The Xun Tradition

A closed clay vessel with a blow hole, the xun runs from a one-hole Neolithic whistle to today's eight-hole solo instrument

Related

XunYayue (Court Ritual Music)

Time and place

The xun is a closed clay vessel with a blow hole, made of fired earth. A one-hole xun from Hemudu in Yuyao, Zhejiang, is about seven thousand years old; clay whistles from Banpo in Xi'an and five-hole xun from the Yin ruins at Anyang follow. It served in courts and villages in early times, then survived mainly in folk and religious settings until twentieth-century musicians in Hubei, Shaanxi and Henan made it a solo instrument again.

What happened

Clay is easy to shape, and a single hole already yields two notes, which makes the xun one of the earliest pitched instruments in China. Five-hole Shang xun produce a pentatonic skeleton, and the Zhou classified the xun under earth in the eight-tone system, using it with the chi and sheng in ritual music. After the Han, dizi, xiao and sheng prevailed and the xun withdrew to temples and villages. In the 1980s replicas and new eight- and ten-hole models appeared, composers wrote solos, and its veiled tone was heard again.

Musical features

Most xun are egg- or globe-shaped, with a blow hole at the top and finger holes at the side. An eight-hole xun spans about an octave and a half, a ten-hole model more. Because the vessel is closed, low notes require angling the breath downward, a technique called fu chui; volume is small and the tone dark and breathy. Players use abdominal vibrato, slides, strikes, trills and smears, joining notes into speech-like curves, and phrase ends are usually long.

What to listen for

Hear the air and the hollow clay, then how the low register is reached by angling the breath. The xun slides rather than leaps, and slow vibrato colours long notes. The library's Kaifeng work song, the Jiande labour song and the Shaanxi Jiaofu Diao are a Henan work song, a Zhejiang work song and a Guanzhong mountain song, not xun recordings, but they stand for the regions where xun were excavated.

Common misunderstandings

The xun is often taken for an ocarina or a revival ornament. An ocarina is a duct flute, its sound made by a fixed windway; the xun is a vessel flute controlled by lip angle, and its low register and slides depend on that control. Another mistake is to think its narrow range limits it to archaic laments; it can carry complete pentatonic and heptatonic melodies.

Sources

• 《中国音乐词典》编辑部编，中国音乐词典（人民音乐出版社）— 条目与年代核对，未引用
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "China" — framework and dates checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.