Chinese Classical Music

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Chinese Classical Music
Jeff Cribben HL Music Theory Period 6
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Geography

• Rivers flow from west to east, including the
  Yangtze, the Huang He, and the Amur.
• The south has hill ranges of moderate elevation,
  and the Himalayas.

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Background

• Ling Lun was the founder of music because of
  the bamboo pipes that he tuned to the sounds of
  birds.
• The Imperial Music Bureau, first established in
  the Qin Dynasty, was greatly expanded under the
  Emperor Han Wu Di and charged with supervising
  court music and military music and determining
  what folk music would be officially recognized.
  In previous dynasties, the development of Chinese
  music was strongly influenced by foreign music.

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• Chinese Music dates back to the dawn of Chinese
  civilization with documents and artifacts
  providing evidence of a well-developed musical
  culture as early as the Zhou Dynasty.

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Culture

• The "official" orthodox faith system held by most
  dynasties of China is a panentheistic system,
  centering on the worship of "Heaven. It has
  features of a monotheism in that Heaven is seen
  as an omnipotent entity. Worship of Heaven
  includes shrines, the greatest being the Altar of
  Heaven in Beijing.

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Culture

• The Chinese government still has almost absolute
  control over politics, and it continually seeks
  to eradicate what it perceives as threats to the
  social, political and economic stability of the
  country. In 1989, the student protests at
  Tiananmen Square were violently put to an end by
  the Chinese military after 15 days of martial
  law.

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• Instrument Background
• Traditional music in China is played on solo
  instruments or in small groups. The scale is
  almost universally pentatonic.
• Woodwind and percussion
• Sheng, gong, paixiao, guan, bells, cymbals
• Bowed strings
• erhu, zhonghu, dahu, leiqin
• Plucked and struck strings
• guqin, yangqin, guzheng, ruan, pipa, zhu

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Guzheng

• Strings are tuned to pentatonic
• Belongs to the Zither family of instruments
• Like the Guqin, but has bridges
• Has around 16-24 strings
• Picks are attached to the right hand and strings
  are plucked and strummed

Guzheng
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Pipa

• The pipa is a plucked Chinese string instrument.
  Sometimes called the Chinese lute, the instrument
  has a pear-shaped wooden body.
• It has been played for nearly two thousand years

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Gu Qin

• The guqin is a quiet instrument, with a range of
  four octaves. Its lowest pitch is about two
  octaves below middle C.
• It has 7 strings, and dates back by legend 5,000
  years

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Zhong Ruan

• It is a lute with a fretted neck, a circular
  body, and four strings. Its strings were formerly
  made of silk but since the 20th century they have
  been made of steel.

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Classical Chinese Music Structure

• Chinese traditional art music is
• written, and largely utilizes a number
  notation
• homophonic (generally a melody line with some
  harmonic accompaniment)
• rhythmically simple
• expressive, rubato, ornamented, and nuanced
• mostly in just intonation.

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Western Music Structure

• Western art music is
• written, and largely utilizes western staff
  notation
• polyphonic (independent lines of music played
  together)
• rhythmically sophisticated by comparison with
  Chinese, triple meters abound, and compound
• meters also used
• expressive and rubato, but not generally as
  nuanced and ornamented as Chinese
• in equal temperament.

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Liu Fang

• Liu Fang born 1974 is a pipa player. Born in
  China, she began playing the pipa at the age of
  6. Her first solo public performance was at the
  age of 9. In 1985, at age 11, she played for
  Queen Elizabeth II.

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Bei-Bei

• Bei Bei is a Gu Zheng (Chinese Zither) performer,
  educator, and composer. She started to play the
  Gu Zheng at the age of seven.
• The feedback that she has received as she has
  introduced American audiences to Gu Zheng and its
  broad and varied repertoire has been extremely
  positive.

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Shen Nalin

• Born in southwest of Sichuan, China, Shen Nalin
  studied composition at the Sichuan Conservatory
  of Music.
• In 1994 he moved to New Zealand and enrolled at
  the School of Music at Victoria University of
  Wellington, and graduated in 2000 with Master of
  Music with Distinction. For his Ph.D studies he
  is composing an opera based on the dramatic life
  and writings of Chinese poets.
• He has composed chamber and orchestral music for
  piano, strings, orchestra, voices and
  compositions using Chinese instruments including
  The Mortal World for sheng, zheng, suona and
  percussion, and The Cold Dream for zheng, sheng,
  strings and percussion

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Jeff Roberts

• The compositions of Jeff Roberts unite his
  experiences as an improvising guitarist
  improvising be-bop, free jazz and Brazilian music
  and is a Chinese Guqin performer with influences
  ranging from American Experimentalism and the
  European avant-garde to Chinese and Korean
  traditional music, reaching audiences through
  concerts in France, Germany, Italy, China and the
  United States.

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Roberts
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Compositions

• Many of his musical styles are with a combination
  of traditional timings and instruments in mind
• Chinese poetry, in particular, is inspiring to
  Roberts, as he makes his music flow with the
  theme of poems also incorporating instruments
  with different styles
• Picture Brazilian-Chinese-Folk-American-Jazz
  fusion

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Wandering
Reference to the legendary Chinese Tang Dynasty
poet Li Po. There is an ephemeral beauty and
scattered ness in the imagery that I find in his
poems an observation of nature here, a memory of
a distant friend there, then a Taoist  immortal,
then perhaps a nostalgia from a past life.
Analogous to Li Pos wanderings in his poems and
in his life as a recluse poet, this piece wanders
too.
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Time Reflection
Having lived for periods of time within
different musical styles and traditions (jazz,
Brazilian bossa and samba, classical, Chinese,
among others), I have developed different senses
of musical time. These different senses arise
from the cultural and historical context of the
music. How one learns to listen to and appreciate
the music in the context of its tradition affects
how they experience musical time.
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Current Stance

• In Chinese music, Jeff is currently researching
  and analyzing structure in traditional guqin
  compositions.
• As a guitarist, Jeff is involved in improvisation
  in several different styles. He performs jazz
  regularly in Beijing in local Jazz clubs and much
  of his time is dedicated to performing various
  types of music
• Jeff won a Fulbright Fellowship Award for studies
  in China. He will continue his studies in
  Beijing, China on guqin with leading guqin master
  Li Xiangting,

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Works Cited

• www.wikipedia.org
• www.chinesecultureonline.com
• www.asiainfo.org
• www.itvgou.com
• Peking.org
• Media.maps.com
• www.worldofstrings.nl
• www.theodora.com
• http//www.china.org.cn/english/culture/151799.htm
  
• http//www.elisabethwaldomusic.com/chinesemusic.ht
  m
• http//sounz.org.nz/contributor/composer/1684
• http//www.improvis.org/
• http//www.vi-co.org/pdf/Classical20China-West20
  study20guide20_general_.pdf