Well, besides "arbarian", "胡" has another meaning in ancient Chinese, similar to "why". Maybe "胡相问" can be translated into "why ask me" .It came out in my mind after listenning.
There are many writings and iconography about music dating from the Han Dynasty. We know about many of the musical instruments, performance contexts, tuning systems, modes, piece/song titles, etc., but there are no melodies surviving from that period. There is, however, some percussion notation in the "Tou Hu" section of the Confucian text "Liji" (The Book of Rites)《礼记·投壶》, which was prepared during the Han Dynasty, which may be of Han or possibly pre-Qin (i.e., Zhou) origin.
this playing and singing style is quite similar to the traditional music "nam2guan4"(south flute) popular in MinNan(south HocKien province) and Taiwan).
@@黃子萍-v9y I was not referring to anything Cantonese, as Quanzhou is a Hokkien-speaking area. "Nanguan" is the Mandarin pronunciation of 南管. It's not related to Cantonese naamyam/nanyin (南音)
It's an anonymous poem of the same title that was found in Cave 17 (the "Library Cave") of the Mogao Grottoes near Dunhuang in Gansu province, northwest China in 1900. It was found among around 50,000 manuscripts that had been stored in the cave since it was walled off for unknown reasons early in the 11th century. Because the poem was found in the same cave as the pipa scores (meaning it also dated roughly to the 10th century or possibly somewhat earlier, i.e., the late Tang Dynasty or the subsequent Five Dynasties period), and had the same title, it seemed a logical choice to treat the poem as a set of lyrics for the melody of the same title. The poem reads as follows (note that, in the recording, some of the lines are switched around or repeated): ====== 《西江月 其一 女伴秋江三首》 Three Poems About [Traveling With] a Female Companion on the Autumn River No. 1: "Moon Over the Western River" 作者：敦煌曲子词无名氏（唐） Author: Anonymous song lyrics from Dunhuang (Tang Dynasty) 女伴同寻烟水。今宵江月分明。 My female companion explores the misty waters with me; On this night, the river moon is clear and distinct. 舵头无力一船横。波面微风暗起。 The rudder is powerless, and the entire boat drifts sideways, As a gentle breeze subtly stirs the water's surface. 拨棹乘船无定止。楚词处处闻声。 Paddling the boat without a fixed destination, The songs of Chu can be heard everywhere. 连天江浪浸秋星。误入蓼花丛里。 Merging with the sky, the river's waves soak up the autumn stars, As if accidentally entering a field of flowering wormwood.
@@ShenZhang-CS It's *social* media, so of course it's important for us to reply to good-faith comments. I intend this channel as an educational resource.
I think the Tang-style xiao was smaller than today's 1.8-foot size, and had a somewhat different mouthpiece notch. A few survive in the Shōsōin's collection, but I don't think the instrument is frequently depicted in Tang-era artworks showing ensemble music-making. Poets like Bai Juyi and Li Bai did mention the xiao in their poems describing court yanyue performance, but it's not always possible to tell whether they might have been referring to the paixiao (panpipe) rather than the dongxiao (end-blown vertical flute).
From what I understand, the dimo was developed sometime during the Tang Dynasty, but was not widely or universally used yet. But that was not the only difference; the di or heng di (as it was often called at that time) was not constructed the same way as today in terms of length, bore, size/shape of holes, number of holes, etc. And there were also different di with different arrangement of finger holes for use with different modes. This particular recording did not aim to use period instruments, as a historically informed performance (HIP) movement had not yet arisen in China.
@@dbadagna Ok, thanks for the reply, but according to this website , www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/dizi#:~:text=The%20first%20written%20record%20of,three%2Dquarter%2Dtone%20intervals They said dimo was first mentioned in the 12th century, and Tang dynasty already ended at that time, so is it true, or is your definition better?
