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About this Project

Welcome! This blog is a repository of my ongoing translations of Classical Chinese texts related to music and sounds, broadly defined. The idea and the many translations you read come from the classes I teach at the University of California, Berkeley. In my experience, the lack of translations often makes it difficult to incorporate Chinese topics in music classes. Through this project, I hope to share my translations, in case they may be useful to your teaching and research as they have been to mine.

Another motivation for this project is that I enjoy doing translations. Anyone who has done translation knows that it is neither the mere transfer of information from one language to another, nor a derivative form of research compared to research studies. Instead, it is proactive and performative. It is full of creativity and unexpected ironies. It is a heuristic that takes us outside of our normative ways of thinking about and relating to the world, so we have the chance of putting these ways under a radical reexamination. If I turn out to be a somewhat talented translator, I hope to bring the joy of translation to you, so you may want to translate something yourself!

Given that this is a blog and not an e-book, I am not following a predetermined table of contents. Instead, I post some newly translated material every week or so. I write a short blurb at the start of each post highlighting what I think is remarkable and/or pedagogically useful of the translated text, besides providing background information. I use subscripts to annotate the translated text _{like this!} . This emulates the typesetting convention of Chinese books since the start of the second millennium, which sets the main text in a large font and inserts annotations and commentaries _{in a smaller font} inside; I put these in-text annotations in a different color to make reading the main text easier. In cases where the text I want to translate is too long (e.g. an entire treatise), I break it down into a series of posts; all such series are listed in the “Ongoing series” page under the “References” tab in the header. I have also put together an (expanding) Glossary of Chinese terms frequently encountered in my translations, under the “References” tag. As the number of my translations here grows, I will produce additional bibliographies or finding guides (chronological, thematic, etc.) for quicker references.

Thank you for perusing this site!

This work by Zhuqing (Lester) S. Hu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Latest Translations

Triple Divisions—Key Points from the Treatises on Music (c. 680), Chapter 5:4 “On the Paradigm of Mutual Generations” and Chapter 5:5 “On ‘triple division with one part subtracted or added’ being applicable to strings and pipes”

This is the third part of my translation of Key Points from the Treatises on Music (c. 680), or “Empress Wu’s Music Theory Primer.” These two chapters continue to discus the seven sheng, yet it also “previews” a significant concept in Chinese tuning theory in relation to the twelve tuning pitch pipes (or lü), before…

June 4, 2021June 4, 2021

What Pentatonicism? – Key Points from the Treatises on Music (c. 680), Chapter 5:2 “The method for the mutual generation of the seven sheng” and 5:3 “On how to understand the two bian notes”

This is the second part of my translation of Key Points from the Treatises on Music (c. 680), or “Empress Wu’s Music Theory Primer.” These two chapters discuss the seven sheng or musical notes of the scale, particularly: (1) what are the topological relations or “mutual generations” between these seven notes vis-à-vis the twelve tuning…

May 20, 2021May 21, 2021

Empress Wu’s Music Theory Primer — Key Points from the Treatises on Music (c. 680), Table of Content and Chapter 5:1 “Distinguishing the sheng of musical notes, examining the origin of sheng.”

Beginning with this post, I will produce a complete, chapter-by-chapter translation of Key Points from the Treatises of Music (Yueshu yaolu 樂書要錄, c. 680). The treatise is special in many ways. It the earliest extant Chinese monograph on music theory and one of the earliest extant monographs on music at large. It is traditionally attributed…

May 9, 2021June 2, 2021