"Music," Confucius writes, "produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without." Zeng Hou Yi, the Marquis Yi of Zeng, so loved music that when he died in 433BC, he was buried with bronze bells, stone chimes, string and reed instruments – and 21 strangled concubines to play them in the afterlife. The music plays on more than two millennia after the marquis' death, but not in the way he intended. Australian audiences will be able to hear how the instruments found in the tomb sounded, when a top Chinese performing theatre group, the Hubei Song and Dance Ensemble and Bianzhong Ensemble, brings the Imperial Bells of China to Canberra on May 31 and...
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