Tag Archives: transposition

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 to Wu Zetian (624-705), the only female emperor in Chinese history. The treatise’s very survival was also a testimony to the deep cultural integrations between medieval China and Japan. And, if these weren’t enough, the treatise, even with 70% of it lost, turns out to be an excellent textbook to Chinese music theory, particularly the key concepts of sheng (“sounds,” “notes of the scale”) and lü (“tuning” and “tuning pitch pipes”). Hence I am translating the surviving parts of this treatise in full, so that it can serve as a primer to Classical Chinese music theory for English speakers. This post translates the Table of Content and Chapter 1 of juan 5.