Chinese musicology

Chinese musicology is the academic study of traditional Chinese music. This discipline has a very long history. The concept of music yue stands among the oldest categories of Chinese thought, however, in the known sources it does not receive a fairly clear definition until the writing of the Classic of Music (lost during the Han dynasty).

Music is amazing - just saying I thought you should know that. Not just listening to music, playing music. It speaks what cannot be said, those untranslatable brainwaves going through your mind are expressed through music. Everyone who reads this should learn a musical instrument (if you don't already play one). It will sound horrible at first and make you want to stop, but once you can play at a level where your feelings are being expressed through music you will never want to be separated from your music. So please, learn an instrument. Make the world a musical place!

Scale and tonality

Most Chinese music uses a pentatonic scale, with the intervals (in terms of lǜ) almost the same as those of the major pentatonic scale. The notes of this scale are called gōng 宫, shāng 商, jué 角, zhǐ 徵 and yǔ 羽. By starting from a different point of this sequence, a scale (named after its starting note) with a different interval sequence is created, similar to the construction of modes in modern Western music.

Since the Chinese system is not an equal tempered tuning, playing a melody starting from the lǜ nearest to A will not necessarily sound the same as playing the same melody starting from some other lǜ, since the wolf interval will occupy a different point in the scale. The effect of changing the starting point of a song can be rather like the effect of shifting from a major to a minor key in Western music. The scalar tunings of Pythagoras, based on 2:3 ratios (8:9, 16:27, 64:81, etc.), are a western near-parallel to the earlier calculations used to derive Chinese scales.

How the scales are produced: Start with a fundamental frequency. (440 hertz is used here.) Apply the ratios to make the first column. Copy the second and all further elements in this column to the respective heads of the other eleven columns. Apply the ratios to make the second through the twelfth columns. So doing produces 144 frequencies (with some duplications). From each column five different selections of non-adjacent frequencies can be made. (See the colored blocks at the far left.) So each column can produce 60 different pentatonic scales.

Sources

• 陈应时 (Chen Yingshi, Shanghai Conservatory). "一种体系 两个系统 Yi zhong ti-xi, liang ge xi-tong". Musicology in China. 2002 (4): 109–116.

External links

• More details and recorded examples.