Chinese Music
A Chinese trumpet (Metropolitan Museum, New York)
The first people who came to China, about 50,000 years BC, brought their music with them from Africa. These people probably clapped their hands and sang songs.
Chinese tradition says that a man named Ling Lun, perhaps during the Chou Dynasty, about 1000 BC, invented the earliest musical instruments in China, bamboo pipes that imitated the sounds of birds. But really people were playing drums and pipes as early as the Shang Dynasty, about
The philosopher Confucius, about 500 BC, said that music should be a way of calming people down and making it easier for them to think. Many later Chinese composers agreed with Confucius. Because of this, people respected official music much more than popular music.
(Metropolitan Museum, New York)
Under the Chin Dynasty, about 200 BC, the Chinese emperors established an Imperial Music Bureau to oversee all kinds of music. Perhaps around this same time, the qin, a Chinese stringed instrument like a zither, was invented.
A Chinese musician playing a qin
The Han emperors, beginning about 100 BC, told the Imperial Music Bureau to work on court music and military music, and also to keep track of folk music. They were especially interested in keeping track of political protest music, and sent music officers out to listen and collect popular music.
During the T'ang Dynasty, about 700 AD, musicians wrote a lot of new music for the qin.
