Chinese musicology is the academic study of traditional Chinese music. This discipline has a very long history. Traditional Chinese music can be traced back to around 8,000 years ago during the Neolithic age. The concept of music, called 乐 (yuè), 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 scales

The first

musical scale In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Often, especially in t ...

s were derived from the harmonic series. On the

Guqin The ''guqin'' (; ) is a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument. It has been played since ancient times, and has traditionally been favoured by scholars and literati as an instrument of great subtlety and refinement, as highlighted b ...

(a traditional instrument) all of the dotted positions are equal string length divisions related to the open string like 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, etc. and are quite easy to recognize on this instrument. The Guqin has a scale of 13 positions all representing a natural harmonic position related to the open string. The ancient Chinese defined, by mathematical means, a gamut or series of 十二律 (

Shí-èr-lǜ ''Shí-èr-lǜ'' (, , ''12 pitches'') (twelve-pitch scale) was a standardized gamut of twelve notes. Also known, rather misleadingly, as the Chinese chromatic scale, it was one kind of chromatic scale used in ancient Chinese music. The Chinese sc ...

), meaning twelve lǜ, from which various sets of five or seven frequencies were selected to make the sort of "do re mi" major

scale Scale or scales may refer to: Mathematics * Scale (descriptive set theory), an object defined on a set of points * Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original * Scale factor, a number ...

familiar to those who have been formed with the Western Standard notation. The 12 ''lü'' approximate the frequencies known in the West as the chromatic scale, from A, then B-flat, through to G and A-flat.

Scale and tonality

Most Chinese music uses a

pentatonic scale A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale). Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancien ...

, 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 An equal temperament is a musical temperament or tuning system, which approximates just intervals by dividing an octave (or other interval) into equal steps. This means the ratio of the frequencies of any adjacent pair of notes is the same, w ...

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 Pythagoras of Samos ( grc, Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, Pythagóras ho Sámios, Pythagoras the Samian, or simply ; in Ionian Greek; ) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His politic ...

, 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. Chinese_Music_Gamut_&_Scales

Sources

* {{cite journal , author = 陈应时 (Chen Yingshi, Shanghai Conservatory) , title = 一种体系两个系统 ''Yi zhong ti-xi, liang ge xi-tong'' , journal = Musicology in China , volume = 2002 , issue = 4 , pages = 109–116

External links

More details and recorded examples.
Chinese music Philosophy of music Musicology Musical scales