Robert Bagley, Professor, Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
| DATE: | Wednesday, September 7, 2005 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM |
| PLACE: | Doe Library, 308J |
| FORMAT: | Colloquium |
| SPONSORS: | Center for Chinese Studies, Department of Music, Department of History, Asian Art and Visual Cultures Working Group |
The tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (d. 433 BC), excavated in 1978, contained thirty well-preserved musical instruments, including sets of bells and chime stones bearing inscriptions that concern pitches, scales, and transposition. These inscriptions are the earliest texts on music theory known from China, and the bells still sound the pitches that their inscriptions refer to.
The set of 41 chime stones is chromatic, that is, the step from one stone to the next is always a semitone. The 65 bells, each of which produces two distinct pitches depending on where it is struck, supply a five-octave pentatonic scale on C along with shorter stretches of other scales, including a chromatic stretch.
The inscriptions use two types of pitch nomenclature, one for relative pitch and one for absolute pitch. Names for a sequence of standard absolute pitches are inscribed on a subset of the bells that embodies those standards. For relative pitch the inscriptions use a solmization system that assigns monosyllables to the steps of the pentatonic scale and disyllables to the remaining steps of the chromatic scale.
The lecture will describe the chromatic instruments and their inscriptions, then try to account for the theoretical knowledge they display by proposing a hypothetical prehistory for Chinese music. It will argue that music theory before Marquis Yi's time differed from the music theory of later periods in focusing on bells and absolute pitch rather than on strings and calculated scales, and will suggest that the difference explains the startlingly early discovery of the chromatic scale in China.
Free and open to the public.
