What began to appear in Qin and Han Dynasties?

"Yuefu" began to appear in Qin and Han Dynasties. It inherited the collection system of Zhou Dynasty, collected, sorted out and changed folk music, and also concentrated a large number of musicians to perform at banquets, suburban sacrifices and celebrations. These lyrics used for singing are called Yuefu poems. Yuefu, later extended to refer to all kinds of lyrics with or without music, and even some operas and instrumental music are also called Yuefu. The main form of songs in Han Dynasty is Song Xianghe. From the initial oratorio of "one person singing, three people harmony", it gradually developed into "Xianghe Daqu" accompanied by silk and bamboo instruments.

In the Han dynasty, drum music rose in the northwest frontier. It consists of different wind instruments and percussion instruments, such as cross blowing, riding blowing, yellow door preaching and so on. They are played on horseback or on the move, and are used for military music etiquette, court banquets and folk entertainment. The folk percussion music that exists today has a legacy advocated by the Han Dynasty. In the Han dynasty, there was also a "hundred operas", which integrated song and dance, acrobatics and wrestling (sumo).

Shang Qing music, which developed from Song Xianghe, was attached great importance by the northern Cao Wei regime, and the Shangqing Department was established. The war at the turn of Jin Dynasty made the music of Qing merchants flow into the south, and merged with Wu Ge and opera in the south. In the Northern Wei Dynasty, this kind of Shang Qing music, which was integrated with the North and the South, returned to the North and became an important music spread throughout the country. Since the Han Dynasty, with the smooth flow of the Silk Road, songs from western countries began to spread to the mainland. During the Northern Liang Dynasty, Lv Guang brought Qiuci (now Kuche, Xinjiang) music, which played an important role in Yan music in Sui and Tang Dynasties, to the mainland. This shows that the communication between people of all ethnic groups in music was very common at that time. At this time, Guqin, the representative instrument of traditional music culture, has matured, mainly in the following aspects: Cao Qin, a monograph on Guqin in Han Dynasty, explained the title of Qinle. Ji Kang, a famous pianist in the Three Kingdoms period, recorded in his book Cao Qin that "the emblem is Zhongshan jade". This shows that people at that time already knew the appearance of overtones on the guqin emblem.

At that time, a large number of scholars and musicians appeared one after another, such as Ji Kang and Ruan Ji, and a number of famous tracks appeared, such as Guangling San, Cao He Drunk. At the end of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there was also a popular musical, with story lines, roles and makeup performances, singing and dancing, and accompaniment and orchestral accompaniment. This is already a small embryonic opera.