Searching for New Sound - Music Composition ideas

Guqin or qin ( 古琴 ) is a plucked seven-string Chinese zither. Chou music is inspired by qin music. To dig deep into Chou's music understanding its aesthetic is critical. I would use a thesis, The 24 Sprites of Qin  (溪山琴況)  by Xu shangying ( 徐上瀛 ,1582-1662) in 1641 to explain the aesthetic of qin. A picture of qin 7 open strings on qin The origin of qin according to Xu (1641), the myth origin, the deity made qin as a tool to cultivate human beings, to combine one's morals and spirituality. This echoes my previous articles about the function of music in China. Xu organized 24 sprites as the basis of the aesthetic of qin. His thesis is long, people summarised the 4 most important points from his thesis. Harmonious (和), the instrument has to be well-tuned. The primary rule is open strings have to harmonize with each other, then the pressed notes come to secondary. The harmonics and pressed should be referring to each other, which implies that the tuning should fit into the h...

Know thyself was the most famous first of three maxims inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The original idea of this proverb was about the self-reflection and self-referencing of the person, the inner search of one's identity. In Chou's (2007) article, "Whither Chinese Composers?", he is asking a bigger question, the collaborative identity of Chinese composers. The concept of composer did not exist or inherently developed within Chinese culture before the western composition idea impact every Chinese musician. In China, the performers had great freedom of improvising the existing materials, serving part of composing role, the origin of the materials was not important. The music in China was very functional, pure entertainment, working, ritual service, cultivation, and education, they are all about serving the need then done, without polishing the craftsmanship. The artistic concept did not exist in music, on the other hand, painting...

In Western music, we cannot hear the music by the ancient Greeks since they did not have a system to notate the music before Guido of Arezzo, the development of staff notation in the 10th century.  This also applies to Chinese music. This is an example of the oldest notation of Chinese music in the 7th century. It is a score for guqin (Chinese zither). The notation is text-based ( wenzipu ), telling the performer the playing position (relative pitch) and the playing technique word by word. However, there is no accurate tempo, rhythm, articulation, or tuning. The situation resembles the western staffless neumes. We have the direction but don't know where to start. Listen to the free-flowing rhythm of the example The performance of the score below Text-based notation of Jieshi Diao Youlan The text-based notation is complex, people simplify the notation to tablature ( Jianzipu ) for  guqin in the 10th century .  But the problem of lack of rhythm still was not addre...