Here is the relevant passage from the "Yue Shu" 《乐书》 (The Book of Music) by Chen Yang (陈旸, 1064-1128) of the Northern Song Dynasty; completed in 1104 and comprising 200 chapters, this treatise was the first Chinese encyclopedia of music. 宋 • 陳晹《樂書》卷148 提到：「唐之七星管，古之長笛也，其狀如篪而長，其數盈導而七竅，橫吹，旁有一孔系粘竹膜者，籍共鳴而助聲，劉系所作也」。笛膜是從唐代七星管開始的。 Although Chen Yang lived in the Northern Song Dynasty, he was writing about the Tang Dynasty in the above passage. It seems that he credits the development of the dimo (dizi membrane) to someone named Liu Xi (刘系), who used it on a type of flute called "qi xing guan" (七星管, "7-star tube"), although it is not exactly certain in which part of the Tang Dynasty he lived, or how long it took to catch on. Surviving specimens of dizi dating to the Kaiyuan period (mid-8th century) that are preserved in the Shōsōin imperial treasure house of Nara, Japan show no mo kong (membrane hole). Similarly, a famous musician named Pei Luo'er (裴洛儿) pioneered plucking the pipa with the fingers in the early Tang period, but not everyone followed his lead, many players preferring to continue using a large plectrum to pluck the strings, which was the old/original way of playing, and both styles coexisted, just as today some guitarists pluck their instruments with their fingernails, and others strum with a pick, depending on their individual style and repertoire being played.
Most of this information was shared with me by Mr. Lin Chiang-san, a musicologist from Taipei, Taiwan, who is active on Facebook and happy to share his considerable knowledge on subjects related to Chinese music, musical instruments, and music history. I am just passing it on to you.
They are much better than I had guessed they would be, in light of the fact that they were arranged and performed by mainland Chinese conservatory-trained musicians in the 1980s. The brilliance and sensitivity of Professor Chen Yingshi shines through all of the arrangements, which are diverse and clever in their conception, and consistently beautifully performed (and, significantly, are free of European-style triadic harmony and counterpoint). Of course, the music could benefit from the use of reproductions of actual period instruments, and it's clear that by this time Chen had not yet completely deciphered the rhythmic notation and arrived at the final, authoritative reconstructions of the Dunhuang Scores (as published in his 2005 book), but on the whole these arrangements ring true in terms of their spirit and execution, and set a good model for future work in the field of the historically informed reconstructive performance of Tang music. Now that Dr. Chen is more or less out of commission, and confined to a hospital bed due to old age and ill health, I feel regret that this major work of his, in terms of restoring Tang music to the concert stage in a proper manner, is largely unknown internationally, 30 years after this project was done. He was truly ahead of his time.
dbadagna yes, I’ve been listening to pieces uploaded by the 唐代礼乐复原组. Do you have a view on which reconstructions overall are closest to the original music of the Tang?
I think we can benefit from listening to many different reconstructions, just as there would be no single "correct" or "best" interpretation of a Monteverdi opera or Bach cantata, for example. I think the new quartet CD made in Kyoto a year or two is quite good, though the tempos are on the whole too slow in my opinion, and the mouth organ is using clusters, which is almost certainly anachronistic. Something to note is that Medieval Japanese writers, writing about the Tang music scores they inherited from China, said that the tablatures are quite easy to make sense of, since everything one needs is recorded therein. I believe this assessment is more or less accurate, though some creativity needs to be exercised in reconstructing the percussion parts. We really owe a debt of gratitude to the members of the Tang Music Project for making so many of the tablatures available to the world in the form of staff notation--though they only finished 7 out of a projected 20+ volumes, and left many dozens of pieces untranscribed. Much more work needs to be done, and I hope someone will step up and get this work completed. Another collaborative international project may be the best way to get it done, now that most of the members of Picken's group have either passed on or are otherwise uncommunicative with others working in this field. The Beijing-based group you mention is doing excellent work in terms of instrumentation and costume, but their tempos are, in my assessment, almost consistently about 400% too slow, obscuring the beauty of the melodies. Their trio rendition of "A Jade Tree's Rear-Court Blossom," which is of incomparable beauty, is the only performance of theirs that really rings true to me. They really captured the indescribable, transcendent essence of this repertoire, at its best. For both the Sino-Japanese and Dunhuang tablatures, I think a sensitive musician who really gets to know the pieces can make good musical sense of them, even though they were created over 1,000 years ago.
Also, Tomoko Sugawara gave a lovely performance of Dunhuang and Sino-Japanese pieces in New York City a month or two ago. Have you seen the video in which my own ensemble (based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) played two of the Dunhuang Scores in a 2017 concert?
