The emperor's orchestra plays on in the neighbor's shrine

Claim (verbatim)

In 1116 the Song emperor Huizong sent the Goryeo court a complete set of Dasheng (大晟) ritual music - instruments and the yayue (雅樂) repertoire of Confucian state sacrifice. In China that music did not survive the dynasty's fall and the ruptures after; in Korea it was institutionalized, described in Seong Hyeon's Akhak gwebeom (樂學軌範, 1493) with its instrument-plates and ritual melodies, and it is still performed, at the Munmyo (Confucian shrine) rite in Seoul, as aak. This is institutional-transplant survival at its sharpest: a court repertoire extinct in its homeland is alive in a neighbor's capital eight centuries later. But the transplant also thinned. The Akhak gwebeom fixes a fuller ritual apparatus than what the living Munmyo rite still sounds, and the Song-Chinese sources against which it can be read - Chen Yang's Yueshu (樂書, c. 1100) and the Song shi music treatise - describe a repertoire of dozens of ritual melodies, of which the living tradition retains only a remnant. So the survival is real, countable, and radically asymmetric: some Chinese ritual melodies survive in continuous performance in exactly one country, and it is not China. Prediction restated: the number of Song-derived aak ritual melodies still in continuous liturgical performance is small but nonzero in Korea and exactly zero in China, and the living Munmyo repertoire is a minority of the ritual melodies the Akhak gwebeom notates.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: comparing the aak ritual melodies notated in the Akhak gwebeom (樂學軌範, 1493) with those still performed in the Korean Munmyo jeryeak (文廟祭禮樂) today and with any in continuous performance in China, the count in continuous Chinese performance will be zero while the count in continuous Korean performance is at least one and no more than a third of those the Akhak gwebeom notates. Primary clause: the continuous-Chinese count is zero while the continuous-Korean count is at least one - a strict survival inversion. Disambiguation: "continuous performance" means an unbroken institutional lineage carried forward from the Joseon codification, not a twentieth-century revival reconstruction; reconstructed revivals are scored separately and do not count toward the Chinese tally. Coverage guard: if the Akhak gwebeom aak ritual-melody set cannot be enumerated to at least ten melodies, the test voids.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Akhak gwebeom (樂學軌範, 1493) ritual-music books for the notated aak melodies, the living Munmyo jeryeak (文廟祭禮樂) repertoire (National Gugak Center) for the Korean survivals, and Chen Yang's Yueshu (樂書) plus the Song shi (宋史) Yuezhi for the Song source-state - tally continuous survivals by country.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The strict inversion the primary clause pins is the celebrated published fact of Korean musicology: Provine's studies of the early aak sources state outright that Confucian sacrificial music survives in continuous institutional performance only in Korea's Munmyo rite - extinct in China, where post-imperial Confucian ceremonies are modern reconstructions - and the derivation of the living melodies from Song-transmitted tunes via the Sejong-era restoration is his central published result. Zero-versus-at-least-one is stated, not discoverable. Factual concern: the notated-melody source the test should name is the Sejong sillok aakbo (1430s), the Akhak gwebeom of 1493 being primarily the codification of the ritual and instrumental apparatus.

• R.C. Provine, Essays on Sino-Korean Musicology: Early Sources for Korean Ritual Music (Seoul: Il Ji Sa, 1988)
• R.C. Provine, 'State Sacrificial Music and Korean Identity', in B. Yung, E.S. Rawski and R.S. Watson (eds.), Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)
• National Gugak Center documentation of the living Munmyo jeryeak repertoire

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.