Chinese vocal music probably developed from sung poems and verses with music. Instrumental pieces played on an erhu or dizi are popular, and are often available outside of China, but the pipa and zheng music, which are more traditional, are more popular in China itself.
Chinese Opera
The music is often guttural with high-pitched vocals, usually accompanied by suona, jinghu, other kinds of string instruments, and percussion. Other types of opera include clapper opera, Pingju, Cantonese opera, puppet opera, Kunqu, Sichuan opera, Qinqiang, ritual masked opera and Huangmei xi.
By its nature, the Chinese music is characterized by gentle sounds reminiscent of a gurgling brook, or birdsong. Many medieval Chinese musicians specially imitated the sounds of nature, thus creating a harmony of music and nature.
In a culture where people function according to ritual and ceremony, music is used to help conduct and govern them. So music wasn't really entertainment, but a means for musicians to accomplish political and social goals. Music was ultimately a means for optimizing social utility or happiness.
Chinese music is as varied as the people who create it. Chinese music dates back thousands of years and sounds different from Western music thanks to important differences in tone, musical scale, pitch, instrumentation, and individual instruments.
Today, the guzheng is widely considered the most popular traditional Chinese music instrument, and can be considered the equivalent of the piano in Western music, said Luo Xiaoci, director of Shanghai Chinese Orchestra.
The five core tones of Chinese scales are sometimes connected with the five elements, or wuxing (earth, wood, metal, fire, and water), while the 12 pitches of the tonal system are connected by some writers with the months of the year, hours of the day, or phases of the moon.
Traditional Chinese music can be traced back 7,000 – 8,000 years based on the discovery of a bone flute made in the Neolithic Age. In the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties, only royal families and dignitary officials enjoyed music, which was made on chimes and bells.
The three main streams of religion in East Asia—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism—all employ music to express beliefs and ideas. Ancient shamanic practices as well as Christianity and Islam also play a part in the musical histories of China, Korea, and Tibet.
Apart from some instrumental sounds used in Chinese erudite music, which might have a natural relaxing sound, some of the Chinese music can be relaxing due to the used scales that are very logical and provide the listener to a natural resolution of phrases.
The characteristics of ancient Chinese music include classical and elegant lyrics, poetic words, neat and beautiful melody and multi-ethnic musical instruments. It's totally different from the metallic feeling of rock music and heavy feeling of classical music. Ancient Chinese Music has its unique aesthetic style.
Gongche notation or gongchepu is a traditional musical notation method, once popular in ancient China. It uses Chinese characters to represent musical notes. It was named after two of the Chinese characters that were used to represent musical notes, namely "工" gōng and "尺" chě.
Chinese Music Notation: The Basics
When we read music, we use alphabet names: ABCDEFG and put those alphabet letters on the staff. The higher the notes on the staff, the higher the pitch. The lower the notes, the lower the pitch. Solfege: Do you remember the song from The Sound of Music, “Do, a deer, a female deer”?
C-pop, or Chinese popular music, is music made by artists in the Greater China region, comprising mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. There are three main subgenres of C-pop: Cantopop, Mandopop, and Hokkien pop.
QQ Music. QQ Music is the Chinese leading music streaming service owned by Tencent Music Entertainment Group. It has more than 284 million monthly users. It annually celebrates the QQ Music Awards.
First of all, let's start with a basic question: What kind of music do you like? (你喜欢什么音乐? nǐ xǐ huan shén me yīn yuè).
Among the many traditional musical instruments of China, the most popular 10 instruments were the guzheng, erhu, dizi, pipa, guqin, hulusi, suona, xiao, Chinese drum, and bianzhong.
Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are considered the “three pillars” of ancient Chinese society. As philosophies and religions, they not only influenced spirituality, but also government, science, the arts, and social structure.
Like Chinese classical painting and calligraphy, the music is mainly performed in single lines, but western music has greater diversity of harmony and rhythm, similar to how a painting shows real events. As the Chinese music is made up of monophonic melodies, this style lends to the simplicity of Chinese instruments.
Traditional Chinese culture respects the importance of rites and has special rites for various occasions, such as the emperor's sacrifice to heaven, the common people's sacrifice to ancestors, weddings, funerals, and courteous exchanges.
China has a very powerful and vibrant music market. With a current 1.5 billion consumer base, thousands of music companies operating and over 750 million digital music users, China is undoubtedly one of the best places, not just in Asia, but in the entire world to make a business out of music.
Chinese has a zodiac culture known as Sheng Xiao. This is based on a twelve-year cycle in Chinese lunar year system and each year in that cycle is associated with an animal sign. These 12 signs are rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Each animal represents unique traits.
From the beginning, Chinese music connected each tone to one of the five elements of nature (earth, wood, metal, fire and water).
Most Chinese music uses a pentatonic scale, with the intervals (in terms of lǜ) almost the same as those of the major pentatonic scale. The notes of this scale are called gōng 宫, shāng 商, jué 角, zhǐ 徵 and yǔ 羽.
In Western music, there are seven different notes in an octave. In East Asian music, there are five; that's the pentatonic scale and one of the main reasons that East Asian music sounds different when compared to Western music, since the relations between notes in a scale are different.