Yanyue (Banquet Music)
Banquet music of the Sui and Tang courts, and the modal legacy it left behind
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Yanyue is banquet music, at its height in the Sui and Tang courts: in the Tang nine- and ten-part programmes a Yanyue item came first, gathering Central Asian dances and songs alongside Chinese ones. It served feasting rather than sacrifice, and was more entertainment than ritual; much of the secular repertory managed by the court's jiaofang belonged to this sphere.
Its greatest legacy is the twenty-eight modes of yanyue, a system pairing gong positions with modes (whether seven gongs by four modes or the reverse is still argued), which shaped Song lyric song, Yuan drama and later opera. Yanyue is not a single genre but an institution of banquet music and its tunes; the later "yanyue scale" means something else, a seven-note scale with qingjiao and run.
Read deeper → Qingyue (Qing Music)
Sources
- 燕乐的宴飨用途、九部乐十部乐与燕乐二十八调，参《中国音乐词典》与 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "China" 相关条目；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.