MING MUSIC AND MUSIC HISTORY

Ming China was a society of songs, dances, instrumental music, and operas. Ming emperors, scholar-officials, and commoners, male and female, produced and consumed a large variety of music, and left numerous descriptions of their music activities. Ming China, as interpreted and narrated in the twentieth century does not, however, appear to be musical at all. Major references compiled in the last two decades, such as the Dictionary of Ming Biography and the Cambridge History of China, hardly discuss music. The Zhongguo jinbashinian Mingshi lunzhu mulu (Studies of Ming history published in China in the last eighty years) of 1981 lists only seven studies on music. In the early 1990s, Ming music was still a marginal topic. Mingshi xinbian (New edition of Ming history) of 1993, for example, very briefly mentions music, and Yamane Yukio's 1992 bibliography lists 82 Japanese studies of Ming history, none of which is devoted to music. This twentieth-century marginalization of Ming music is not intentional but a result of many causes, such as the sonic and ephemeral nature of music, specialized theories and notation, and fundamental discrepancies between Ming and twentieth-century concepts of music and music history.