The series of volumes of Music from the Tang Court considers a repertory of music at least 1400 years old. During the two centuries before 841 the Japanese Court borrowed a large amount of secular entertainment music from China. This 'Tang Music' (Togaku) survives in Japan in a substantial body of manuscripts, but is transformed in character in contemporary performance. This edition transcribes and comments on the music as it survives in its earliest sources. This process has revealed surprising evidence for ancient interconnections in Asian musics, and the essays in this seventh volume present aspects of this research to date. They provide evidence, for example, of music in a scale of four notes only from Bali and from Ancient China, as well as, most significantly, for the transportation from the Tang capital to Japan of 'several tens of scrolls of music in tablature'.

毕铿（Laurence Ernest Rowland Picken，1909-2007.3.16），二战末作为生物学家参加英国议会科学使团来华，在听过一场古琴大师徐元白（1893-1957）先生的现场演奏後，对中国古代音乐产生极大兴趣。回国后，遂转向研究中国古代音乐，为剑桥大学教授、东方音乐研究部副主任。自50年代起，陆续发表了许多有关中国古代音乐研究的著述，特别是对唐传日本古谱的研究，并著有七卷本《来自唐代宫廷的音乐》（Music from the Tang Court，Cambridge University Press，2006）。对於毕先生的成就，参见：

高兴：《劳伦斯·毕铿及其唐代音乐研究》，《中国音乐学》，2005年第2期。

宫宏宇：《毕铿和他的中国音乐研究：纪念毕铿先生逝世》，《中央音乐学院学报》，2007年第4期。