Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: The Piping of Heaven: Music, Nature, and Tonal Experimentation in Ancient China as Seen through the Zeng Hou Yi (曾侯乙) Bell Inscriptions

Abstract

Early Chinese thinkers long believed that music encapsulated, in audible form, core numerical properties inherent in the operations of the natural world, particularly in terms of the pentatonic scale and twelve pitch-standards fundamental to musical creation and their correlations with the five phases and twelve lunar months. Their written texts are both corroborated and yet complicated by inscriptional information from the massive bronze bell-set excavated from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (曾侯乙), dating from the 5th Century BCE. This talk examines how music theory may have informed the inscribers of these 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. Including several audio clips, this talk should be of interest and accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike.

About the speaker

Scott COOK is Tan Chin Tuan Professor in the Departments of Chinese Studies and History, National University of Singapore. He earned his PhD in Chinese at the University of Michigan in 1995 and specializes in pre-imperial manuscripts and early Chinese intellectual history. He is author of several books on Warring States manuscripts, including The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, vols. 1-2 (Cornell East Asia Series, 2012) and A Study of Recorded Conversations of Confucius Texts among the Shanghai Museum Manuscripts上博竹書孔子語錄文獻研究 (Shanghai: Zhongxi shuju, 2021).