Daqu from Han to Song

aqu (大曲) was a genre of entertainment music popular in China from the Han dynasty to the Song dynasty. While da (大) in Chinese means large or great, qu (曲) means a song, or more generally, a piece of music. As its name implies, a daqu was always a long, multisectional piece of music performed in a grand style uniting singing of poetic verses, instrumental playing, and dancing together, and the daqu of each dynasty also reflects the period’s overall cultural atmosphere. Thus, daqu can be imagined as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) of ancient China. Unfortunately, an important genre as it was, the music of daqu has not survived the harshness of history. To trace the rise and fall of daqu, we can only rely on various descriptions of this genre buried within historical sources such as the “Twenty-four Books of Official History” (二十四史). D