Not long ago, the guqin was performed at the "Music of the Silk Road , Tang Yun Echoes" concert, which restored ancient instruments and recreated the "Chinese Orchestra" of the Tang Dynasty (courtesy of the organizers)
The new season of the variety show "Chinese Music Ceremony" has aroused heated discussion, and the Chinese music works interpreted by these unique national instruments in the program have been given a new soul and charm after re-instrumentation and creation, and combined with the in-depth creation and dissemination of modern stage digital technology, it has greater communication power and influence, leading to the collision of more "national tides", which are loved by young people.
China is known as the "State of Liturgy", with a long history of instrumental music and a long musical culture. To this day, there are still some musical instruments from ancient times that have been preserved in the historical evolution, such as drums, ruans, and si, etc., which still convey the natural sound from distant history to everyone and present the ancient musical instrument style of the sound of silk and bamboo.
Gagaku: The "Chinese Orchestra" of a thousand years ago
Looking back three thousand years ago, there was an ancient "Chinese orchestra" in China - Gagaku. Originating from the ritual music system established by the Western Zhou Kings in the 11th century BC, Gagaku is an ancient musical culture unique to China. It integrates instrumental music, dance and chanting, and was used by ancient Chinese courts and nobles during large ceremonies such as pilgrimage, feasting, shooting, and sacrifice, through the Zhou Qin, Han and Tang Dynasties, and in major historical periods such as the Two Song Dynasties.
The Southern Song Dynasty was the most prosperous period in the history of Gagaku, and the scale of Gagaku Orchestra reached a historical peak. The orchestra consists of a "Gongjia" band of hundreds of people, a "Dengge" song team of more than 40 people singing collectively, and a "two dance" (wen dance and martial dance) dance team of 64 to 128 people. The Orchestra has a complete range of instruments and a complete variety of music. According to the 82nd chronicle of volume 129 of the History of Song, the main instruments of the Gagaku Orchestra are made of eight kinds of materials, such as gold, stone, silk, bamboo, dagger, earth, leather, and wood, called "eight-tone instruments", that is, eight "voice parts", and each "part" instrument is Jing Zhong, A Bell, Chime Bell, Golden Hammer, Golden Bracelet, Golden Duo; Special Gong, Chore; One String, Three String, Five String, Seven String, Nine String, Nine String, Nine String, Ser; Long Gong, Straw, Gong, Zhen, Chao Sheng, He Sheng, Yu Sheng, Jiu Xing Dagger, Seven Star Dagger; There are 38 kinds of shrews, linggu, lingling, road drums, road ferrets, ya drums, phase drums, and beats; 柷, 敔 and so on. The band is divided into two types: "music in the hall" and "music in the hall". "Music in the Hall" follows the ancestral system of "silk is not as good as bamboo, bamboo is not as good as meat" and "noble voice", and the song team is set up in the hall to sing, accompanied by only a small number of pianos, sers and individual instruments such as yellow bells and bells. However, the "music under the hall" is very large, according to the southeast, northwest and direction, there are many chimes, chimes and other musical instruments.
The Southern Song Dynasty was very popular, and its influence spread to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, etc., and it is still preserved and continued to this day. During the Northern Song Dynasty, faced with increasingly serious economic pressure and the crisis of the Liao Dynasty's heavy military pressure, it resumed the exchange of a large diplomatic mission with Goryeo, restarted "maritime diplomacy", and jointly confronted and elbowed the Liao state. Gagaku became an important carrier of this diplomacy, and the court arranged for musicians to go to Goryeo to preach Gagaku, "for several years." Goryeo emissaries studied art from their teachers in China, and the court also "instructed" music and dance performances, instrumental playing techniques, and gave a full set of gagaku scores. The musical form and ritual form of Gagaku spread overseas, and "music and dance flourished".
In the 2010s, Hangzhou launched the restoration of the Southern Song Dynasty Music, and nearly a thousand teachers, students and employees of Hangzhou Normal University spent three years collecting all the literature of the Southern Song Dynasty Music, copying musical instruments, costumes, and honor guards, studying and rehearsing representative works such as "Zheng'an Song", "Zheng'an Song And Wu Dance", "Qian'an Song and Wen Dance", and reproducing the Southern Song Dynasty Music with song and dance.
Not long ago, the concert "The Music of the Silk Road and the Echo of Tang Yun" held at the Shangyin Opera House (Courtesy of the organizer)
Drums: From morale-boosting war drums to the first of the "eight notes" of the instrument
At the "Chinese Music Ceremony", the traditional drum "Chinese Hero" performed by young percussionist Wang Jiannan brought a refreshing audiovisual experience to the audience with the traditional drum of the mainland.
