Recent trends in Buddhist music research in China

Despite two millennia of history, the Buddhist music of China has only recently become the focus for systematic academic research. This neglect resulted from social and political forces which made such research undesirable or difficult. The present paper traces three stages of research in this century: a period of initial “discovery” of the music and its significance during the early 1930s, interrupted by civil unrest and war, a period of fervent fieldwork beginning in the late 1940s (terminated by the Cultural Revolution), focussing mainly on documentation through collection and transcription (but hampered by a lack of recording equipment) with a few sociological and historical studies; and the period since the late 1970s, yielding extensive regional, comparative and historical studies, the production of archival and commercial recordings, and a stimulus to actual performance, all resulting in increasing respect for and interest in the tradition within China.