None. The instruments have very unique characters but the music is not very melodic and pleasant to hear. Sometimes I think they purposely did that so that the emperor wouldn't be able to tell whether they've played a note wrong or not. In the Chinese drama, Longest Day in Chang'an, they've managed to use the same instruments and made it a bit more melodic. Much better result I think.
@@DesignEnthusiast83 This sounds very pleasant to me tbh, better than the majority of modern music. I guess you are just used to modern music which usually has catchy chorus.
@@user-ll8dj4kp5m I guess it's sort of like jazz where they don't want the music to get into the minds of people who are carrying conversations in the environment. Just the sort of background music to set up the mood.
On the contrary, all the pieces on this recording are reconstructions of tablatures of Tang yanyue pieces found in Gansu province, northwest China (dating to the 10th century AD), or Sino-Japanese score collections dated from the 8th through 12th centuries AD. I've listed the source(s) for each piece in the video description above.
@@dbadagna reconstruction involves too much imagination as the ancient music notations do not include tempo and beats, there is absolutely no way to reconstruct to its original form. and most of all, it is totally nonsense to sing in standard mandarin, standard mandarin is nothing close to the languages used in tang dynasty. the reconstruction we hear now is just modern fantasy.
What a find! Thanks for uploading.
Well, besides "arbarian", "胡" has another meaning in ancient Chinese, similar to "why".
Maybe "胡相问" can be translated into "why ask me" .It came out in my mind after listenning.
How fascinating. That gives new meaning to Abbott & Costello's famous "Who's on First?" routine.
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%83%A1
🔥🔥🔥🔥.
This is a M O O D😩👌🏽.
太好了！
Are there enough records or artifacts to know how music in the Han Dynasty sounded like? This is amazing.
There are many writings and iconography about music dating from the Han Dynasty. We know about many of the musical instruments, performance contexts, tuning systems, modes, piece/song titles, etc., but there are no melodies surviving from that period.
There is, however, some percussion notation in the "Tou Hu" section of the Confucian text "Liji" (The Book of Rites)《礼记·投壶》, which was prepared during the Han Dynasty, which may be of Han or possibly pre-Qin (i.e., Zhou) origin.
I've collected some Han-era sources about music on this Web page:
earlychinesemusic.blogspot.com/2020/04/early-chinese-music-resources-han.html
The calligraphy is so pretty
this playing and singing style is quite similar to the traditional music "nam2guan4"(south flute) popular in MinNan(south HocKien province) and Taiwan).
Quanzhou nanguan is mainly Ming Dynasty in its orientation.
@@dbadagna never heard the name of "nanguan" for cantonese opera & song but "nam3yam4"(south sound).
@@黃子萍-v9y I was not referring to anything Cantonese, as Quanzhou is a Hokkien-speaking area. "Nanguan" is the Mandarin pronunciation of 南管. It's not related to Cantonese naamyam/nanyin (南音)
What lyrics were being sung to 西江月?
It's an anonymous poem of the same title that was found in Cave 17 (the "Library Cave") of the Mogao Grottoes near Dunhuang in Gansu province, northwest China in 1900. It was found among around 50,000 manuscripts that had been stored in the cave since it was walled off for unknown reasons early in the 11th century.
Because the poem was found in the same cave as the pipa scores (meaning it also dated roughly to the 10th century or possibly somewhat earlier, i.e., the late Tang Dynasty or the subsequent Five Dynasties period), and had the same title, it seemed a logical choice to treat the poem as a set of lyrics for the melody of the same title.
The poem reads as follows (note that, in the recording, some of the lines are switched around or repeated):
======
《西江月 其一 女伴秋江三首》
Three Poems About [Traveling With] a Female Companion on the Autumn River
No. 1: "Moon Over the Western River"
作者：敦煌曲子词无名氏（唐）
Author: Anonymous song lyrics from Dunhuang (Tang Dynasty)
女伴同寻烟水。今宵江月分明。
My female companion explores the misty waters with me;
On this night, the river moon is clear and distinct.
舵头无力一船横。波面微风暗起。
The rudder is powerless, and the entire boat drifts sideways,
As a gentle breeze subtly stirs the water's surface.
拨棹乘船无定止。楚词处处闻声。
Paddling the boat without a fixed destination,
The songs of Chu can be heard everywhere.
