No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1977
The documentation of many aspects of early musical history is substantially fuller, and extends further backwards in time, in Asia than in Europe. This is so for the history of secular music in general, for the history of musical forms and melody types, as well as for the history of instruments, of playing techniques, and of ornamentation. Assyriologists, and musicologists with some knowledge of and competence in Assyriology, have recently demonstrated that the Babylonians were already familiar with the seven diatonic modes of the European tradition in the second millennium b.c., and there exists a Hurrian cuneiform tablet of 1400 b.c. bearing words and music of a hymn to the goddess Nikkal, wife of the Moon-God. The concern of this paper, however, is with South and East Asia, rather than with Western Asia and the Ancient Fertile Crescent, and in both East and South Asia numerous documentary sources carry us back to a point in time in musical history some five or six centuries earlier than equivalent European sources. From the standpoint of the historian of Western music, what is perhaps most astonishing is the existence of a substantial body of secular instrumental music of the eighth and early ninth centuries, surviving in score, in mensural tablatures, in documents in part themselves written in the ninth and tenth centuries, or now available in copies made not later than the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.
1 For a recent account, with full bibliography, see Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘Déchiffrement de la musique babylonienne’, in Accademia nazionale det Lincei, Problem attuali di scienza e di cultura, Quaderno no. 236 (1977), 1–24.Google Scholar
2 Laurence Picken, ‘Instrumental Polyphonic Folk Music in Asia Minor’, in Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, lxxx (1953–4), 73–86; and Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (London, 1975), 232ff, 303ff, 537ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 D Richard Widdess, ‘The Kuḍumiyāmalai Inscription: a Source of early Indian Music in Notation’, Musica Asiatica, ii (1979), in press.Google Scholar
4 ‘Twelve Ritual Melodies of the Tang Dynasty’, Studia memoriae Belae Bartok sacra, ed. B. Rajeczky and L. Vargyas (Budapest, 1956, 1957), 147–73.Google Scholar
5 Rembrandt F. Wolpert, ‘A Ninth-Century Sino-Japanese Lute-Tutor’, Musica Asiatica, i (1977), 111–65.Google Scholar
Allan J. Marett, ‘Tunes Notated in Flute-Tablature from a Japanese Source of the Tenth Century’, Musica Asiatica, i (1977), 1–59.Google Scholar
7 Elizabeth Markham: work as yet unpublished.Google Scholar
8 Observation by L.E.R.P.Google Scholar
9 See footnote 7.Google Scholar
10 ‘Secular Chinese Songs of the Twelfth Century’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae, viii (1966), 125–72; see pp. 141, 143. A revision of Song 3, with equi-syllabic English translation by Arthur Cooper, is given in the latter's Li Po and Tu Fu (Penguin Classics, 1973). 34–5.Google Scholar
11 Observation by R. F. Wolpert.Google Scholar
12 Nānyadeva: Sarasvalthṛdayâlamkāra. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona. Govt. MS 111 of 1869–70, under title Bharatabhāṣya. Photographed by courtesy of the librarian.Google Scholar
13 Denis C. Twitchett and Anthony H. Christie, ‘A Medieval Burmese Orchestra’, Asia Major, vii (1959), 176–95. The pitches are there given as sharps rather than flats.Google Scholar
14 Muriel C. Williamson, The Basic Tune of a Late Eighteenth-Century Burmese Classical Song', Musica Asiatica, ii (1979), in press.Google Scholar
15 Muriel C. Williamson, ‘Aspects of Traditional Style Maintained in Burma's first 13 Kyô Songs’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, ii (1975), 117–64.Google Scholar
16 See footnote 14.Google Scholar
17 ‘The Shapes of the Shi Jing song-texts and their Musical Implications’, Musica Asiatica, i (1977), 85–109.Google Scholar
18 Jonathan Condit, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Korean Score in Mensural Notation’, Musica Asiatica, ii (1979), in press; Sources for Korean music 1450–1600, (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar
19 A mythical auspicious bird resembling a super cock-pheasant. Its appearance presaged the coming of a sage-king.Google Scholar
20 See Condit, Sources/or Korean Music.Google Scholar