The Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods (770 BC–221 BC): Splendid Bronze Wonders
摘要
The Spring and Autumn (770 BC–476 BC) and Warring States (475 BC–221 BC) periods are the culmination of the musical culture in the Bronze Age of China. With the socio-economic progress, many rulers of vassal states rose to power and waged wars to overthrow each other, eventually resulting in seven leading states, thus the name Warring States period. They defied the authority of the Zhou Empire and used large-scale hanging instruments that were reserved for aristocrats with higher ranks without authorization. This encouraged the rapid development of bianzhong and qing as hanging instruments, and many important and exquisite musical instruments that had not been seen before were also excavated, including free reed instruments like sheng (笙) and yu (竽); plucked-string instruments like guqin (古琴), zheng (筝) and se (瑟); bronze struck idiophones of various shapes like bells, bianzhong (扁钟, yongzhong with a relatively flattened bell body), chunyu (錞于), zheng (钲), goudiao (句鑃) and duo (铎); and extremely rare rhythm pipes. In this chapter the author introduced seminal projects of re-creating these relics.