As a music student for more than 8 years since standard 2, I strongly agree that music does reveal the culture of a country. As a pure Malaysian Chinese, I've learned that Malaysia, which is made up of three main races, that is Malay, Chinese, and Indian has their own music that represents their culture strongly. Now, I"m going to talk about the Chinese music that is the most significant for me.
I've been learning traditional Chinese music since I was in standard two. Most of the music instruments are from China, which is the origin of the Chinese music. Basically there are more than 100 different types of instruments but the most famous one is the drum that normally plays an important role in music. There are actually many kinds of drums can be found depends on the tune and the size that you required.
Chinese music is known to be very noisy and loud and is usually perform during some celebration such as Chinese New Year, wedding, and some important events. The "dragon dance" can be considered as the representative for our society because whenever there is a happy event, you can find it being performed. It is made up of a team of music players and dancers. The instruments involved are basically of variety of drums. The reason why drums are being chosen is because it creates a noisy atmosphere and delighted the surrounding. For Chinese, noisy represents happy.
Besides those happy events, Chinese music is also being performed during the funeral. This time, instead of using drums, we choose to use some instruments that can give a solemn and sorrow sound such as "er-hu", "zhong-hu", and "sheng". When these instruments combined to play music, it"ll definitely make people to mourn. That is why they are not famous among our society. But I like the sound of these types of instruments because it makes me relax and give me a quiet environment.
There are still a lot of music instruments in my culture but I just can't introduce them one by one.