Book format is a success story for classical approach

Tianjin event highlights artistic and literary works, Wang Ru reports.

The year 1676, when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were developing infinitesimal calculus respectively, Buddhist monk Jiang Xingchou (1639-95) traveled from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, to Japan, where he preached and taught arts with his proficiency in calligraphy, painting and seal engraving.

He was especially influential with his skills in playing guqin, a zither-like seven-stringed traditional Chinese instrument, cultivating a large number of guqin players and laying a foundation for the development of the art in Japan. He was later known as "master Donggao", and his music scores, known as Master Donggao's Music Notes, have been widely spread, becoming a living fossil of communication between China and Japan in guqin.

Li Fengyun and Wang Jianxin, both professors at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music, introduced their collection, which records their organization of, and research on, Master Donggao's Music Notes, and gave an instrumental performance of guqin and xiao, a type of vertical flute, during a lecture in Tianjin on Nov 22, as part of the second Rockcheck-Baihua Literature and Art Week.