The drum is a percussion instrument produced in the primitive society of the mainland, and judging from the pottery drums found and excavated today, it has a history of at least 5,000 years. However, the original drum was not used as an instrument. In ancient times, our ancestors revered the drum as a kind of artifact that could reach the heavens and was used in the activities of ancestor worship and worship. The drum has a longer history of being used on the battlefield than it has as an instrument. In ancient times, when the two armies fought, they all beat drums to cheer up and boost morale, the so-called "one drum to make a gas, then decline, three and exhaustion." According to legend, the Yellow Emperor was unable to defeat the battle of Xuan you jiu, and later the Nine Heavenly Xuannu found a way for the emperor, she ordered the soldiers to slaughter the cattle and made 80 drums made of cow skin. When the Yellow Emperor led his troops to declare war with Xuan You, he laid down the "Qi men and hidden armor" and let a Hercules named Chang Bo in the army beat the drum during the battle, and the drum sounded loudly for a while, shaking for five hundred miles, and the entire battlefield shook the mountain, causing the soul of the Xuan You soldiers to fly away and collapse into an army. The yellow emperor's troops were mighty and vigorous, shouting to kill the sky, invincible, and finally captured and killed Xuan You.
In addition to cheering up, war drums also have an important use to convey information and intelligence. The Chronicle of the States of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty describes the princes of the Qi Huan Guild as "building an altar on three levels, raising three zhang, hanging bells on the left, and setting drums on the right", and beating drums to gather people. In the allusion of King Zhou You's "Princes of Beacon Drama", "Under the Li Mountain, more than twenty smoke piers were placed, and dozens of large drums were placed, but there were thieves, who put up wolf smoke, and rushed straight to Xiaohan, and the nearby princes sent troops to rescue each other, and then they raised the big drums and urged them to come." The drum can also be used as a chime, i.e. "morning drum". "Morning drum" is a drum that announces the time of morning and dusk, "the morning and dusk are cut down with a thousand vertebrae, waiting for the opening and closing of the doors in the city", the position of the drum is usually placed on the drum tower of the city, the bells and drums are sounding in unison, and the civil and military officials and the people are all living and working in this way. At present, the big drum on the bell and drum tower in Dongcheng District, Beijing was made in the Qing Dynasty, and the diameter of the drum surface reached 1.5 meters, which was known as the "Drum King".
The history books record that Li Longji was good at playing musical instruments, and the best one was the karma drum, which was accompanied by Yang Guifei's graceful dance posture and became a good story passed down
The use of drums as a real musical instrument began during the Zhou Dynasty. The Zhou Dynasty formulated a set of drum music system, specially set up "drum people", responsible for drumming, drumming and other affairs, and set the drum as the head of the "eight tones", before playing the piano, there must be drums as the music of the conductor and guidance, the so-called "drum qinser". The drums are also rich and flexible, up, down, jumping, flipping, riding, flashing, spreading, soaring, moving and other different techniques, dazzling. In the performance, it is mostly carried out with dance moves, and dances while knocking.
After the Tang Dynasty, drum music entered the level of liturgical music. According to legend, Tang Xuanzong Li Longji was a musical genius who was proficient in composing, conducting and performing. He is especially good at hitting the karma drum, and just practicing the karma drumstick breaks several boxes. The chancellor Song Jing praised Xuanzong for beating the karma drum as "the head is like the peak of the green mountain, and the hands are like white raindrops." The ministers around him could peer into the changes in their moods and moods from the sound of the drums. According to legend, Liyuan's disciple Huang Hao was greatly appreciated by Tang Xuanzong. Once, huang Hato thought that the emperor had not summoned him for more than fifty days, so he sneaked out of the palace to do private affairs with a fluke mentality. Unexpectedly, as soon as the front foot went out, Xuanzong came to proclaim the will. Huang Hao was frightened to death, and when he hurried back to the palace, he heard Xuanzong beating a drum, and his voice was agitated and generous, urgent and chaotic, and his face was frightened like earth, and he hurriedly told the internal servants: Don't enter the palace to report to the emperor for the time being, otherwise your life will be in danger. After a while, Xuanzong changed a piece of music, the rhythm was soothing and the drums were soft, and Huang Hao's heart was a little at ease, so he dressed up and went into the temple to kneel. When Emperor Xuanzong saw that Huang Hao had come, he asked unhurriedly, "Where did you go just now?" "Echoing Your Majesty, a relative of the slave has just sent him out." "Fortunately, you came to see me at this time, and if you had taken a step earlier, you would have had a good fight." Huang Hao repeatedly thanked the emperor for his kindness, and said in his heart, "It is dangerous."
