選集

Koto and shakuhachi are the two voices most people now associate with Japanese traditional music, and they began in very different places. The koto was the domain of the blind musicians' guilds of the Edo period, who taught it as a refined chamber art for the parlour. The shakuhachi belonged to wandering Fuke Zen monks, who played it as a breathing discipline. By the Meiji era the two had met, with the shamisen, in the ensemble music called sankyoku.

6 recordings, 1:21:14

The 'Pear Garden' is the old name for the Chinese theatre world, after the troupe kept by the Tang emperor Xuanzong. Peking opera came of age at the same moment as the gramophone, and its stars were recorded almost as soon as discs reached Shanghai. Collectors still argue over these sides line by line.

10 recordings, 44:36

The oldest sounds in the catalogue, from wax cylinders and early discs, in roughly the order they were made. A German sinologist's cylinder from the late 1800s preserves a chanted reading of Tao Yuanming's 'Returning Home', a rare trace of how classical poetry was voiced.

16 recordings, 50:19

For two thousand years the seven-string qin was the instrument of the educated gentleman: played alone or for a friend, in a study or a garden, rarely for an audience. Its pieces are written in a tablature that records fingering rather than rhythm, so every player rebuilds them from old handbooks.

10 recordings, 54:15

In Taiwan, the square in front of a temple is a stage. Opera troupes, puppet companies and gong-and-drum bands perform there as offerings to the god, and passers-by are welcome to stop and listen.

10 recordings, 2:08:52

'Silk and bamboo' is the old Chinese shorthand for music: silk for strings, bamboo for flutes. This collection follows Chinese instruments from the scholar's study to the concert hall.

6 recordings, 2:57:45

These recordings were made in Beijing in 2017 by students and teachers at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts and other institutions, for a research corpus on jingju singing. Some are sung with jinghu accompaniment mixed in; others are completely unaccompanied, which makes them an unusually clear window on the vocal art itself.

7 recordings, 25:57

Not all traditional music happens on a stage. In Chinese cities, retired amateurs gather in the parks every morning to play erhu, sing opera and drum, and buskers carry the erhu from highway service areas to New York's High Line.

12 recordings, 1:02:48

Peking opera is only one of hundreds of Chinese theatre forms, each sung in its own dialect. This collection gathers what free archives hold of the rest.

4 recordings, 1:18:35

Much of Japan's oldest living music is ritual: sutras chanted in Buddhist halls, and the drums and flutes of Shinto ceremonies.

9 recordings, 32:37

Songs for work, for drinking parties and for storytelling, sung over a hundred and twenty years.

8 recordings, 24:35

The big drum belongs to Japanese festivals and shrines, but the ensemble taiko most people know, kumi-daiko, is a post-war creation that spread around the world.

12 recordings, 40:11

At Chinese New Year the lion arrives with a drum, a gong and a pair of cymbals. In southern lion dance the drummer leads: every leap, shake and pause of the lion follows the drum.

6 recordings, 37:38