THE DISSEMINATION AND USE OF EUROPEAN MUSIC BOOKS IN EARLY MODERN ASIA

Abstract

Musical commodities frequently accompanied European explorers, soldiers, merchants and missionaries who travelled to Asia in the early modern period. During this time, numerous theoretical treatises and musical scores – both printed and manuscript – were disseminated throughout Asia. This article examines the dissemination and use of European musical works in early modern China, Japan and the Philippines, before identifying the titles of scores and treatises so far known to have been present in these territories. In order to measure the relative success of European missionaries in transplanting music to early modern Asia, it then takes as case studies the local production of three significant sources of European music during the seventeenth century: (1) the earliest example of printed European music from Asia, produced by the Jesuit press at Nagasaki in 1605; (2) a Chinese treatise on European music that was commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor in 1713 and printed the following decade; and (3) a 116-page manuscript treatise, compiled by an unidentified Jesuit in late seventeenth-century Manila, which synthesises the most current European music theory as well as commenting on local musical practices.