chinese music

• Bear Children’s Choir – Promotional site with music catalogue, realaudio and realvideo streaming and downloads, children’s games and playground.
• Guan Yadong’s Pipa Music – Chinese-born player of Oriental and Occidental repertoire. With information on the instrument, MP3 files, movie clips and news items.
• The Internet Chinese Music Archive – Audio files of genres from traditional to contemporary pop. In Chinese and English.
• MTV Chinese online – Chinese website with videos, music information, and contests.
• Rock Music in China – A report on rock music in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou during 1995 with audio samples and links.
• Unbreakable Spirits: China Rocks – Audio excerpts from the radio series Unbreakable Spirits, an overview of Chinese women’s cultural creativity in classical, traditional and contemporary music, in religious practice and cultural ceremony.

• Ancient Chinese Guqin Playing – How to play the ancient Chinese guqin. Including fingering and how to read guqin music. With pictures and sound clips.
• The Butterfly Lovers – Story of the famous Chinese opera/violin concerto Liang Zhu, also known as The Butterfly Lovers.
• China: Classical Music – Contains information on Chinese music in general as well as a few instruments in particular. Also has listings of recordings.
• Chinese Music, Regent Tour China – Introduction to traditional Chinese music with descriptions and photographs of the instruments.
• Chinese Musical Instruments – Introducing Chinese classical music and instruments. Guqin, guzheng, pipa, erhu, xiao and danbau. Offers music lessons and sells Chinese musical instruments and Chinese music books, VCDs and music CDs online.
• Chinese Traditional String Instruments – Profiles of the main plucked and bowed instruments.
• Classical Chinese Music – Short introduction to the classical music forms of China.
• Erhu Music by George Gao – Erhu player. Biography, news items, audio and video clips, and sales of instruments, sheet music, and recordings.
• Friends of Guqin – Includes information about the guqin, news, images and music.
• Gao Hong – Pipa soloist. Includes biography and information on the instrument and upcoming performances.
• The Heaven Of Chinese Music – Information about traditional Chinese instruments.
• John Thompson on the Guqin Silk String Zither – Introduction to this Chinese instrument, with pictures, song lyrics and information on its place in Chinese culture.
• Li Xiangting – Biography of the artist with audio clips of his music.
• Melody of China – Chinese music ensemble based in the San Francisco Bay Area,seeks to promote classical Chinese music.
• Music From China – Music From China (MFC) is a musical ensemble that invokes the delicacy and power of both traditional and contemporary Chinese music.
• National University of Singapore (NUS) Chinese Orchestra – Provides an overview of the music and instruments. With introduction of the team.
• North American Guqin Association – Located in San Francisco Bay Area; introducing, promoting and exchanging Guqin music. Make Qin friends, offer Guqin lessons, produce Guqin CD, arrange and give Guqin performance.
• The Palace of Zheng: Music of Harmony – A forum of the music and its instruments.
• San Francisco Guzheng Music Society – Our Society is dedicated in promoting guzheng, a Chinese table harp – plucked string instrument, and Chinese culture & music to people of all ages and nationality.
• Wang Fei Guqin – Guqin performer,instructor. Includes biography and information on the instrument and music audio online.
• Yunzhi National Musical Instruments Factory – Makes traditional Chinese musical instruments including Erhu, Pipa, and Jinghu.

Music of China appears to date back to the dawn of Chinese civilization, and documents and artifacts provide evidence of a well-developed musical culture as early as the Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC – 256 BC).

According to Mencius, a ruler had asked Mencius whether it was moral if he preferred pop songs to the classics. The answer was that the only thing matters being whether or not he loved his subjects.

The Imperial Music Bureau, first established in the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), was greatly expanded under the Emperor Han Wu Di (140-87 BC) and charged with supervising court music and military music and determining what folk music would be officially recognized. In subsequent dynasties, the development of Chinese music was strongly influenced by foreign music, especially that of Central Asia.

Instrumental music in China is played on solo instruments or in small ensembles of plucked and bowed stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums. The scale has five notes. Bamboo pipes and qin are among the oldest known musical instruments from China; instruments are traditionally divided into categories based on their material of composition: skin, gourd, bamboo, wood, silk, earth/clay, metal and stone. Chinese orchestras traditionally consist of bowed strings, woodwinds, plucked strings and percussion. The oldest written music is Youlan or the Solitary Orchid, attributed to Confucius (see guqin article for a sample of tablature). The first major well-documented flowering of Chinese music was for the qin during the Tang Dynasty, though the qin is known to have been played since before the Han Dynasty.

