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Title: Music in the Age of Confucius by Jenny F. So, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution), Milo Cleveland Beach ISBN: 0-295-97953-4 Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating glimpses into another time
Comment: 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.
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Title: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th Ed) by Joseph Gibaldi, Phyllis Franklin ISBN: 0873529863 Publisher: Modern Language Association of America Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition by University of Chicago Press Staff ISBN: 0226104036 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
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