Themes > Arts > Music > Music around the World > Music of East Asia
This region of the world is a continent into itself: the areas that it covers are so vast that it is difficult, if not impossible, to know all the forms of music played and sung there, particularly in China. Probably no ear has heard them all. To cite China at this point is to stress its historical importance and to bring up a continuity in music that archeology and written records not only confirm, but allow us to follow in all its details, from Early Antiquity up to the present time. This immense area embraces China, Korea (North and South), Japan and Taiwan. Leaving aside the geographical proximity that unites these countries and the history of documented exchanges initiated from China, which has acted as a real centrifugal force, experts hesitate to make any definite judgments about the spirit of this music, but the term melodic is the one most commonly used to describe it precisely. Music, then, in East Asia is rooted in melody and its variations. But by itself this statement is not fully satisfying. There is a fundamental difference between the traditional music in Japan and that in China. In China, the notion of melody is as much linked to the pursuit of pure timbres, going as far as stressing harmonics, as it is tied down in Japan to a contour in which noise and secondary interfering elements are detected (conscious vibration generating microtones, breath, etc.) In this latter case, sound becomes a conglomerate of various phenomena and no longer corresponds to simple frequencies. Just comparing the manner in which the dizi, the Chinese bamboo flute, which is based on the principal of the mirliton, and the shakuhachi, the Japanese five-hole vertical bamboo flute, are played is enough to measure the difference. Undoubtedly, for that reason both Japan and Korea have succeeded in compelling recognition in the universe of contemporary Western music: both have favored sound effects to the detriment of melodic contour. On the other hand, if China has not succeeded in this breakthrough, it is because it has placed more emphasis on the timbre property of sound and its intervals. Yet, to read the texts from the past, all these sound possibilities were already present in Chinese thought. Consequently, this sense of the wholeness of sound also must have existed before. Therefore, at this level, we can suppose that there was a clear evolution in the conception of sound in China, one which in the past modified sound production to make it conform and extend to irrational phenomenon or noise, one which did not consider them as fioritura, but as an integral part of sound. We now notice a few surviving relics of this conception, for example in certain techniques of the qin, a seven-stringed zither: sliding the hand to vibrate the strings or the sound-box. All of this is clearly evoked in the tablature of this instrument. It is also obvious in the vocal aesthetic of the Nan kuan repertoire, which survives in Taiwan, in which the voice approaches a dry twang. The same can be said of the recitative technique of Chinese opera with its sudden drops of the voice. It is true that in antiquity, Chinese texts referring to sound always discussed it through aspects of the eight winds, which would later determine the famous eight timbres. The winds developed and shaped the sharpness of sound. Thus posed in these terms, this conception allowed an enlargement of sound and tended to manifest it as an extension that noise assigned to it. Melodic development has been thus considerably purified in China, leaving only a pure play of intervals, a situation quite different from the one found in Japan and Korea where the melodic contour is expressed suddenly with less clarity. This contour creates heterophony, in which combining superimposed figures has prevailed. In China, the orientation in art music is more towards the orchestra, towards a timid polyphony, even towards an embryo of harmony. Furthermore, it must be recognized that China has a tendency to favor high-pitched voices (although in Chinese Buddhism low voices exist). Finally, China possesses a predilection for metal percussion instruments (the yunluo, a carillon of ten small gongs). In Korea as in Japan, this tendency is less pronounced. The voices have evolved more within a middle register, and when they climb into the high ranges, they do so through a subterfuge reminiscent of the yodel. As for percussion instruments, here, membranophones clearly supplant metal percussion instruments. Another notable difference distinguishes China (Han Dynasty) from Japan: China is turned towards nature, which it transposes to a poetic plane. In this regard, just reading the titles of the musical compositions in Chinese collections confirms this fact. Chinese opera stage sets are rooted in realism, even if the role of dream is large as in certain kunqu operas. In Japan and also in Korea, nature is perceived as an element to be assimilated by abstraction. It conducts the musician towards a play of pure forms. In China, the prevailing rhythm generally relies on even meters. Only very occasionally are odd meters used, for example, in the five-beat Dance of the Moon of the Ashi minority in Yunnan. This dynamic transforms this art into a lively musical form that always moves forward. In Japan, the rhythm is perceived as a hieratic phenomenon, even if it means the rhythm is dissolved as in the gagaku repertoire, in which the very gestures of the performers are codified to increase the size of the rhythm. The same phenomenon is also felt in the old Korean court music, in which the notion of time, through an underlying rhythmic liberty of interpretation, leads to a floating temporal vision that cannot be reduced to measurable diagrams. One of the most typical pieces of the old Korean court repertoire is the well-known composition Sujech'on symbolizing the sunrise: it unfolds in hieratic splendor that attains mysticism. Assuredly, outside the musical systems and a similar organology, there exist points of convergence in the musical world of East Asia. One point is in terms of partitioning the repertoire. Here and there, an identical evolution has taken place. The separation of the vocal and the instrumental is so old a phenomenon that it has generated age-old habits, namely those of conceiving of instruments and voices in an autonomous fashion. In fact, we are faced with a repertoire that distinguishes both and has built up a very rich corpus for each one. One example is the corpus of Chinese opera known throughout the world through its most illustrious representative, the Peking Opera (Beijing). It can be stated that this very popularized formula has enlarged the discipline of music in order to attach pantomime, acrobatics, and choreography to it. This opera is full of color and rhythm and becomes a nerve center that balances disparate forces. Although glimpses of Chinese opera were already present in antiquity in formulas that anticipated it, it appeared in its present designation during the Yuan Dynasty (13th to 14th centuries). The same is true in Japan, where the sung theater was born under the impetus of Zeami in the 14th century. It was the no that brought on its comic counterpart, the kyogen. No was complemented in the 17th century by a different genre, the kabuki, which was itself preceded by the bunraku marionette theater. The development of instrument pursued a similar course, except here, the repertoire has been proven to exist prior to the sung theater. Furthermore, if China has completely lost its court music unlike Korea or Japan, it has placed its energies in small instrumental ensembles. Through them, learned Chinese music has become known. One fact has proven to be most important in China and has marked that country to this day: it is the importance conferred on soloist music, and in particular, on one instrument which epitomizes all the genius of the Han Dynasty: the seven-stringed zither, the qin. It used to be an instrument of the literati, and it is still one for connoisseurs. Confucius himself knew this instrument, which has the special characteristic of being played for itself in private in a landscape in order to overcome solitude. Thus this repertoire would be one of the rare ones not to address a public, and as such, would form a unique case in the history of music, which goes so far as to call into question the very necessity for an audience. Chinese literature abounds with texts concerning not only this instrument, but also the necessary state of mind to have for playing it and, above all, the setting in which it is possible to do so. The sinologists Robert van Gulik and more recently Georges Goormaghtigh have translated and published some of these poems. In East Asia, art music remains the most appreciated of all forms of music. As far as popular or ritual music forms are concerned, except for Japan, where they are known and studied, efforts have been undertaken only in the last few years to enlarge the approach to include them. There are many music forms of minority groups that are still not well-known, especially in the southern part of China. In Taiwan, the discoveries of minority group music have renewed our conception of music in this part of the world.

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