- Chinese Folk Music Harmony Systerm
Most Chinese music uses the Pentatonic scale, which is a typical scale that has similar interval relationships as the major scale, but it only contains five notes.The notes of this scale are called gōng 宫, shāng 商, jué角, zhǐ 徵 and yǔ 羽.
The earliest historical mention of pentatonic scale comes from the books 吕氏春秋 (Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals) written by scholars 吕不韦 (Lü Buwei) in 241 B.C. and 管子 (Guanzi) and 管子 (Guan Zi) in the fourth century B.C. Guan Zi mentioned the method of adding and subtracting a third ( 三分 损益法) and applied it to the number 81. The number 81 means superior luck, which is an auspicious number in the Chinese tradition.
Based on his research and calculation, Guan Zi was able to generate four other numbers. Together with the number 81, the five numbers correspond to the musical notes do-so-re-la-mi in today’s music notation system. And these five notes are composed as the pentatonic scale system. (Han 2022)
2. Chinese folk music region
According to the libraries, the origins of Chinese folk songs can be traced back to the Yellow Emperor’s reign.( Yellow Emperor, formally Xuanyuan Huangdi, who is third of ancient China’s mythological emperors, a culture hero and patron saint of Daoism. )
Huangdi, illustration from Li-tai ku-jen hsiang-tsan (1498 edition); in the collection of the University of Hong Kong.
After a long history of cultural development, there are various types of Chinese folk song which reflect contrasted or similar musical features. The type of Chinese folk song can be divided by a geographical, historical and cultural distribution perspective. Because of the complex factors, such as population migration and the changes of the environment, it is hard to provide a specific number of genres for Chinese folk songs. Also, many Chinese folk music scholars have different opinions of how many types of Chinese folk song exist. However, the majority of the scholars believe that types of Chinese folk song can be divided by geography.
The seven regions in Chinese geography.
EC: East China, MC: Middle China, NC: North China, NEC: Northeast China, NWC: Northwest China, SC: South China and SWC: Southwest China.
Since the landmarks of mainland China vary from the East to the West, and the South to the North, people divide mainland China into seven cultural areas, and all of them contain different folk music characteristics.