Music from the Tang Court: Some Ancient Connections Explored

by Laurence E. R. Picken , Noël J. Nickson

• ISBN13: 9780521543361
• ISBN10: 0521543363
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The series of volumes of Music from the Tang Court considers a repertory of music at least 1400 years old. During the two centuries before 841 the Japanese Court borrowed a large amount of secular entertainment music from China. This 'Tang Music' (Togaku) survives in Japan in a substantial body of manuscripts, but is transformed in character in contemporary performance. This edition transcribes and comments on the music as it survives in its earliest sources. This process has revealed surprising evidence for ancient interconnections in Asian musics, and the essays in this seventh volume present aspects of this research to date. They provide evidence, for example, of music in a scale of four notes only from Bali and from Ancient China, as well as, most significantly, for the transportation from the Tang capital to Japan of 'several tens of scrolls of music in tablature'.

Table of Contents

1. How the Togaku repertory was acquired by the Japanese

and the processes of 'acculturation' that followed its acquisition Laurence E. R. Picken

2. In search of the music of pre-Nara Japan Noë

l J. Nickson, Laurence E. R. Picken, M.O.

3. 'Old Music', 'New Music', and other classificatory terms in the musical vocabularies of Late Nara and Heian, Japan Laurence E. R. Picken

4. Locational and functional names of notes in modal note-sets across Eurasia Laurence E. R. Picken and Noë

l J. Nickson

5. Modalnote-sets and related matters in Ancient China

in Ancient and Modern India and Persia

in Ancient Greece

6. The modal system of Togaku as a vestige of 28 mode-keys of the Tang inheritance: different modes with like finals

like modes with different finals Laurence E. R. Picken

7. Parallels in the organization of music in time in Indonesia, Ancient India and Ancient China Laurence E. R. Picken, Nicholas Gray and Robert Walker

Envoi

Cumulative bibliography.