Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Huang Pei-ling / 黃佩玲

Titel

Devotional Buddhism, Sinicization, and the Politics of Representation in the Northern Dynasties Music Iconography at Dunhuang

Ist Teil von

• Music in art, 2013-04, Vol.38 (1-2), p.171-190

Ort / Verlag

Research Center for Music Iconography, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Wall paintings in a group of 25 Mogao grottoes of Dunhuang, constructed during the Northern dynasties (465–585), include depictions of approximately 450 musicians playing instruments. According to the time of their production, they can be classified in three periods: the first period (465–500) coincides with the middle period of Northern Wei; the second period (525– 545) with the government of Prince Yuan Rong, as well as with the later period of Northern Wei and Western Wei; and the third period (545–585) with the Northern Zhou period. Among the instruments particularly interesting are conical drums depicted during the second period (caves nos. 431, 435, 248, 249, 285, 288). In the middle of one or both heads, these drums have some kind of a round button similar to tuning paste (syāhi). This detail indicates that such hand-struck shoulder-hung drums, with or without tuning paste, were transmitted from India, via Gandhara and Kucha, to northern China, including the Xiliang area and Dunhuang in particular. They followed the trade and movement of people, and were also used at Buddhist festivals and devotional rituals. The drums jigu and yengu, which are always mentioned together in written accounts associated withxiliangji, the Xiliang style of music adopted for court entertainment, were transmitted from northwestern India through folk religious festivals and in the new environment came to be seen as a pair, one with tuning paste and one without. The Central Asian style of painting that was prevalent at Dunhuang during the first and the second periods, changed in the third period to the Southern Han style, what also brought the new preference for the pictorial narratives which included silk and bamboo Han instruments.