Music, Dance and Modern Survival

Traditional performance of the Da Cheng Hymn calls on yayue, an elevated ceremonial musical style using bronze bells, stone chime sets, guqin and se zithers, flutes and ritual drums, an ensemble whose instrumentation was itself considered a moral technology in Confucian thought, believed to instill harmony and correct feeling in performers and listeners alike rather than serving merely as decoration for the rite. In its fullest historical form, reserved for the highest grade sacrifices, the hymn was accompanied by the bayi wu, an eight row, eight column dance of sixty four performers holding a pheasant feather in one hand and a short flute in the other, moving through a fixed sequence of postures synchronized with the sung verses.

The music and dance nearly disappeared in China during the twentieth century, hit first by the fall of imperial patronage and then by the Cultural Revolution's open hostility to Confucian ritual, and much of what is performed today has been reconstructed from surviving Ming and Qing dynasty musical scores rather than passed down through unbroken practice. Taiwan preserved a more continuous performance tradition, and the annual Shidian ceremony at Taipei's Confucius Temple remains one of the most widely viewed modern stagings of the hymn, alongside revived observances at Qufu and other temples across mainland China, South Korea and Vietnam.