The ritual music system (lǐ-yuè, 禮樂) of China’s Zhou dynasty (1046 BC until 256 BC) has endured it’s influence for more than three millennia. Many of its traces remain discernible within the cultural practices of contemporary East Asia. Most notably, the Gagaku and Confucian rituals preserved in Japan, South Korea, Okinawa, Vietnam, and Taiwan each retain fragments of these ancient rituals in different ways—for instance, the preservation of Tōgaku by Japan’s Imperial Household Agency.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emergence of East Asian nation states brought about a transformation of these traditions. State ceremonies influenced by the ethos of lǐ-yuè were reconstructed anew: the large-scale live “human screen” spectacles during North Korea’s Arirang Festival, Japan’s precision group drills in the universities, filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s *(張藝謀)orchestration of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, and the multimedia gala for the 90th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army in 2017 all point, indirectly yet vividly, to the continued contemporary life of Zhou ritual music.The modern conception of lǐ-yuè among East Asian cultural elites is intimately bound to the history of nation-state formation, the colonial experience, and postcolonia transformation.

During the Meiji era in Japan, the emperor led religious reforms that suppressed Buddhism while re-establishing Shinto as a nationalistic and militarized institution—as embodied by the Yasukuni Shrine. In modern China, waves of anti-traditionalist movements—from the May Fourth Movement to the Great Cultural Revolution—systematically dismantled the centrality of lǐ-yuè in social life. Today, the People’s Republic of China has largely erased traditional rituals at the state level.

Meanwhile, the wartime military aesthetic brought to Taiwan by the Nationalist regime left behind monumental traces such as the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall and the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine. Yet Taiwan, shaped by successive colonial regimes, paradoxically became a refuge of local ritual music traditions. In contemporary folk practices—from religious processions to ceremonies—one can still observe diverse forms of “small tradition” lǐ-yuè that have largely disappeared elsewhere.

I grew up in a non-religious household in the secular heart of Taipei,Taiwan. My maternal great-grandfather, a Confucian scholar during the late Qing period, performed ancestral rites and divination, but neither worshipped Buddha nor followed Daoist practice. My maternal grandfather, raised under Japanese rule, rejected all religious observance and even forbade his children from involvement in it. My paternal grandfather, an engineer from a family that practiced traditional Chinese medicine, also professed no belief. Our extended family, over three generations, had virtually no real connection to religion—with the only exception being my grandmother, who practiced Buddhism devoutly. Ironically, my own religiousawareness emerged not through family transmission, but as unconscious resistance to the “rationalist” values promoted by state ideology.

In 1989, shortly after the end of martial law, I enrolled in a Catholic university in Taipei and began participating in Dada-style performance actions. In 1992, I co-founded a noise group called “Zero and Sound Liberation Organization” with two classmates. It was one of several underground music collectives formed in Taipei at the time. Without access to studios, we recorded and rehearsed in industrial areas, landfills, and mountain cemeteries. Our recordings were, inevitably, saturated with uncontrollable environmental noise—traffic, domestic sounds, machines, wind, insects. Much of our soundscapes came from forces we could not command. Yet this method of working with the environment led to something close to a mystical experience. We felt that something beyond us—an unseen agency—was taking part in our creation. The outcome often overwhelmed anything our reasoning or technique could grasp.

These uncanny encounters destabilized the musical values we had grown up with: harmonious structures of classical, pop, and military music. They also began to dismantle the director on fieldwork into Daoist ritual and Indigenous ceremonies. What enchanted me was not only the glowing incense and resonant bells and drums, the atmosphere of darkness and flickering firelight, gestures in trance and sonic confusion. Ritual offered us a space that stood outside utilitarian needs, where divine intention—albeit ambiguous and obscured—could emerge through collective UN-consciousness. At that time, academic cultural anthropology sought to model ritual through repetitive observation. But in practice, every ritual we studied resisted such modeling.

Consider deity Mazu procession festivals: divination decides who leads, when the god’s palanquin departs, where it goes. The relationships between local gods shape the route, with each temple paying respect to the others. Yet even the palanquin’s movements—its halts, turns, crossings, even trajectories—cannot be fully pre-planned. They are shaped by on-site conditions, collective energy, and unpredictable events. In this way, every ritual outcome is a product of both communal intent and divine chance.

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In 1993, I was curating performance events at a café in Taipei. The overlap between underground art scene, student movements, and social activism often produced intense and spontaneous live actions. During the 1994–1995 “Broken Life Festival,” a multi-day series of industrial noise performances, the agitated audiences reversed roles and turned themselves into the center of the performance. Some started to create installations using leftover materials from derelict factories—constructing large circular structures from scrap wood, suspending flickering TVs from warehouse beams not to be watched but to be destroyed by throwing stones.

We sensed, however vaguely, that this collective chaos—this unnamable noise and eruption—carried These unscripted interventions often struck with original creative forces comparing to institutional art, that contemporary art or experimental music hasnothing to compare. But what is it? And how could it continue? At that time, we had no clue. We had not yet theorized audience-centered performance. We only knew, intuitively, what kinds of conditions might provoke it. Unaware, we had already passed the brief historical moment post student movement ,that made such anarchy possible. By 1995, Taiwan’s noise and social movements abruptly fell silent.

