A seminal monograph first published by Rulan Chao Pian in 1967, this is the standard reference on SonQ dynasty music. The book provides a mirror for scholars to reflect on the cultural, social, and theoretical dimensions of Chinese music scholarship in the new millennium. This new reprint edition features a foreword by Bell Yung and an introduction by Joseph Lam.

This book presents a large body of Korean fifteenth-century music in transcription.

Chinese, one of the oldest active languages, evolved over 5,000 years. As such, it makes for a fascinating case study in the development of language. This cultural history of Chinese demonstrates that the language grew and responded to its music and visual expression in a manner very similar to contemporary English and other Western languages. Within Chinese cultural history lie the answers to numerous questions that have haunted scholars for decades: How does language relate to worldview? What would happen to law after its language loses absolute binding power? How do music, visual, and theatrical images influence literature? By presenting Chinese not as a system of signs but as the history of a community, this study shows how language has expanded the scope of Chinese imagination and offers a glimpse into the future of younger languages throughout the world.

This study of popular songs offers a new hypothesis about the role of elite in popular culture and evidences how commercial publishing facilitated the rise of selective reading and imitation of texts in late-Ming China, creating a new basis for describing desire and the self.

Beth Szczepanski examines how traditional and modern elements interact in the current practice, reception and functions of wind music, or shengguan, at monasteries in Wutaishan, one of China's four holy mountains of Buddhism. The book provides an invaluable insight into the political and economic history of Wutaishan and its music, as well as the instrumentation, notation, repertoires, transmission and ritual function of monastic music at Wutaishan, and how that music has adapted to China's current economic, political and religious climate. The book is based on extensive field research at Wutaishan from 2005 to 2007, including interviews with monks, nuns, pilgrims and tourists. The author learned to play the sheng mouth organ and guanzi double-reed pipe, and recorded dozens of performances of monastic and lay music. The first extensive examination of Wutaishan's music by a Western scholar, the book brings a new perspective to a topic long favored by Chinese musicologists. At the same time, the book provides the non-musical scholar with an engaging exploration of the historical, political, economic and cultural forces that shape musical and religious practices in China.

In The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora, twenty-three scholars advance knowledge and understandings of Chinese music studies. Each contribution develops a theoretical model to illuminate new insights into a key musical genre or context. This handbook is categorized into three parts. In Part One, authors explore the extensive, remarkable, and polyvocal historical legacies of Chinese music. Ranging from archaeological findings to the creation of music history, chapters address enduring historical practices and emerging cultural expressions. Part Two focuses on evolving practice across a spectrum of key instrumental and vocal genres. Each chapter provides a portrait of musical change, tying musical transformations to the social dimensions underpinning that change. Part Three responds to the role that prominent issues, including sexuality, humanism, the amateur, and ethnicity, play in the broad field of Chinese music studies. Scholars present systematic orientations for researchers in the third decade of the twenty-first century. This volume incorporates extensive input from researchers based in China, Taiwan, and among Chinese communities across the world. Using a model of collaborative inquiry, The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora features diverse insider voices alongside authors positioned across the anglophone world.

Winner, 2023 Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language. Drawing on a wide range of overlooked scholarly texts, literary commentaries, and pedagogical materials, Vedal examines how Ming scholars positioned the study of language within an interconnected nexus of learning. He argues that for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, the boundaries among the worlds of classicism, literature, music, cosmology, and religion were far more fluid and porous than they became later. In the eighteenth century, Qing thinkers pared away these other fields from linguistic learning, creating a discipline focused on corroborating the linguistic features of ancient texts. Documenting a major transformation in knowledge production, this book provides a framework for rethinking global early modern intellectual developments. It offers a powerful alternative to the conventional understanding of late imperial Chinese intellectual history by focusing on the methods of scholarly practice and the boundaries by which contemporary thinkers defined their field of study.

This new reference work contains approximately 1500 entries covering Chinese civilisation from Peking Man to the present day. Subjects include history, politics, art, archaeology, and literature to name but a few.

Explores the religious, political, and cultural significance attributed to music in early China. In early China, conceptions of music became important culturally and politically. This fascinating book examines a wide range of texts and discourse on music during this period (ca. 500100 BCE) in light of the rise of religious, protoscientific beliefs on the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos. By tracking how music began to take on cosmic and religious significance, Erica Fox Brindley shows how music was used as a tool for such enterprises as state unification and cultural imperialism. She also outlines how musical discourse accompanied the growth of an explicit psychology of the emotions, served as a fundamental medium for spiritual attunement with the cosmos, and was thought to have utility and potency in medicine. While discussions of music in state ritual or as an aesthetic and cultural practice abound, this book is unique in linking music to religious belief and demonstrating its convergences with key religious, political, and intellectual transformations in early China.

This volume explores not only the close ties that link the cultures and musics of East and Northeast Asia, but also the distinctive features that separate them.