连天江浪浸秋星。误入蓼花丛里。
Merging with the sky, the river's waves soak up the autumn stars,
As if accidentally entering a field of flowering wormwood.
@@dbadagna I can't believe you are still replying to comments. You're awesome
@@ShenZhang-CS It's *social* media, so of course it's important for us to reply to good-faith comments. I intend this channel as an educational resource.
I'm pretty sure the 6 hole Shakuhachi (chiba) was used in Tang dynasty ensemble music
I think the Tang-style xiao was smaller than today's 1.8-foot size, and had a somewhat different mouthpiece notch. A few survive in the Shōsōin's collection, but I don't think the instrument is frequently depicted in Tang-era artworks showing ensemble music-making.
Poets like Bai Juyi and Li Bai did mention the xiao in their poems describing court yanyue performance, but it's not always possible to tell whether they might have been referring to the paixiao (panpipe) rather than the dongxiao (end-blown vertical flute).
难以言喻，太奇妙了
Is the dizi suppost to have a dimo on it? I thought it wasn't used much in Tang Dynasty. I am not too sure though.
From what I understand, the dimo was developed sometime during the Tang Dynasty, but was not widely or universally used yet. But that was not the only difference; the di or heng di (as it was often called at that time) was not constructed the same way as today in terms of length, bore, size/shape of holes, number of holes, etc. And there were also different di with different arrangement of finger holes for use with different modes. This particular recording did not aim to use period instruments, as a historically informed performance (HIP) movement had not yet arisen in China.
@@dbadagna Ok, thanks for the reply, but according to this website ,
www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/dizi#:~:text=The%20first%20written%20record%20of,three%2Dquarter%2Dtone%20intervals
They said dimo was first mentioned in the 12th century, and Tang dynasty already ended at that time, so is it true, or is your definition better?
Here is the relevant passage from the "Yue Shu" 《乐书》 (The Book of Music) by Chen Yang (陈旸, 1064-1128) of the Northern Song Dynasty; completed in 1104 and comprising 200 chapters, this treatise was the first Chinese encyclopedia of music.
宋 • 陳晹《樂書》卷148 提到：「唐之七星管，古之長笛也，其狀如篪而長，其數盈導而七竅，橫吹，旁有一孔系粘竹膜者，籍共鳴而助聲，劉系所作也」。笛膜是從唐代七星管開始的。
Although Chen Yang lived in the Northern Song Dynasty, he was writing about the Tang Dynasty in the above passage. It seems that he credits the development of the dimo (dizi membrane) to someone named Liu Xi (刘系), who used it on a type of flute called "qi xing guan" (七星管, "7-star tube"), although it is not exactly certain in which part of the Tang Dynasty he lived, or how long it took to catch on. Surviving specimens of dizi dating to the Kaiyuan period (mid-8th century) that are preserved in the Shōsōin imperial treasure house of Nara, Japan show no mo kong (membrane hole).
Similarly, a famous musician named Pei Luo'er (裴洛儿) pioneered plucking the pipa with the fingers in the early Tang period, but not everyone followed his lead, many players preferring to continue using a large plectrum to pluck the strings, which was the old/original way of playing, and both styles coexisted, just as today some guitarists pluck their instruments with their fingernails, and others strum with a pick, depending on their individual style and repertoire being played.
@@dbadagna Oh, now I get it and it makes much more sense. Thank you very much for taking your time to write back. Thanks!
Most of this information was shared with me by Mr. Lin Chiang-san, a musicologist from Taipei, Taiwan, who is active on Facebook and happy to share his considerable knowledge on subjects related to Chinese music, musical instruments, and music history. I am just passing it on to you.
有碟片可购买吗？
No, it's surely long out of print.
dbadagna 👌
@@MegalopsykhiaLIN 絕版了 我也買不到
amazing
听了不起性欲
皇帝亢奋的话就不会来听这个了。冷却时间才会来听这种音乐。
大国气象
How would you rate this reconstruction?
They are much better than I had guessed they would be, in light of the fact that they were arranged and performed by mainland Chinese conservatory-trained musicians in the 1980s. The brilliance and sensitivity of Professor Chen Yingshi shines through all of the arrangements, which are diverse and clever in their conception, and consistently beautifully performed (and, significantly, are free of European-style triadic harmony and counterpoint).
