Both notation and staff were introduced from the west in modern times. What did ancient musicians in China use to record music?

The earliest existing music score in the world is not the western notation and staff, but the famous guqin script in ancient China-Stone Tunes the Orchid. It is a manuscript of the early Tang Dynasty, which has been around for more than 1000 years and is now kept in the National Museum in Tokyo, Japan. The so-called "word spectrum" is to record every sound in words. For example, "You lie down with your middle finger ten inches and the middle finger of your index finger holds the palace merchant", that is, you press the middle finger of your left hand about half an inch above the tenth emblem of the second string of the guqin, and the middle finger of your right index finger dials one or two strings with "hold" to get four tones.

On the one hand, this notation can express the pitch of a sound by chord order and emblem position, but on the other hand, it can not accurately express the fast and slow rhythm of music, and this recording method is too lengthy, which is not conducive to the preservation and dissemination of music. Thus, in the Tang Dynasty, the "subtraction spectrum" of the guqin invented by Cao Rou appeared.

The so-called subtraction notation is a notation similar to Chinese characters, which condenses the techniques, string sequence and emblem involved in Chinese notation into some symbols and combines them together. For example, in the symbol on the left below, the index finger of the right hand plays the three strings with the "pick" fingering, and the big finger of the left hand holds down the three strings and slides from high to low to the place where the ten symbols are eight points. This way of notation is much simpler than writing, but there is still no way to show the accurate musical rhythm. Of course, there are advantages. This kind of impermissibility provides a certain space for future Guqin artists to play freely, so that a piece of music is always in a certain degree of freedom. But as far as its weakness is concerned, it is impossible for us to truly restore the performance state of music creators.

In China ancient music, another main notation is the "Miyachi notation" which is widely used in various folk music. The so-called "I-foot" is a symbol of pitch. The common I-scale spectrum in modern times generally uses words such as He, si, Yi, Shang, Chi, Gong, fan, Liu, Wu and B as the basic symbols of pitch, which can be equivalent to sol, la, si, do, re, mi, Fa (or fa in ascending order), sol, la and Si.

If it is necessary to express a higher sound than "b", add a word "ruler, worker" to the left; If you need to express a lower sound than "and", tail it at the end of the word "public, late" Different from the bottom of guqin, the notation of Gongchi is marked with rhythm, which is called "board eye". "Hey, ×, ○, ●, △" and so on. Are symbols representing the beat.

"Board" generally stands for strong beat, and "eye" stands for weak beat. There are scattered plates, flow plates, one plate with one eye, one plate with three eyes and one plate with three eyes. Although at present, Miyachi notation can be translated into simplified notation to some extent, many playwrights and opera lovers still tend to adopt the traditional Miyachi notation.