In terms of music, according to "Shiji", my country's first biographical general history, bamboo is an important material for making musical instruments. Our country's traditional wind instruments are basically made of bamboo. Ancient musicians paid great attention to the selection of materials. Ancient books recorded in detail which kind of bamboo should be used for which musical instrument. For example, dragon bamboo should be used for flute, mother mangosteen and purple bamboo should be used for flute, Zoushan Xiaozhu should be used for sheng, etc. . The origin of my country's musical rhythm is also closely related to bamboo. According to my country's first biographical chronological history, "Hanshu·Lvlizhi", Huangdi sent Linglun to take bamboo from the valley of Kunlun in the west of Daxia and grow it. If the orifice is thick, cut off the two joints and blow on it, thinking it is the palace of the yellow bell. Make twelve tubes to listen to the call of the phoenix. The number of male calls is six, and the number of female calls is six. Compared with the palace of the yellow bell, both can be produced. This is the law. Book.
The Yellow Emperor once assigned a person named Ling Lun to determine the "temperature". Ling Lun went to the west of Daxia and fetched bamboo from the southern foot of Kunlun Mountain. The cross section was 6 inches and 9 minutes long. When he played it, it sounded like Huang Zhong Gong Tune, with beautiful melody. From then on, there were flutes and other musical instruments.
Although this story is a legend, it fully illustrates that in the minds of the ancients, bamboo played a decisive role in the development of music. Later, archaeologists discovered a thirteen-tube ancient panpipe made of bamboo among the cultural relics unearthed from the tomb of Zeng Houyi in Suixian County, Hubei Province. It was the earliest panpipe discovered among archaeological relics. It can be said that bamboo has an important connection with my country's music culture. In ancient times, music was called "silk and bamboo", and there was a saying that "silk is not as good as bamboo". In the Tang Dynasty, people called musical instrument players "bamboo men". There is a folk instrumental music in southern my country. The band mainly uses silk string and bamboo palace instruments. People directly call it "Jiangnan Sizhu".
my country’s traditional musical instruments such as flute, Xiao, Sheng, Zheng, Guban, Jinghu, Erhu, Banhu, etc. are all inseparable from bamboo. There were many musical instruments made of bamboo in ancient my country, and there were more than a dozen types of flutes alone. For example, the Tuliang, which has only one hole, can play two sounds at the same time, and the large low flute with a turn, which is 3.2 meters long. rice, a giant flute weighing nearly 5 kilograms, a short mouth flute only 4.6 centimeters, etc.
The ancients even studied a bass instrument called "Xiang", but unfortunately it has been lost for thousands of years. Rare ancient bamboo musical instruments that have been handed down include the bamboo banqin which is beaten with a hammer, the drum qin which is played by slapping bamboo tubes, the bamboo raft drum developed based on the folk fishing drum, and the giant dragon drum made of the thickest bamboo. Charcoal pianos made of bamboo charcoal fired at high temperatures and can emit metallic sounds.
It can be said that my country’s wind music is actually bamboo wind music. Bamboo is listed as one of the "eight tones" of ancient Chinese music classification, which embodies the Chinese nation's attitude toward nature of "harmony between nature and man" or "harmony between nature and man", and also shows the simplicity and flexibility of traditional Chinese music.