Chinese folk flute music are

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be c ...

s written to tell the traditions and tales of various tribes in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, around the 12th century. They were played mostly on wooden flutes, and thus the pieces that have survived till today are written in D, which is the key these early flutes were made in. This is also why, unlike most Chinese music, these pieces are not written in a pentatonic scale, but in a more middle eastern style. We can tell this because the ornamentation of these pieces is very similar to that of the bagpipes, which were invented in India, and also the

penny whistle The tin whistle, also called the penny whistle, is a simple six-holed woodwind instrument. It is a type of fipple flute, putting it in the same class as the recorder, Native American flute, and other woodwind instruments that meet such criteria. ...

and other Celtic instruments. These pieces were highly ornamented. Grace notes are used instead of tonguing, a technique used by the

bagpipes Bagpipes are a woodwind instrument using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag. The Great Highland bagpipes are well known, but people have played bagpipes for centuries throughout large parts of Europe, No ...

. Unlike in most western music, any two notes were used as grace notes, rather than a tone gap. These pieces were written by taking a short theme and developing it in three sections, each section adding more complex ornaments and rhythms as it progresses. Unlike the European folk structure which normally goes ABABAB etc., as in modern pop music, Chinese folk songs have a structure of AAA, or if you count the development as a change then: ABC.

References

Chinese folk music Flutes {{China-music-stub

See also

References