Early feudal period (475 BCE - 589 AD) (Continued)
We know that during the Han (202 BCE-220 AD) and Wei dynasties (420-589 AD), acrobatics developed as a new folk-music genre. The general name given to various acrobatic acts was baixi. Most of these acts contained martial arts movements and stage magic, often to musical accompaniment. Some acrobatics were introduced from other countries from the West of China, a point that acknowledges the international currents of the ancient world.
At the end of the Han dynasty (around 220 AD), various wars among regional powers pushed people to migrate to other areas. One outcome was the fusion of music from different regions and ethnicities. Another was the importing of several new instruments to China, some of which later became typical traditional Chinese instruments, most prominently the Pipa, a plucked lute originally from Central Asia or India.
Ji Kang (223-262 AD) was an important figure during the period. As an opponent of the governing powers, he was eventually killed for his political views. Before his execution, Ji Kang asked for his zither and played his swan song, the famous guqin masterpiece Guangling san, whose music is presumed to be forever lost. Ji Kang wrote several important contributions to the theory and aesthetics of music, among them a book called Shengwu Aile Lun (Discourse on the Absence of Sadness and Happiness in Sound), in which he argued that music itself couldn't arouse any emotion. According to theory, when people felt happy or sad while listening to music, it was because they were projecting emotions they brought as listeners onto the music (Cai 1983).
Middle period of feudal society: Sui, Tang, Song, and Yuan Imperial dynasties (581-1368 AD)
After the collapse of the Han dynasty, frequent warfare was one factor that stimulated the spread of Buddhism across China. Emphasizing its closeness to the commoners, Buddhists took up folk musical styles-it is thought that even their largescale rituals were entertaining musical events. A specifically Buddhist musical genre named bianwen appeared in the Tang dynasty. First discovered among a cache of manuscripts at Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China in the early twentieth century, bianwen was a kind of 'draft speech' of the Buddha used in vernacular ways to popularize and explain religious texts. The genre usually comprised the reading out of the text, which was then repeated using more melodic singing, or possibly with a mix of speaking and singing in one verse (Xia 1987: 104-105). Their anonymous authors, although literate, were not educated members of the official class, and the tales were intended to be performed by people who could not read or write. Their language reflects the spoken language of the Tang period. The genres and themes of the tales were quite diverse and many of their forms and themes were significant in Chinese literary development. Commoners gradually welcomed this form of religious music genre and eventually created a secular version of bianwen by adding historic and folk stories, legends, or popular social news in place of the religious texts. By the Southern Song dynasty, however, the form had largely died out.
Confucianists distinguished between the elegant and cultivated yayue and a second category of music labeled suyue. Genres of suyue included baixi (acrobatics) in the Han dynasty, yanyue (entertainment music used at banquets) in the Tang dynasty, and ballads in the Song dynasty (Lin 1994: 27). This division hides some areas of overlap: entertainment music was always a vital part of imperial court culture, and from the Han dynasty onward, the court included institutions founded to provide professional training for court musicians and act as a base for researchers who collected folk music nationwide. These collected folk resources were then refined and performed as yayue for imperial sacrifices, feasts, and at other court events.
The long, straight legs of Wading birds, such as the Grey heron, provide great bones for flute making.