In ancient China the position of musicians was much lower than that of painters (although music was seen as central to the harmony and longevity of the state). Therefore music theory was not very well developed since the Tang Dynasty. But almost every emperor took the folk songs seriously. They sent officers to collect the folk songs for inspecting the popular will. One of the Confucianist Classics, Shi Jing (poets), contained lots of folk songs during 800 BC to about 300 BC.

The New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s evoked a great deal of lasting interest in Western music as a number of Chinese musicians who had studied abroad returned to perform Western classical music and to compose works of their own based on the Western musical notation system. Symphony orchestras were formed in most major cities and performed to a wide audience in the concert halls and on radio. Many of these performers added jazz influences to traditional music, adding xylophones, saxophones and violins, among other instruments. Lu Wencheng, Li Jinhui, Zhou Xuan, Qui Hechou, Yin Zizhong and He Dasha were among the most popular performers and composers during this period; many, especially Zhou Xuan, were criticized as pornographic and degenerate by Maoists. Popular music–greatly influenced by Western music, especially that of the United States–also gained a wide audience in the 1940s. After the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, a large-scale campaign was launched in the Communist controlled areas to adapt folk music to create revolutionary songs to educate the largely illiterate rural population on party goals. Musical forms considered superstitious or anti-revolutionary were repressed, and harmonies and bass lines were added to traditional songs. One example is The East Is Red, a folksong from northern Shaanxi which was adapted into a nationalist hymn. Of particular note is the composer, Xian Xinghai (1905-1945), who was active during this period and composed the Yellow River Cantata which is the best-known of all of his works. The contata was adapted to a piano concerto, the Yellow River Concerto, by the pianist Yin Chengzong in 1969, and is still performed today on stages of the world.

After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, revolutionary songs continued to be performed, and much of the remainder of popular music consisted of popular songs from the Soviet Union with the lyrics translated into Chinese. Symphony orchestras flourished throughout the country, performing Western classical music and compositions by Chinese composers. Conservatories and other institutions of musical instruction were developed and expanded in the major cities. A number of orchestras from Eastern Europe performed in China, and Chinese musicians and musical groups participated in a wide variety of international festivals.

During the height of the Cultural Revolution, musical composition and performance were greatly restricted. A form of soft, harmonic, generic, pan-Chinese music called guoyue was artificially created to be performed at conservatories. After the Cultural Revolution, musical institutions were reinstated and musical composition and performance revived.

The 1970s saw the rise of Cantopop in Hong Kong. It arose as a reaction against more traditional shidaiqu, and featured American soft rock and traditional Cantonese vocal styles. Joseph Koo, Lisa Wang, Adam Cheng, Lotus, Wynners and James Wong were especially popular. In the 1980s, singers began using Cantonese instead of English. This new generation of stars included Sam Hui, Danny Chan, Kenny Bee, Anita Mui, Aaron Kwok, Leon Lai, Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung. The last four were the biggest stars, and were referred to as «the four gods (of Cantopop)» (Cantonese: sei3 dai6 tin1 wong4). Newer teen idols include Sammi Cheng, Karen Mok and Eason Chan.

Parallel with the rise of Cantopop was Chinese Rock, which drew on earlier, underground pioneers like Taiwanese star Teresa Teng. The widely-acknowledged forefather of Chinese rock is Cui Jian. Modern rock artists include Tang Dynasty, Dadawa, Cobra, Dou Wei, Zhang Chu, He Yong, Zhinanzhen, Lingdian and Heibao. Musically, these range from New Wave (Lingdian) to heavy metal (Heibao), alongside punk rock bands like Catcher in the Rye and Dixiayinger.

In 1980 the Chinese Musicians’ Association was formally elected to the International Musicological Society. Chinese musical groups toured foreign countries, and foreign musical organizations performed in China. In the mid-1980s popular ballads and Western folk and classical music still drew the greatest audiences, but other kinds of music, including previously banned Western jazz and rock and roll, were being performed and were receiving increasing acceptance, especially among young people.

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