On the Western reception of Prince Zhu Zaiyu’s music theory from the eighteenth to the twentieth century

Abstract

This article provides a case study of the historical process of the reception of an eminent aspect of pre-modern Chinese music theory in Western scholarship: The music-theoretical works of Zhu Zaiyu 朱载堉 (1536–1611), often considered as the greatest theorist in the history of Chinese music, are discussed in relation to their initial Western reception by Joseph-Marie Amiot, a Jesuit missionary who lived in China during the eighteenth century. It is shown how Amiot’s most important corresponding work, which still remains one of the basic texts for the study of Zhu Zaiyu in the West, initiated the reception of Zhu’s theoretical views in Europe, how it influenced and partly also misinformed the views mostly in German musicology from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s, and how the later and more progressive Anglophone Zhu Zaiyu studies from the 1960s to the 1980s emancipated themselves from this. Critical reflections on the Western history of the reception of Zhu’s thought and especially his understanding of the equal temperament system are included along the way and in the final section.