Facing the Predicament of Wordlessness: When We Speak of Certain Musical Sounds

Abstract

Over more than one hundred years, in the tide of “global westernization,” most of the Chinese words that were once used to describe musical sound have already been displaced by terminology based on that used in western music, especially western musical terminology of the Classical period. The words that were originally used in Chinese discourse—either within the history of literature or spread orally amongst folk musicians—have been lost or forgotten, and the system itself has already disintegrated and been pushed to the edge of today's mainstream discourse.