Bone flutes in Henan sound nine thousand years old
Chinese music spans many ethnic traditions, instruments and languages inside one modern state. Zhou-dynasty sources already show a developed court musical culture, while bone flutes from Jiahu about 9,000 years old and clay xun roughly 7,000 years old push its story deep into prehistory.
Legend says the Yellow Emperor asked Ling Lun to create music, and he cut bamboo pipes tuned to birdsong, the phoenix included; the first pipe gave the yellow bell pitch, and twelve tones and a set of bells followed. Under the Zhou, court ritual music later called yayue, elegant music, took shape. The word for music could also mean dance, poetry and ritual, and music was imagined as nature's voice within the order of yin and yang. By around the seventh century BC a pentatonic scale had been derived from a cycle of fifths.
Philosophers disagreed sharply. Confucius saw proper music as refining the individual and signalling a stable government, while condemning some popular tunes as corrupting. Mozi wrote Against Music, calling it wasteful indulgence. Asked by a ruler whether preferring popular songs to the classics was wrong, Mencius replied that what counted was loving one's subjects.
Musicians ranked well below painters, so literati who played for pleasure distanced themselves, favouring instruments like the guqin. Emperors sent officials to collect folk songs, and the Classic of Poetry preserves many from about 800 to 400 BC. The Imperial Music Bureau, founded under the Qin, grew greatly under Han Wudi. Central Asia later brought the pipa and erhu, and a musician from Kucha named Sujiva introduced an Indian seven-note scale in the sixth century, though it was eventually dropped.
The oldest surviving written piece is Solitary Orchid, from the sixth or seventh century, and the qin flowered under the Tang. In 1601 the Jesuit Matteo Ricci gave the Ming court a harpsichord and taught four eunuchs to play it. The New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s sparked lasting enthusiasm for Western music, backed by the Shanghai Conservatory.
Source: Music of China
