The emergence of the hybrid 5-/7-tone Gamelan Semarandana in the 80s elicited various theorisations about Balinese modal practice (Rai 1996, McGraw 1999/2000, Vitale 2002). Since then, the associative qualities of modes have expanded, the use of previously rare modes increased, and new modulation techniques invented. Many composers now frequently use these once-unexplored elements, and arts institutions are more open to them since their use is seen as exploratory yet maintaining continuity, thus occupying a liminal space between the binary tradisi vs. moderen discourse that pervades the academic spaces of Balinese musical practice (Sudirana 2019). These developments have yet to be explored in the ethnomusicological literature, and despite a proliferation of 7-tone compositions, theorisations of mode have not been updated. By comparing and contrasting the two authors’ analyses of recent compositions—one based on implicit, emic compositional approaches, the other based on etic analysis techniques—this paper theorises various new aspects of Balinese modal practice. We discuss the complexities of analysing mode changes during modulations in relation to the effects of meter, different elaborative textures, melodic contour archetypes, and solmization choices; and we present a new way of comparing relationships between modes, one that considers common tones, interval structure, associative quality, and rasa. All of these suggest paths for future research and compositional development. Finally, we explore how these musical techniques—once radical breakthroughs in traditional practice—endure and progress long after their emergence and musical-cultural normalisation, and how their expanded use relates to local vs. national contexts of musical change.

While it is generally accepted that Cantonese Music (Guangdong yinyue, 廣東音樂) employs three modes, namely zhengxian (正線, “authentic tuning”), fanxian (反線, “reverse tuning”) and yifanxian (乙反線, “tuning according to scale degrees yi and fan in gonche solmization”), there is little consensus regarding the definition and organization of its modal system. While some scholars suggest links between the Cantonese modes and the wusheng (五聲) pentatonic modal system described in ancient Chinese music theory (Yuan, 1987; Thrasher, 2008), others view them as heptatonic scales with Western influence rather than modes (Jones, 1995). Contemporary musicians, accustomed to the cipher notation system (jianpu, 簡譜) in which numbers correspond to the degrees of the Western diatonic major scale, equate zhengxian and fanxian with the keys of C and G (Yeung, 2013), thereby interpreting them as transpositions of each other and implicitly reducing the number of distinct modes from three to two. Drawing upon the anthropological distinction between etic and emic, this paper seeks to untangle the considerable conceptual conflations between scale, mode, tuning, and temperament in historic and contemporary explanations of the Cantonese modal system. We examine etic tonal types and emic modal categories separately, the former by analyzing selected repertoire and the latter by studying theoretical and pedagogical writings from the 1920’s to the present, before exploring their intersections and correlations. Such comparisons help unpack the aesthetic and ideological influences informing modal representations at different stages of the genre’s development.

This paper examines the tuning and playing of the qin in Qing court ritual music with reference to the Correct Principles of Music (Lülü zhengyi) and its sequel (Lülü zhengyi houbian). A treatise commissioned by the Kangxi emperor in 1713, the Correct Principles of Music introduces a musical system that divides the octave into fourteen pitches, creating scales that Jean-Philippe Rameau misunderstood as whole-tone scales. Now known as Kangxi’s fourteen-tone temperament, it was used to notate court ritual music in the Sequel to the Correct Principles of Music, printed in 1746.

The fourteen-tone temperament is a pipe tuning system arising from the acoustic incompatibility between strings and pipes: the same length ratio produces different musical intervals in strings and pipes. Applying the ratios of the Chinese circle-of-fifth tuning to pipes, the authors of the Correct Principles of Music generated fourteen pitches within an octave and redistributed the scale notes of the traditional heptatonic scale among the fourteen pitches to retain the intervallic relationship of the scale. However, this leads to an incompatibility with the just intonation in qin tuning; the scale notes produced by the seven strings of the qin are only compatible with those of the pipes when they are open strings. The incompatibility between strings and pipes led to a disorderly system of qin tuning presented in the Correct Principles of Music, which is modified and rendered more practical in the Sequel, resulting in a simplified form of qin playing that involves only open strings.