Audible Empire: Musical Orthodoxy and Spectacle in the Sui Dynasty

Abstract

After conquering the Chen in 589, the Sui became a powerful empire that ruled over both the northern and southern regions, a vast territory that featured distinct regional cultures and customs. To foster an impression of political unity, the Sui court initiated a series of projects aimed at implementing central control over remote areas and reconciling interests of different cultural groups. This ideology of concordia discors found no better avenue of expression than music, which included musical performance, lyric composition, and standardization of pitches and musical scales. This article investigates the politics of music and the creation of an “audible empire” in the first decade of the Sui. Specifically, it examines how imperial subjects at the time perceived and articulated the Sui court ritual music, including both its history and its public display. Based on court memorials, historical records, and poems, I argue that the Sui’s musical lineage—how the music of orthodoxy was transmitted and inherited by the Sui—was carefully constructed and often contested in the empire’s early years and that poems that describe viewers’ experience of observing the Sui music performance reveal courtiers’ ambivalent attitudes towards music as an imperial tool of persuasion.