Traditional Chinese Music has grown out of the life and times of the Chinese people. A long history of 3000 years has allowed the musical traditions of China to flower. Unparalleled systems of musical tuning and pitch as well as musical notations make it so unique. It is pentatonic in nature and has its very own musical genres and instruments.
The solo instruments of traditional Chinese Music include pipa, guqin, and guzheng. Little ensembles of bowed and plucked stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums are used apart from solo instruments. The oldest known instruments are bamboo pipes and Qin. The following list will give you an idea about the number of instruments played in traditional Chinese music:
Woodwind and percussion
- dizi,
- sheng
- paigu
- gong
- paixiao
- guan
- bells
- cymbals
Bowed strings
- erhu
- zhonghu
- dahu
- banhu
- jinghu
- gaohu
- gehu
- yehu
- cizhonghu
- diyingehu
- leiqin
Plucked and struck strings
- guqin
- sanxian
- yangqin
- guzheng
- ruan
- konghou
- liuqin
- pipa
Sung in a thin, non-resonant voice or in falsetto,usually solo rather than choral all traditional Chinese music is melodic rather than harmonic . Chinese vocal music developed from poems and verses sung with music. Instrumental pieces played on dizi or an erhu are popular , and are often available outside of China, but the pipa and zheng music, more traditional in nature, are very popular in China itself. The qin is the most venerated instrument in China, even though very few people have any first hand knowledge of it.
Hence traditional Chinese music has a strong orthodox background and despite the folklorist elements present in it is bound by strict rules and conventions and yet provides a mellifluous background to the growth of Chinese culture.