Caught between deep doubts about contemporary art and an affinity for traditional ritual, I struggled for years to work within standard artistic frameworks. These unresolved questions remained dormant until a decade later, when a new cycle of transformation finally began. When my grandparents and my father passed away in different phases of my life, each of their deaths opened new terrain for reflection that I keep returning to. Like many Taiwanese families, our elders may not have been religious, yet their funerals were Buddhist-Daoist hybrids. Even in modernized forms, the ritual cycle—from the “first seven-day ceremony”(7 days after the death) to “the final merging of ancestral tablets ceremony”—could last over two years. These practices offer profound social functions: communal, financial, and psychological support around a series of kinship obligations. Chanting sutras such as the Amitābha Sūtra for over an hour during a mourning ceremony can powerfully soothe grief.

Annual ceremonies like New Years Eve, Qing-ming and each person’s Death Anniversary further reinforced the presence of the dead in the seasonal rhythm of the living. For someone raised outside religious traditions like me, every funeral became a renewed encounter with the cultural codes of lǐ-yuè. Ritual works —even without deep belief in ghosts or deities: just acting with sincerity at each step, it activates a larger structure of vivid meaning formation and collective care.

The “little traditions” continue to sustain us in this way. But what about East Asia’s lǐ-yuè in the so called “great tradition”? In early Chinese thought, music was a vehicle for divine resonance. It was linked with Qì (vital force), Fong (wind), and the cosmological rhythms that animated the world. Sound bridged the human and the spirit realms. The music master Shi Kuang could divine fate through tone, interpret omens from birdsong and wind, and summon drought with spectral melodies. From qì to Fong, from vibration to structured tone (Yīn), to exalted ritual music (Yuè), a cosmological continuity was thus assumed.

By the Zhou dynasty, music theory turned more humanistic. The Lǐ-jì (Book of Rites) states: “All sound arises from the human heart. When emotion is stirred, it manifests as sound. When sound is patterned, it becomes music.” Thus, music expresses political and ethical order: harmonious music belongs to stable governance; angry or sorrowful music reflects chaos or collapse.” As the text affirms “ritual regulates, music harmonizes.” And, “When ritual and music are in proper use, they are harmonious but not excessive, mournful but not despairing, joyous but not indulgent.”

What matters is not the afterlife, but the moral structure of this world. Rituals, including funerals, do not describe life after death but re-affirm this life. And at the center lies personal cultivation. Confucius said, “Worship as if the spirits were present”. True music, he claimed, lies not in sound alone but in the ethical action that precedes it: “Speaking withpropriety is ritual. Acting with joy is music.” For him, music without virtue was hollow; ritual without sincerity was nothing more than empty form.

Four centuries after Confucius, the great historian Sima Qian (BC145–86) synthesized this vision into a political program with recognizable legalism influences. (Legalism ( Fa tradition) is an intellectual current in the latter half of the Warring States period (Zhanguo, 453–221 BCE). Unlike Confucianists , Fa thinkers were unconcerned with individual morality ,they were political realists who sought to attain “a rich state and a powerful army” based on impersonal norms and standards: laws, administrative regulations, clearly defined rules of promotion and demotion, and the like.(definition from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In his Treatise on Music (Yue Shu), he wrote: “Ritual, music, punishments, and governance—all ultimately aim towards the same end: to unify people’s minds and thereby bring forth the path of good governance.” And he continued, “The noble person adopts humility and restraint as the basis of ritual, reduction and moderation as the principle of music—disciplining the body and channeling desire. Such is the joy he finds in it. Because the customs and dispositions of different regions and nations vary, one must broadly collect local traditions (as in today’s fieldwork or ethnomusicology), and harmonize them according to tonal systems (in the ancient Chinese context, this means music theory,acoustics, the calendar, systems of weights and measures), in order to correct deficiencies,enable cultural transformation, and support moral education and effectiveness of governance.”

In this passage, Sima Qian reveals how Confucian thought in the late Warring States period (late Zhou) had developed, extending from self-discipline to the surveillance and regulation of sound, and from acoustic science to governance of calendrical, metrological institutional norms. All these dimensions—bodily, auditory, technical, administrative—were understood as subsumed under the authority of the political will. In this adjusted vision, music and governance are not merely related but structurally interdependent, each reflecting and reinforcing the other.

We may regard this theoretical development as an early and distant precursor of the political aesthetics that would later form the foundation of the modern nation-states of East Asia.

Text by Lin Chi-Wei, based on previous university talks in Taiwan Sociological Association of Art and Culture ,NCCU and Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle / June 2025

Text published by Museo di Arte Orientale in the booklet of new vinyl production “Yue-Ji (樂記）: On Grief, Memory and Transformation” , Compilation curated by Freya Chou, with tracks and texts by Dj Sniff, James Hoff and Lin Chiwei ,produced by MAO / NOV 2025