On Differences Of Sino-Japanese Schools Of Zheng And Causes Of Cultural Transmission

Zheng, a traditional musical instrument of China, has a history of 2500 to 3000 years. The original zheng consisted of five strings. With the development of the times, the number of strings kept increasing till the middle Tang Dynasty, the Nara period (710--794) in Japan, when thirteen-stringed zheng became widespread. Just at that time thirteen-stringed zheng, following Yan music, was brought to Japan, and became one of the instruments in orchestra performance in Japan, which was called Koto. Later, it gained popularity in temples and among the folk, forming tsukushi-koto and then zoku-koto, which belong to Ikuta-ry. and Yamada-ry. respectively as it is now.Since then, zheng, as a musical instrument, evolved in different ways in both countries. In Japan since the zoku-koto came into being, the shape and the number of strings have remained unchanged, while in China zheng continued to develop till it became a twenty-one-stringed instrument and gradually came into popularity in 1950s, when the academic circle began to classify the schools generally in terms of geographical difference and name them after specific provinces respectively. The paper makes a comparison between different schools of zheng in China and Japan from the following four aspects: first, the law of formation in time; second, the reasons and conditions of formation; third, musical patterns; fourth, spreading and inheritance of schools.The paper makes a contrastive study of schools of the twenty-one-stringed zheng in China and those of koto in Japan from above-mentioned aspects by the historical music research method and national music research method. It aims to explore the connotation of zheng music interpreted in different cultural environments by analyzing the culture of Japanese characteristics, particular national characters of both countries, the iemoto system of Japan and core parts in the thoughts of Confucian school in both countries, and finally get the deepest meaning and the underlying reasons of cultural transition behind such survival phenomenon.