Chinese Literati Music

Chinese literati music is the music cultivated by China's scholar-officials, the wenren, as one of the four arts of self-cultivation alongside calligraphy, painting and weiqi. Its centre is the guqin, the seven-string zither whose quiet, inflected tones, notated in tablature handbooks transmitted for over a millennium, made it the instrument of sages and the emblem of literati identity; around it stand the xiao flute, qin song, in which the player sings classical poetry to self-accompaniment, and an aesthetic of restraint, antiquity and inner resonance. Twentieth-century masters including *Guan Pinghu*, *Wu Jinglue* and *Tsar Teh-Yun* preserved the tradition through revolution and exile.