceremonial courtyard" of the subterranean palace, each bell produced two distinct pitches, depending on where it was struck. The set as a whole had a range of over five octaves, much of it fully chromatic in semitones. Drums, stringed instruments and wind instruments, as well as the above-mentioned lithophones, completed the ensemble. Some of the instruments or other ritual materials found in the tomb bore scenes depicting the making of music. The bells themselves were decorated with both the names of their two pitches in absolute terms and the identification of these in terms of relative pitch, a duplication that means we can today measure both their respective pitches and establish the tonal systems within which the set as a whole was played. The inclusion of five sets of beaters even gives a fairly strong hint as to how many musicians were required to perform the bells.
Discovered at the very beginning of the period of reconstruction following the Cultural Revolution, these instruments, most especially the bell set, have already attracted major attention in China. Recordings of a replica ensemble are available at many tourist sites across the country (though sadly the music chosen is less interesting). By the mid-1990s, enterprising Hubei peasants had taken to buying replica bells from Shanghai's Jiaotong University. These bells are then buried in the paddy fields for a year or two to age them and then sold on to unsuspecting foreign tourists, who are warned not to tell Chinese Customs-antiquities not being legally exportable). Whatever the moral issues of this exchange, the bells are extremely good-looking objects, and they deserve to be better known overseas.
Music in the Age of Confucius (or, actually, a century or so later) is exactly the book to carry out this process. Drawing together the widely scattered fruits of twenty years of research, it talks the reader through the various unprecedented discoveries, and was published on the occasion of the exhibition of instruments from the tomb of Marquis Yi at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington in 2000. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, many of them in colour, it is expertly written by a team of contributors who have kept in mind the intelligent, lay public likely to attend the exhibition. Five chapters examine, in turn, music at the time of Marquis Yi, percussion instruments, strings, winds and the importance of the instruments for our understanding of Chinese music history as a whole. In each case, the material from Marquis Yi's tomb is used as the focal point in a review of discoveries from other sites and references in the surviving literature and relics of the period. Supporting material in the book includes a chronology, map, glossary of characters, reference list, scale diagrams of instruments and an index. This adds up to a fascinating and engaging read, eminently open to the reader new to Chinese music.