Silk and Bamboo

This volume features twenty-four popular melodies from the Southeast Chinese instrumental music genre known broadly as “silk and bamboo”—a term denoting the materials used to construct the string and wind instruments on which these melodies are traditionally played. Though primarily an oral tradition, a major part of this repertoire has also been passed down through notation. Each melody is here presented in three forms: a facsimile of the traditional gongche score drawn from various manuscripts and early published anthologies, a transcription of the gongche notation in the jianpu numeric cipher system often used by silk and bamboo musicians today, and a corresponding transcription in staff notation. Each transcription is presented in two parallel forms: the relatively unornamented version faithfully reproduced from the gongche score and an ornamented realization based on one or more recordings of modern silk and bamboo musicians. This collection offers a glimpse into the contexts and performance practices surrounding this beloved repertoire while also presenting an alternative to the overly prescriptive editions of traditional Chinese music often encountered today.