Related data for: Technology in a New Key: Toward a Reexamination of Musical Theory and Practice in the Zeng Hou Yi 曾侯乙 Bells

Abstract

Accompanying music audio files and music notation files for: "Technology in a New Key: Toward a Reexamination of Musical Theory and Practice in the Zeng Hou Yi Bells." This paper takes a fresh look at the music-theoretical information to be gleaned from a comparison of pitch-frequency measurements to inscriptional information from the massive bronze bell-set excavated from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (d. ca. 433 BCE), and attempts to place it in the context of the roughly parallel knowledge derived from received texts of Warring States China. After briefly examining a couple of important textual witnesses to conceptions of music theory from that era, the paper then examines how similar conceptions may have informed the inscribers of the Zeng Hou Yi bells, who, concerned with more practical musical ends, employed a system of nomenclature that diverged in subtle yet important ways from the formulations of their philosophical counterparts. The final two sections then explore possible implications of the bells’ relatively unique terminology from the standpoints of scale structures and musical temperament, respectively, looking for any consistent patterns to be found among tone-to-key distributions across the bells, as well as clues to the possible deployment of a system of intonation designed to provide a means of tempering the twelve-tone gamut in order that such a range of different scales played in distinct keys over several octaves would have even been possible in the first place. (2020-03-16).

Music audio data; Music notation data

Software: Sibelius