Music Theory
Although it has been a common belief that music is a universal language, besides the fact that all music employs a system of sounds to explain certain ideas and emotions, music of different cultures in fact operates along several different rules and structures and in order to understand a type of music better, understanding the fundamental rules and structures of the musical culture (and in extension, the history, language, etc of the society) can not be overstated.
Rhythm
Rhythm: The idea of “jiepai” and rhythm and tempo in Chinese music changed over history.In the Tang Dynasty, there came the concept of a “jupai”, or a musical phrase. A “duanpai” was a longer division which separates the different sections. Musical phrases and sectional divisions then were usually determined by the verses in the songs.By the Song Dynasty, “yunpai” came into existence and this was the beat made by the wooden clappers or “paiban” on the final accent or word of a sentence or phrase. Song Ci has verse structures that are not of equal lengths and hence the length of each “pai” was not regular. Within each “pai”, there are a number of “zi” (used to represent notes or words), but although there is a subdivision of “zi” within a “pai”, the length of each “zi” is not regular and hence there is as yet, no concept of a regular number of beats within a bar as we know of now.In the Ming Dynasty, 1 “pai” started to come to represent 4 “zi”. In performance, a clapper use to beat each “pai”. Hence it started to be also known as the “ban”. The rest of the “zi” were known as the “yan”. It was from this time that there was an emergence of the concept of regular bars and beats. However, such regularity does not equate to the regularity of beats and accents and bars in the Western music concept of rhythm. The regularity was more in terms of an adherence to the musical phrase, and rhythm as conceptualised by Western music was in fact elastic.
Accents and Dynamics
Accents and Dynamics: accents and dynamics of the music are also closely related to the language. The concept of regular accents in Indo-European language is absent in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The emphasis is more on the accents within a phrase (rather than regular accents in a word). Related to this concept, the idea of accents on regular beats of a bar is not as important as accents occurring on appropriate parts of the phrase. Accents are also influenced by note length
Keys
Keys: There is a concept, both of absolute pitch and relative pitch.Pentatonic scales are one of the most frequently occurring scale in Chinese music (but definitely not the only one). Within the pentatonic scale, the degrees of the scale are known as “gong, shang, jiao, zhi, yu” corresponding to 1,2,3,5,6 degrees of the scale. These 5 notes are also known as the “wusheng” and four of the more important notes within this 5-note scale are “gong, shang, zhi and yu” and these are known as the “si ji”.Three types of pentatonic scales are most frequently found in Chinese music: the tonal pentatonic (( a s d g h) makes up the majority; the semi-tonal pentatonic (zh zj a d f) can be found in the music of certain minority tribes in Yunnan; and the neutral pentatonic (zg lzj a s rf) where l is lowered slightly but not yet a semitone and r is raised slightly, less than a semitone. This neutral pentatonic scale can be found in the music from the North-western parts of China, as well as the Guangdong, Chaoshan area.