Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.4, 2017

 

The Way the Ancient Chinese Used their Ears: With a Discussion of the Origins of Several Musicological and Philosophical Concepts

(Abstract)

 

Wang Xiaodun

 

Before writing, people mainly communicated through hearing and speaking. Through long practice, the ancient Chinese gained a knowledge and reverence for the ear and the sense of hearing, and set up a system of acoustic knowledge that corresponded to the system of visual knowledge. This was composed of the learning associated with meteorology, the calendar, poetics, metrology, yin-yang theory, and various kinds of knowledge of the night. The system took wind and qi (breath or bodily energy) as key concepts, generalizing them in theoretical terms as the “three talents,” “yin and yang,”“strings and woodwindscannot match the voice,”“voice and qi correspond,” “listening with qi,” “deriving other measures from measurement of tonality,” and “music follows harmony.” These were based on hearing the wind; examining the qi through tonality; using sound to reach the gods; hearing an army’s movements by blowing a pitch pipe; and other ritual activities. Unlike record keepers, the bearers of this knowledge were blind musicians, known as masters. Until the sixth century or later, mainstream Chinese music maintained a tradition of placing less weight on rhythm and melody than on pitch and stressing traditions of calmness and elegance, harmonizing tonality and the calendar, and mysticism. All of this reflects the historical process in which “music originates in the voice, the voice in tonality, and tonality in qi,” which facilitates a renewed understanding of the starting points and original nature of music and tonality.