Chinese Music

To the Chinese the art of music is distinctly old stuff. In 2600 B. C., when the skin-clad savages of Europe were tootling shinbone flutes and walloping tomtoms, China's cultured Emperor Huang-ti established a standard scale for all China's musical instruments. When the T'ang Dynasty passed out in 907 A. D., Chinese music declined somewhat. But cultivated Chinese have always regarded music as one of China's most important arts.

Like Occidental music, Chinese falls into two camps: classical and popular. Most of what U. S. listeners hear (in Chinatown theatres and restaurants) belongs to the popular type. But last week Manhattanites got a chance to hear samples of China's classical music played by the highest-browed of China's highbrow musicians. The concert was sandwiched in as part of a show given by the Chinese Cultural Theatre Group, a troupe that had reached Manhattan by way of several west coast cities. Their play-acting was not up to Chinatown's level. But the music, delicately played on half-a-dozen unfamiliar exotic instruments, was as tangy and pungent as a 25-year-old egg. While Musician Sung Yue-tuh drew subtle wheezes from the sheng (4,639-year-old ancestor of the harmonica), and Wang Wen-piao sawed at his erh-hu (two-string fiddle), the audience took it politely. But when Professor Wei Chung-loh of China's Ta Tung National Research Institute swung out on his p'i p'a (traditional guitar of the ancient Chinese princes), they cheered.

To most U. S. ears, Chinese music is at best incomprehensible, at worst a painful noise. To Chinese ears and minds it is not only pleasant but instructive. Philosopher K'ung Fu-tze (Confucius), himself a ch'in (zither) player of no mean order, considered music one of the six fundamental factors in education. In China's great days, music was a required subject for budding administrators. Hundreds of learned books were written about it.

Says one of the old books:* "The music of a well-ordered reign is peaceable and conducive to happiness; such a government is harmonious. The music of a reign of disorder is spiteful and conducive to anger; such a government is seditious. The music of a ruined kingdom is dismal and brings care; such a nation is mournful."

*The Li Ki, or "Book of Rites" written by Ma Yong in the 2nd Century A. D.

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