The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound - Andrew Killick

The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound - Andrew Killick

East Asia: Ancient Traditions and Modern Inventions

The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound - Andrew Killick

Andrew Killick [+-]
University of Sheffield
Andrew Killick has been teaching and writing about the world’s music professionally since 1998. His passion for all forms of music has led him literally around the world, including studies at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Washington, periods of fieldwork in India and Korea, and teaching at Illinois State University and Florida State University before taking up his current position at the University of Sheffield in 2003. Originally trained as a classical pianist, he also plays the Korean gayageum zither and an English bagpipe, the Northumbrian smallpipes. His academic publications include two books on Korean music topics, about twenty refereed journal articles and book chapters, and substantial contributions to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. In his spare time he likes to compose “rounds” in a wide variety of musical styles.

Description

Our entry point to the music of East Asia may seem an unlikely one: the harmonica, which many readers will associate with blues or Bob Dylan. The harmonica is introduced as an example of a family of instruments called “free-reed aerophones” which also includes the harmonium and a wide variety of accordion-type instruments. Free-reed aerophones were taken to the Americas from Europe, where they played an important role in folk music, and the harmonium was also taken to India as we saw in the last chapter, but Europe itself learned the free-reed principle from China in the nineteenth century. After tracing the instrument back to its source, we see how some Chinese musicians in recent times have adopted the Western harmonica and developed a unique and virtuosic music of their own for it. We then use the Chinese free-reed mouth organ as a starting point for exploring traditional Chinese music, including instrumental ensembles, the meditative solo music of the qin zither, and China’s highly developed traditions of musical theater. We note that a feature common to most Chinese music, the “pentatonic” or five-note scale, was long unrecognized by Western scholars (although it was common in European folk music too) because of their ethnocentric preconception that scales must have seven notes. We see how China historically formed another “music tree,” drawing on roots in outlying areas and spreading its branches over neighboring countries like Korea and Japan. These countries are briefly surveyed to reveal how the Chinese influence mainly affected the culture of social elites (for East Asia, like Europe and India, had a stratified social system) while the common people maintained local forms that were often strikingly different. East Asia, like Europe, has a rich historical record including a long history of written music, and claims some of the world’s oldest surviving musical traditions, though in both places we find that these traditions have often been “re-invented” for modern purposes. Also with reference to modern times, we consider how East Asia, once an object of exoticism in Western operas and musicals, has become a new home for Western classical music and also a front-runner in the technologization of popular music through Japanese “noise” music, karaoke, and Vocaloid software.

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Citation

Killick, Andrew. East Asia: Ancient Traditions and Modern Inventions. The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. Sep 2026. ISBN 9781781793411. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=27330. Date accessed: 10 Oct 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.27330. Sep 2026

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