The oldest sounds

Flutes of crane bone

From the 1980s archaeologists digging at Jiahu, a farming village in Henan province lived in from about 7000 to 5700 BC, found flutes in the graves. In 1999 the journal Nature reported six complete flutes and pieces of about thirty more, made from the wing bones of the red-crowned crane, with five to eight finger holes. They are among the oldest playable instruments known anywhere.

Musicologists played the best-preserved one, which has seven holes, and measured its notes. They formed a scale close to do, re, mi. A later study grouped the flutes by age: the earliest have four or five notes, the later ones six or seven. Nine thousand years ago, someone was already choosing which notes belonged together.

The eight sounds

Thousands of years later, an early ritual book, the Rites of Zhou, sorted instruments by the material that makes the sound: metal (bells), stone (chimes), silk (zithers like the qin), bamboo (flutes), gourd (the sheng mouth organ), clay, hide (drums) and wood. These are the bāyīn, the eight sounds. The only clay instrument that survives is the xūn, an egg-shaped vessel flute with a dark, hollow voice; Britannica dates the earliest one found to about 5000 BC.

Bells that sing two notes

In 1977 soldiers levelling a hill near Suizhou, in Hubei province, came upon the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, a ruler of a small state. When it was excavated the next year it held a whole orchestra, and at its heart a set of 65 bronze bells on a three-tiered rack. One bell, a gift from the king of Chu, is inscribed with a date corresponding to 433 BC.

The bells are unusual in two ways. Each one sounds two different notes, a short step apart (a third): one when struck in the centre, another when struck at the side. And the bells, their rack and hooks carry 3,755 inscribed characters, most of them about music: the names of the notes, and how those names translate between the pitch systems of Zeng, Chu, the Zhou court and other states. Together the bells span about five octaves, and in the middle of the range they have every semitone. The originals are in the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan; the museum's orchestra plays copies made in 1983.

The five tones

Much of the Chinese music that followed rests on a scale of five notes, the wǔshēng: gōng, shāng, jué, zhǐ, yǔ, which starting on C are C, D, E, G and A. Play only the black keys of a piano and you hear the same kind of scale. It has no semitones, so any two notes sit comfortably together.

You can hear it in the first recording: the seven strings of the qin in their standard tuning, played one after another, give five different notes of the same kind of scale, with the lowest two returning an octave higher. The qin is the subject of the next step.

The second recording is ritual music still taught today: a class at the Confucius Temple in Tainan, Taiwan, learning shísānyīn, the ensemble music associated with the temple's ceremonies. It is a living example of the ritual music that, in older times, also used bells and stone chimes.

And in Japan

Japan's Yayoi period (from about the 2nd century BC) left more than 400 bronze bells called dōtaku. Some have clappers, but they give only a dull rattle, and scholars now think they were ritual objects rather than instruments to ring. Music for listening reached Japan later, from the Chinese and Korean courts; that is step 4.

詞語

五聲 wǔshēng

“the five tones”, gōng, shāng, jué, zhǐ and yǔ: the Chinese pentatonic scale

骨笛 gǔdí

“bone flute”, like the flutes found at Jiahu

編鐘 biānzhōng

“arranged bells”, a tuned set of bronze bells hung on a rack

八音 bāyīn

“the eight sounds”, the old way of sorting instruments by what they are made of

在別處聆聽

• Hubei Provincial Museum: the Chime-Bell Orchestra, which plays the copies of the Zeng bells
• The 1999 Nature paper on the Jiahu flutes, with a sound file of the tested flute, hosted by St John's University, Minnesota