Tang Music and music of the Song dynasy Lectures for SNU

Abstract

With the publication of Fascicle 6 of our series: Music from the Tang Court, my former doctoral pupils and 1 will have completed our transcription and, together with Professor Noel Nickson, our preliminary study of the first mode-key group of that portion of the repertory of Japanese Court Music known as Togaku/Tangyue (唐樂) -'Tang Music' in the sense of the tunes revealed on transcribing the oldest scores for mouth-organ, zither, and lute.

It is necessary to use a term such as 'mode-key' since the Chinese term diao 'system' (調), and in particular the 28 diao of the Tang, comprised four different heptatonic octavespecies, or note-sets, each in seven different keys. This first mode-key group, known to the Japanese as Ichikotsu-cho, (一越調), was known

to the Chinese simply as Yuediao (趣調). I suggest that the '1' crept into the name of

the mode-key because the Yuediao was the first mode in the system of Tang.