Of course, the music could benefit from the use of reproductions of actual period instruments, and it's clear that by this time Chen had not yet completely deciphered the rhythmic notation and arrived at the final, authoritative reconstructions of the Dunhuang Scores (as published in his 2005 book), but on the whole these arrangements ring true in terms of their spirit and execution, and set a good model for future work in the field of the historically informed reconstructive performance of Tang music.
Now that Dr. Chen is more or less out of commission, and confined to a hospital bed due to old age and ill health, I feel regret that this major work of his, in terms of restoring Tang music to the concert stage in a proper manner, is largely unknown internationally, 30 years after this project was done. He was truly ahead of his time.
Have you checked out my Tang Dynasty music TH-cam playlist?
dbadagna yes, I’ve been listening to pieces uploaded by the 唐代礼乐复原组. Do you have a view on which reconstructions overall are closest to the original music of the Tang?
I think we can benefit from listening to many different reconstructions, just as there would be no single "correct" or "best" interpretation of a Monteverdi opera or Bach cantata, for example.
I think the new quartet CD made in Kyoto a year or two is quite good, though the tempos are on the whole too slow in my opinion, and the mouth organ is using clusters, which is almost certainly anachronistic.
Something to note is that Medieval Japanese writers, writing about the Tang music scores they inherited from China, said that the tablatures are quite easy to make sense of, since everything one needs is recorded therein. I believe this assessment is more or less accurate, though some creativity needs to be exercised in reconstructing the percussion parts.
We really owe a debt of gratitude to the members of the Tang Music Project for making so many of the tablatures available to the world in the form of staff notation--though they only finished 7 out of a projected 20+ volumes, and left many dozens of pieces untranscribed. Much more work needs to be done, and I hope someone will step up and get this work completed. Another collaborative international project may be the best way to get it done, now that most of the members of Picken's group have either passed on or are otherwise uncommunicative with others working in this field.
The Beijing-based group you mention is doing excellent work in terms of instrumentation and costume, but their tempos are, in my assessment, almost consistently about 400% too slow, obscuring the beauty of the melodies. Their trio rendition of "A Jade Tree's Rear-Court Blossom," which is of incomparable beauty, is the only performance of theirs that really rings true to me. They really captured the indescribable, transcendent essence of this repertoire, at its best.
For both the Sino-Japanese and Dunhuang tablatures, I think a sensitive musician who really gets to know the pieces can make good musical sense of them, even though they were created over 1,000 years ago.
Also, Tomoko Sugawara gave a lovely performance of Dunhuang and Sino-Japanese pieces in New York City a month or two ago.
Have you seen the video in which my own ensemble (based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) played two of the Dunhuang Scores in a 2017 concert?
Which is ur favorite?
Which what?
None. The instruments have very unique characters but the music is not very melodic and pleasant to hear. Sometimes I think they purposely did that so that the emperor wouldn't be able to tell whether they've played a note wrong or not. In the Chinese drama, Longest Day in Chang'an, they've managed to use the same instruments and made it a bit more melodic. Much better result I think.
@@DesignEnthusiast83 This sounds very pleasant to me tbh, better than the majority of modern music. I guess you are just used to modern music which usually has catchy chorus.
@@user-ll8dj4kp5m I guess it's sort of like jazz where they don't want the music to get into the minds of people who are carrying conversations in the environment. Just the sort of background music to set up the mood.
中國沒有這個，大陸沒有，台灣更沒有。
都是些現代人臆想出來的曲調。
On the contrary, all the pieces on this recording are reconstructions of tablatures of Tang yanyue pieces found in Gansu province, northwest China (dating to the 10th century AD), or Sino-Japanese score collections dated from the 8th through 12th centuries AD. I've listed the source(s) for each piece in the video description above.
@@dbadagna reconstruction involves too much imagination as the ancient music notations do not include tempo and beats, there is absolutely no way to reconstruct to its original form. and most of all, it is totally nonsense to sing in standard mandarin, standard mandarin is nothing close to the languages used in tang dynasty. the reconstruction we hear now is just modern fantasy.
@@sfung9115古樂譜有的會標記節拍的，但是很少
@@sfung9115唐朝官話現在國內也有專業人士在復原
By searching for a way to make this music sound right, we will get closer and closer to what could be.