In making their instruments, the Chinese used eight different sounds in nature which they found musical—the sound of skin (drums), stone (king and nio-king), metal (flutes, bells, gongs, cymbals and trumpets), clay (instrument like an ocarina moulded into fantastic animal shapes), wood (drums and boxes), bamboo (flutes and parts of the cheng), silk (strings on the che and king and other stringed instruments), gourds (sound boards which held the tubes of the cheng, one of the ancestors of the modern organ).
As early as the 5th century B.C., one of the first books on music in the world was written by a friend of Confucius, the great teacher and philosopher. We know about the ancient Chinese music, not from hieroglyphics and parchments, but from the music they use today, which is the same as that of barbaric times. The law against new things prevailed there as it did in Egypt, and where the government controls art, there can be little progress.
However we might have known much more about music had not Emperor She Huang-Ti “the book destroyer” ordered all musical instruments and books to be destroyed (246 B.C.) except those about medicine, agriculture and magic. For generations after, the people heard little music but the noise of tumbling bells and dancers’ drums.
Their popular music has always been very poor with no particular form or system.
Japanese Music
From the many Japanese prints, and cups and bowls decorated with fascinating pictures of the dainty little men and women playing the samisen and koto, we feel as if we had met these far away people before.
The koto and the samisen have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. It is said that the koto was first made of several hunting bows placed side by side and that later they were joined together as one long sounding board across which the strings were drawn. In the prints we see the long zither-like instruments lying flat on the floor and the dainty little players in fancy kimonos beside them.
Perhaps in the same print a companion will be seen playing a samisen, a long necked instrument whose strings are plucked with a pick or plectrum, such as we use for the mandolin. Whether these prints are a hundred years old or the work of an artist today, makes little difference, for we find the instrument unchanged and the little player in the same lovely kimono. These instruments have been in use in Japan for hundreds of years.
The music and instruments of the Japanese are very like those of the Chinese, not only because they are of like race, but because the Japanese are great imitators and have borrowed from China not only music but art. The Japanese love music for itself, not as the Chinese love it as subject for debate, but they have not written any better music than their neighbors on the mainland.
If you have listened to the music of Madame Butterfly, an opera by Giacomo Puccini, you will have heard a number of Japanese melodies, some of which are real. The composers of Europe and America love to imitate the oriental music because it gives them a chance to make effects quite different from those possible in our own music. Besides, the oriental people seem very picturesque to us and stir our imagination. Henry Eichheim of Boston has written Chinese and Japanese Impressions in which he has used many of the native instruments,—bells, rattles and drums.