In the new century, the Chinese drum music that has lasted for thousands of years has penetrated deeply into the blood of the Chinese nation, from the religious sacrifices of various nationalities to the marriages and funerals of the people, from the people's life entertainment to major celebrations, from the accompaniment of opera to large-scale songs and dances, and the sonorous and agitated drums have knocked out the endless national spirit of the Chinese nation and the immortal courage of the Chinese for thousands of years.
Nguyen: China's "Moon Guitar"
Nguyen is a traditional musical instrument with a long history on the mainland, which has a history of more than 2,000 years of development and still maintains its ancient form to this day. We know that many plucked instruments, such as the lute and the dulcimer, are imported. However, Nguyen is a domestic instrument that we are born and raised in. Legend has it that in the Qin Dynasty, In order to build the Great Wall, Qin Shi Huang concentrated many manpower, material and financial resources throughout the country. In order to unify command and management, the construction labor site invented and used a "rattle"-like apparatus to direct and transmit signals. Later, people tied strings to this instrument, installed a pillar "pin", and slowly evolved into an instrument. The ancients called it "Qin Pipa", which is the predecessor of Nguyen we see now.
By the Han Dynasty, this instrument had formed its own unique playing style, that is, "playing" and "picking". At that time, the instruments that used this playing method were generally called "pipa". Pipa and Pipa are the names of two playing techniques derived from the harmonic sounds "batch" and "put". According to Liu Xi of the Eastern Han Dynasty, "Interpreting the Name and Interpreting the Musical Instrument", "Pushing the hand before the approval, but the lead hand is known as the handle, like its drum, because it is also named." It can be seen that "batch" and "handle" are the two most basic and common playing techniques of plucking music, that is, the contemporary so-called "playing" and "picking".
The japanese Shosoin-in temple has a five-stringed pipa of spiral rosewood
The earliest musical instruments in the shape of today's Nguyen date back more than 2,000 years to the time of Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty. According to the Western Jin Dynasty Fu Xuan's "Pipa Fu Prologue", in 105 BC, that is, in the sixth year of YuanFeng, Emperor Wu of Han implemented the strategy of attacking from afar and closely, and united the powerful Wusun state to attack the Xiongnu, so he relieved the granddaughter of Liu Peng, the king of Chu, and married the western region Wusun Wang Junsu (official name Cen Qi), and married and kinship to consolidate relations. The journey to the Western Regions is sparsely populated, strange and distant, and Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty ordered musicians to create instruments that can be played on a bumpy carriage to relieve the fatigue and loneliness of the princess on the road. The craftsmen thought for a long time, referred to various musical instruments, such as qin, zither, zhu, zhen and other instruments, and created a circular speaker, straight handle, twelve pillars, four strings of musical instruments, then called "Han Pipa", that is, the predecessor of Ruan. Why did Emperor Wudi of Han choose this instrument? There is also another legend that this has to do with its shape. We can see that Nguyen's body is round, much like a full moon. After the princess marries away from home, she can hold this instrument and play it, which means "embracing the moon and missing her hometown" to relieve the princess's homesickness. Since then, Jieyou has used this instrument as a sustenance instrument, often accompanied by him, and returned to Chang'an after living in the western region for more than 50 years. In the well-known "Zhaojun out of the plug", the instrument that Wang Zhaojun carries with him is also this kind of instrument, not the pipa.
During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Ruan Xian, one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest, was the best at playing this instrument, making it popular throughout the country and gaining people's respect and love. Due to Nguyen Ham's exquisite playing skills, people named this instrument after him, called "Nguyen Ham Pipa". It is also the only instrument in our national instrumental music to be named after a person. In the Tang Dynasty, with the prosperity and development of the Silk Road, the curved-necked pipa that was introduced to China from the western region and was now called "pipa" prevailed, ranking first in the orchestra. In order to distinguish these two instruments, people began to refer to the straight-handled round lute as Nguyễn. At that time, Nguyen was highly valued by the court, not only as the darling of the upper class, but also as a musical instrument commonly used by the officials and the people of the city, and in this situation, a large number of excellent performers of Nguyen emerged, and a large number of Nguyen's theoretical works and teaching materials were compiled. Ruan also broadcast overseas, and foreign envoys sent to Tang to study Ruan, and the development of Ruan's musical instrument reached a historical peak.
