評Mariana Münning, Josie-Marie Perkuhn, and Johannes Sturm, eds., The Strange Sound: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Musicology in Bonn, October 3-4, 2014

In “Religion and Music in China: Synthetic or Hybrid? ” François Picard touches on the ‘pentatonic myth' of Chinese music citing Constantin Brăiloiu, “pentatonic and modality are two different worlds, whatever number of notes a scale includes.” (p. 14) In this paper, Picard adopts the Monika protocol, named after the musicologist Monika Stern. The Monika protocol calculates the length of time of each nominal note in a repertoire through a histogram, and accordingly, tells the hierarchy of the scale in the piece. (p. 15) Picard uses this protocol in analysing several religious music pieces found in China with their syllable-distributions, ranging from Confucian ritual music and early Christian music composed by Chinese Christians to twentieth-century Buddhist songs. Although pentatonic structure is often observed in various forms of Chinese ritual music, it is not the defining feature of ‘Chinese' or ‘ritual' music. I quote: “the question raised in the beginning can be answered: ‘Chinese music', even only ritual music, is the result of a constant reconstruction, adaptation, and renormalization.