This shows that music must have been limited to a very few subjects.
When the scale of five steps was changed into a scale of seven steps about 600 B.C., every one thought that the end of music had come. However these two new notes B and E which formed half steps in the scale were given very interesting names: Leader and Mediator. We, today, call B the leading tone, and E the mediant, so in this case, the Chinese were not quite so topsy-turvy as usual. But in true Chinese fashion they thought that a mythical bird Fung-Woang and his mate had invented the steps and the half steps. The whole steps to them stood for perfect and independent things such as heaven, sun and man; the half steps stood for dependent things such as earth, moon and woman.
They had 84 scales! Think of that and be happy! For we have only two modes, major and minor, and twelve different sounding scales in each.
We get very little pleasure out of Chinese melodies for they seem to wander about aimlessly and do not end comfortably, nor do they seem to begin anywhere! The best melodies are found among the oldest sacred music and among the songs of the sailors and mountaineers. The sacred hymns and the songs of the people have come down unchanged from earliest times. The music of their theatres we like least of all as it is sing-sing, shrill and nerve racking.
Here is an example of an ancient hymn in the pentatonic scale:
Chinese Sacrificial Hymn to the Imperial Ancestors
Instruments
How the Chinese like noise! Their orchestras are seventy-five percent noise makers: drums of all kinds and sizes, bells, stones beaten with mallets, cymbals, wooden clappers, a row of tuned stones and copper plates strung up to be hammered, and wooden tubs beaten sometimes from the inside and sometimes from the outside. They also have wind instruments of clay and flutes of bamboo and metal. The cheng, their most pleasing wind instrument, is made of a hollow gourd with bamboo tubes of different lengths inserted. Their most popular stringed instruments are the kin, a primitive guitar, and the cha, a sort of large zither with twenty-five strings. These instruments date back to barbaric times.
One of the most curious that we have come across is the king which is supposed to have been invented by Quei, a mythical youth like the Greek Orpheus. It is a rack hung with two rows of sixteen different sized stones, which are struck with a wooden mallet. This instrument goes back to 2300 B.C. It seemed so important to the Chinese that they have a special kind of king called the nio-king upon which only the Emperor could play. Another little instrument almost as queer as the king, made of slats of wood tied together and shaped like a fan, used to beat time, was called the tchoung-tou. It was held in one hand and struck against the palm of the other much as one would play with a fan.