10 - Choral music in East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea

Summary

Prelude: cultural and historical perspective

It is often said that music is universal, that the entire human race possesses musical instinct. If music is humankind's shared instinct and, as several recent scientific studies in anthropology seem to suggest, the earliest form of humans' spoken language was monosyllabic and tonal, what Mithen called “infant-directed speech” or IDS, then the Sinitic (that is, Chinese) language may be seen as a remnant of humanity's earliest speech, since it is the only monosyllabic and tonal language in the modern world. From there, one may conjecture that, as a tribe began to develop a shared vocabulary however simple, and as tribal life became more organized, there would arise a need for concerted voices in communal gatherings. It follows that responsorial and antiphonal chanting or singing may have developed and gradually become humankind's earliest vehicle of group communication, as in burial (compare evidence of Neanderthals' burial rituals more than 70,000 years ago) or other rituals such as moon and harvest festivals.

Indeed, human history abounds with ancient tales of choral singing. Christian music historians point to certain biblical passages as the earliest references to group or choral singing, such as the song of triumph uttered by the Israelites on the shores of the Red Sea, with Miriam, Moses' sister, as the first choral conductor or, more properly, the first cantor (the “Psalm of Victory” from Exodus 15). In China, there is also a famous story from the Warring States Period (early third century BCE) of soldiers singing the Chu (楚) folksong in order to weaken the fighting spirit of the enemy. This particular tale has been told and retold in many of China’s historical chronicles as well as portrayed in Jingju (or Jingxi, often erroneously referred to in the West as “Chinese opera”), and in the award-winning Chinese movie Farewell, My Concubine.