Zhong Nguyen
After the founding of New China, Ruan's musical instrument was developed and innovated, making the timbre more integrated, the sound range wider, and forming a complete family system. In the Nguyen family, according to the different pitches, it is divided into high note Nguyen, small nguyen, alto nguyen, bass nguyen, la nguyen, etc., forming its unified timbre system. It also improved the technical modeling of Ruan's piano head, neck, body, string shaft, mountain pass, piano product, piano code, binding strings and strings, which can be used for solo, ensemble, chamber music ensemble, etc., enriching the vocal parts of the national orchestra and making its timbre more full and strong. Ruan's piano is like a full moon, and the tone is more similar to the guitar, so foreign friends gave it a particularly beautiful name - moon guitar. In the 1970s, major music academies in the mainland have set up Ruan's professional disciplines, and many composers have created a large number of excellent works tailored for it, highlighting its unique aesthetic art, among which representative works include "Silk Road Camel Bell", "Manjiang Hong", "Yunnan Memories", "Mountain Rhyme" and so on.
埙: A "music bottle" from ancient times
Known as "the most ancient civilization in the history of world music", it is also known as the "group of world musical instruments", and its simple, thick, vicissitudes and mournful sound quality infection has conquered countless listeners. In the Hemudu site in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, the oldest temple has been found - an oval pottery with only one blow hole. Archaeologists believe that the 埙 is also a musical instrument that has gradually evolved into a working people's production and labor. Primitive societies, the ancients, during hunting, found that when throwing stones with cavities or holes, there would be a whistle of "shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh The ancients were inspired to burn clay into an artifact with holes and blowing to trap prey.
After more than 7,000 years, It has experienced rise and fall and development. The pronunciation hole has developed from a blow hole to both a blow hole and a pronunciation hole. In slave society, it developed into three sound holes and was able to play four of the five-tone scale. In the Shang Dynasty, five-tone holes appeared, which could blow out each semitone within the octave range. The shape of the cun has also changed from the earliest oval shape to ovate, spherical, pear-shaped, and hammer-shaped, and the appearance has also been engraved with exquisite carvings, lou wen, and oil paint, becoming a work of art. In the Zhou Dynasty, when liturgy was popular, the gong was listed as a native instrument and became one of the main instruments in the Gagaku band. According to legend, when Confucius was in the Country of Qi, he heard a piece of music called "Shao" and was intoxicated by the sound of The Qi, so that the soul of the three months was haunted, and even the delicious meat taste could not be tasted, which is the famous allusion of "the son is in Qi Wen [Shao], march does not know the meat".
Yikes
In the last year of the Qin Dynasty, Chu and Han exchanged troops to dominate the world, and Xiang Yu, the king of Chu, was tightly besieged under the qi. In order to completely disintegrate the fighting spirit of the Chu army, Liu Bang asked the generals, and the strategist Zhang Liang offered his plan, playing the folk songs of Chudi, so that the Chu army mistakenly thought that it had occupied so Chudi and shook the hearts of the Chu soldiers. Xiang Yu heard the Chu folk songs on all sides at night, and he deeply felt that the general trend had gone. The Chu army was even more scattered, lost its fighting spirit, and finally forced Xiang Yu to kill himself in Wujiang, which is the famous "embattled song" allusion in history. For the "embattled song", there has always been a saying that Zhang Liang used a flute to blow Chu Ge, but according to later records, the instrument used by Zhang Liang at that time was not a flute, but a Chu song that was blown with a pipe. To this day, "Chu Ge" is also a famous solo piece, desolate and tragic, swinging back to the intestines.
In the 20th century, the people who disappeared from folk art activities were revived. After the founding of New China, nine holes of purple sand and ten holes and twelve holes were successively developed, which can play twenty-six tones, and China has embarked on a new stage of development. This "voice from ancient times" has also conquered many foreign friends. In 1984, the 23rd Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles, and mainland musician Du Ciwen shocked the world with Tao Xi's "Chu Ge" at the General Assembly Art Festival, infecting countless people. People were amazed at how beautifully melodious and expressive an instrument made of earth could have. The local overseas Chinese were very proud, and the foreign media praised it, saying: "For the first time, I heard the oldest Chinese music!" They praised "the timbre of the 埙 is really charming, it is a music bottle that makes a wonderful sound".
Ancient Chinese musical instruments are like a splendid and magnificent treasure house, dazzling and rare in the world. Today, when we touch these instruments again, please do not forget the precious musical heritage left to us by our ancestors and let it flourish even more.
Author:Dong Wei (Associate Professor, Hangzhou Normal University)
Editor: Zhou Minxian
Editor-in-Charge: Xuanjing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.