Liu Xiaohong

01 · Lineage & Regional School

Liu Xiaohong, Male, Han, from Lin, Shanxi, is a fifth-batch national representative bearer of Suona Art (Ⅱ-37). The tradition is documented in Lin, Shanxi. Within the regional tradition and school record of Suona Art in Lin, Shanxi: It is widely transmitted in Linxian County of Lüliang City, Shanxi Province, and the surrounding area in the form of oral instruction and mind to mind, and is deeply loved by the local people. This heritage item has a broad popular base, is an important part of local folk life, and plays an important role in enriching the cultural life of the people and bringing them together. More than a hundred traditional old tunes have been handed down to the present day, and the pieces that accompany the percussion drum beats, such as "Helengze", "Dadesheng" and "Xiaodesheng", are particularly local in character. Main representative works include "Mantianxing", "Desheng Huixing", "Minjian Xiaoqu", "Bendiao Huadaoze" and "Shuilongyin".

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, of Han ethnicity, born in January 1966 in Lin County, Shanxi Province. From childhood he had a particular passion for the large suona, and at the age of fourteen he took the famous artist Zhang Caiqing as his teacher to study playing techniques. In order to master more of the ancient scores and tune titles, he spent more than two years visiting the area, receiving guidance from fifteen veteran artists across the county and collecting more than one hundred ancient large-suona scores and tune titles, which he compiled and printed as Wind and Percussion Music of Lin County. His representative pieces include Fan Gu Ze, Liu Qing Niang and Chu Dui Zi. His original techniques, such as the rolling-finger tone, the surging-breath tone and the abdominal-vibration tone, have moreover been affirmed by senior peers and professionals in the field. He has also recovered more than twenty traditional pieces, including Wu Lian Tao, Qu Qin and Hua Dao Zi. Within the documented technical tradition of Suona Art in Lin, Shanxi: The Linxian big suona is an ancient folk tradition of wind-and-percussion music, and is also the principal instrument of the local wind-and-percussion bands of Linxian County, Shanxi Province. Linxian lies on the western foot of Lüliang in western Shanxi, facing Lishi to the east, looking across the Yellow River at northern Shaanxi to the west, adjoining Liulin to the south, and touching Xing County against the mountains to the north. Its landscape is crisscrossed by gullies, making it a typical loess gully region. The Linxian big suona has a high volume, strong penetrating power and a heavy timbre. It absorbs not only the roughness, boldness and excited timbre of the northern Shaanxi big suona, but also the clear and lively subtlety and delicacy of the small suona of Shanxi and Sichuan, forming styles in which a street procession is majestic and magnificent, a stationary performance is elegant and restrained, joy is bright and lively, anger brings surging waves of sound, sorrow is plaintive and lingering, and happiness is boisterous and bustling. It has blowing techniques such as "che zhen yin", "qi hong yin" and "dead tunes played alive". Lin County big suona music belongs to the wind-and-percussion class, played with the suona as lead instrument combined with gongs and drums, and mainly uses suona, horn, big drum, hard jingles, gada luo and similar instruments. Generally two suona are used: one plays the melody in the high register, commonly called "kao zi", and the other supports the principal melody in the middle and low registers, commonly called "la tong". The music of the two suona is blended, with a clear contrast between the thick and the thin. The fingerings used are the ben, fan and jia modes as well as the six-character mode. In melodic structure their common characteristic is a clear line and fairly large undulation. Besides leaps of dominant and subdominant relations around the principal note, large leaps such as major sevenths, perfect octaves and intervals of thirteen to sixteen degrees form their distinctive style. The metrical patterns of performance have four-beat (one ban, three yan), ban-jiaban (one ban, one yan) and liushui (one ban) forms. The form is that of an independent tune pattern, and the usual tempo follows slow - gradually faster - fast - very fast conclusion. The big ensemble of the Linxian big suona is rough in style, using few delicate ornaments, with great momentum and a lively atmosphere, suited to large-scale group entertainment; the small ensemble is more elegant and refined, where narrative passages are soft and restrained and bold at the outset, and joy is noisy and boisterous. The small ensemble commonly uses the small suona (haidizi) as lead instrument; its civil ensemble is accompanied by huhu and erhu, and its martial ensemble by percussion such as bangzi, small barrel drum and small cymbals, and the pieces played are mostly Jin opera tune patterns. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Mantianxing": More than a hundred traditional old tunes have been handed down to the present day, and the pieces that accompany the percussion drum beats, such as "Helengze", "Dadesheng" and "Xiaodesheng", are particularly local in character. Main representative works include "Mantianxing", "Desheng Huixing", "Minjian Xiaoqu", "Bendiao Huadaoze" and "Shuilongyin". "Desheng Huixing": More than a hundred traditional old tunes have been handed down to the present day, and the pieces that accompany the percussion drum beats, such as "Helengze", "Dadesheng" and "Xiaodesheng", are particularly local in character. Main representative works include "Mantianxing", "Desheng Huixing", "Minjian Xiaoqu", "Bendiao Huadaoze" and "Shuilongyin". "Minjian Xiaoqu": More than a hundred traditional old tunes have been handed down to the present day, and the pieces that accompany the percussion drum beats, such as "Helengze", "Dadesheng" and "Xiaodesheng", are particularly local in character. Main representative works include "Mantianxing", "Desheng Huixing", "Minjian Xiaoqu", "Bendiao Huadaoze" and "Shuilongyin". "Bendiao Huadaoze": More than a hundred traditional old tunes have been handed down to the present day, and the pieces that accompany the percussion drum beats, such as "Helengze", "Dadesheng" and "Xiaodesheng", are particularly local in character. Main representative works include "Mantianxing", "Desheng Huixing", "Minjian Xiaoqu", "Bendiao Huadaoze" and "Shuilongyin".

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

National representative bearer of Suona Art (Lin County Large Suona), a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. He has long devoted himself to collecting materials and training successors, having trained 126 students in total, among them one provincial-level and one municipal-level bearer.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Liu Xiaohong · National Representative Bearer Archive