ABSTRACT
East Asia has inherited an exceptionally rich store of both documentary materials and archaeological remains (figure 1) for the study of music history. The survival of treatises, notations, musical instruments, and depictions of performances often makes it possible to give precise dates for important musical events, or to trace the long-term evolution of particular repertoires, at any time during the past two millennia. This abundance of resources tends to encourage a strong historical bent that has emerged in studies of the region’s music whenever contemporary circumstances were propitious. For instance, when the Chinese Communist Party granted a new measure of freedom to intellectuals in the “Hundred Flowers” campaign of 1956, one result was a spate of primarily historical research on Chinese music that drew on a vast body of literary and other sources.
