China's Five Tones

China's pentatonic patterns widely existed in ancient and folk music in China, and on this basis, various changes in China's national style and a complete musical theory system were formed.

Although pentatonic mode can be found in traditional music of many countries and regions, it is usually called "China mode" or "national mode".

The pentatonic mode is arranged with a pure pentatonic interval relationship, and it is a mode composed of five tones. Because this model is unique to China, it can also be called the national model. The names of these five sounds are: Gong, Shang, Jiao, Zheng and Yu.

Extended data:

The characteristics of pentatonic scale in single-part and multi-part music, stability and instability are different.

In multi-voice music, the stability of pentatonic scale mainly depends on the configuration of mode harmony. The stable tone of the same mode may be different because of the different methods of harmony configuration. Therefore, in multi-voice music, it is necessary to analyze the harmony configuration in detail to make clear which levels are stable.

In one-part music, 1, 4 or 5 plays a stabilizing role. 1 is the tonic. The most stable. There is a relationship between the fourth and fifth grades and tonic, which is not stable, but it has great support for tonic.