Cambridge History of China

2020

Die östliche Zhou- (770–221 v. Chr.) und die Han-Dynastie (206 v. Chr.–220 n. Chr.) waren Perioden sozialer, kultureller und politischer Umwälzungen in China. In dieser Übergangszeit hat sich China von einem durch rivalisierende Staaten beherrschten zu einem unter einem einzigen Herrscher vereinten Land gewandelt. Archäologische Funde aus dem 7. und 6. Jh. v. Chr. legen nahe, dass sich die rivalisierenden Staaten größtenteils der musikalischen Tradition des Zhou-Staats angepasst haben. Die Fülle an Glocken und Klangsteinspielen, die bisher mit Zhou-staatlichen Zeremonien und Ahnenritualen verbunden werden, zeugen von diesem Einfluss. Jedoch implizieren materielle Belege aus dem 5. und 4. Jh. v. Chr. einen weitgreifenden Wandel auf der kulturellen und musikalischen Ebene, vor allem im zunehmend an Macht gewinnenden Chu-Staat. Trotz des politischen Niedergangs der Chu im 3. Jh. v. Chr. hielten sich die musikalischen und kulturellen Einflüsse bis in die Han-Dynastie.

2019

Eastern Zhou (770-221 BCE) to Han (206 BCE-220 CE) was a period of great social, cultural and political change in China. During this transitional time, China went from a land ruled by rivaling states to one dominated by a single emperor. Archaeological evidence of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE suggests that the rival states largely adhered to Zhou musical traditions. The abundance of bells and chime stones, associated with Zhou state ceremonies and ancestral rituals, serves as key evidence of this influence. Material evidence from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, however, suggests great musical and cultural change, especially in the increasingly powerful Chu state. Despite the political demise of Chu in the 3rd century BCE, its musical and cultural impact continued well into the Han.

Journal of Music History Pedagogy Vol. 4, No. 2 (pp. 333-36), 2014

A round-table discussion on teaching Western music history in Asia, held at the Second Biennial Conference of the East Asian Regional Association of the International Musicological Society (Taipei, Taiwan, October 2013)

2001

Inter-culturality and Philosophic Discourse, 2013

Lately, themes related to Chinese sound culture and musical thought have been attracting more scholarly attention. Nevertheless, there seems to be a blind spot in the recent discussion. Most scholars simply assume that Confucian thinkers had a monopoly on all kinds of musical phenomena as well as musical discussion in ancient China. They even seem to believe that all Confucian thinkers from Confucius to the authors of the Book of Music (Yueji 樂記), including Mencius and Xunzi, adhered to a unified position on music, which is called "ritual and music (liyue 禮樂)" discourse. The contending ideas within the Confucian camp have not been sufficiently appreciated and much less attention has been paid to the ways in which the different camps once attacked the Confucian idea. This kind of approach oversimplifies the musical discourses in early China and consequently misleads us into believing that sound culture in China was so limited as to reduce the value of music to no more than serving the rule of the state. My aim here is to explore the formation and development of the key terms "sheng (§, sound)," "yin (if, tone)" and "yue (~, music)," in early Chinese musical discourse. Since sheng, yin and yue were gradually involved in the entire pre-Qin period and their relationship was complicated by different preoccupations, their various facets can be revealed by analysis of their usage. I will argue that the reflection on established music and the necessity for musical adjustments had already appeared before the formation of the Confucian school in the mid-fifth century BCE; diverse solutions to musical problems were proposed by various circles including scholars, musicians and rulers; the signification of the three terms evolved over the pre-Qin period, implying, on the one hand, the provisional consummation of Confucian musical discourse and, on the other, the beginning of long-term debate handed down to coming generations.

2017

中央音乐学院学报 = Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music, 2019

Chinese objects were throughout the eighteenth century the most admired and desired items by the European collectors of the highest rank, and many aristocratic palaces included a Chinese room or a garden pavilion. In these places the true Chinese and the fictional Chinese crossed path. While the Prussian royal palace in Berlin included one room with original Chinese lacquer paneling, and another full of genuine Chinese porcelain of the highest quality collected since the late seventeenth century, King Friedrich der Grosse (1712–86) built between 1755 and 1864 at his summer palace in Potsdam a tea pavilion in an entirely fictional Chinese style. A short supply of true Chinese objects and strong interest for them created an artistic space for the creation of fictionalized imagery of China (chinoiseries). Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names. We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).

2017

A paper read at a symposium in Shanghai Conservatory of Music in September 2017.