Chinese Music in Print: From the Great Sage to the Lady Literata - Hardcover

by Yuanzheng Yang (Author), Fong Sing Ha (Contribution by), Colin Huehns (Contribution by)

Grounded in
a desire to bring back to life rare items from the University of Hong Kong's
Fung Ping Shan Library that are entwined within the world of music and to place
them in a context of books and images in American, British, and other Asian
collections, Chinese Music in Print
views the library as a repository not of information but of artifact, and then
uses these artifacts as a means for generating scholarly narrative. It begins
by assessing seminal texts in the Confucian canon set against the delicacy of
the concubine and amanuensis Shen Cai's calligraphy and poetry. Confucianism
was itself a crucial aspect of courtly life, and an exploration of its ritual
is the book's second theme. Vernacular genres of opera and song are represented
in the third chapter, while the Great Sage returns in the fourth for an
exploration of the repertoire and richness of his favourite instrument, the qin. The final chapter ends the journey
with discussion of the legacy of generations of Europeans who have visited
China and their contribution to the understanding of a more vernacular
instrument, the erhu.