Song Weixiang

01 · Lineage & Regional School

Song Weixiang, Female, Han, from Haimen, Jiangsu, is a fifth-batch national representative bearer of Haimen Mountain Songs (Ⅱ-94). The tradition is documented in Haimen, Jiangsu. Within the regional tradition and school record of Haimen Mountain Songs in Haimen, Jiangsu: They brought with them the dialect and customs of Jiangnan, and also the Wu-language mountain songs. As one expression of the river-and-sea culture, Haimen mountain songs are closely bound up with the production and life of the local people, and researchers in dialectology, folklore, ethnomusicology, history and other fields can all find precious material in them. Haimen lies on the river beside the sea, in one corner of Jiangsu Province; the land on which it stands was formed by sediment deposited by rivers, and the county was officially established only in the thirty-third year of the Qianlong reign of the Qing (1768). In the twentieth year of the Republic (1931), Guan Jiange collected and collated Haimen mountain songs into Jiangkou Qingge, which caused a sensation in the arts circles.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Female, Han, born in December 1967 in Haimen City, Jiangsu Province. She is a National First-Class Actor and the director of the Haimen Mountain Song Art Theatre. She learned to sing Haimen mountain songs from childhood, and in 1984 she was admitted to the trainee class of the Haimen Mountain Song Opera Troupe and became a professional performer. In 1986 the Haimen mountain song Xiao Ajie Kan Zhong Yaochuan Lang (Little Sister Takes a Fancy to the Boatman), which she sang, was performed at Zhongnanhai in Beijing with the Nantong Municipal Folk Art Troupe. Over more than twenty years she has played more than fifty different characters in Haimen mountain-song opera, appearing in roughly three thousand performances, and has sung more than three hundred Haimen mountain songs in some two thousand performances of her own. Within the documented technical tradition of Haimen Mountain Songs in Haimen, Jiangsu: At that time large numbers of farmers from Chongming, Jurong and elsewhere poured into the Haimen area to reclaim land and create fields. After long development, the distinctive Haimen mountain songs finally stood out from labour life and reached a settled form. The language of Haimen mountain songs is vivid and graphic, and the music is pure, sweet, extended and mellow; it falls into two large types, lyrical mountain songs and narrative mountain songs. Lyrical mountain songs are also called “short mountain songs”; they are mostly improvised mountain songs sung extempore during or after work, in forms of four, six or eight lines, with seven characters to a line as the norm. Narrative mountain songs are also called “long mountain songs”; their texts often run to dozens or even hundreds of lines, with complete plots, and are sung to such tunes as the shange diao, duihua diao, foqi diao, youhu diao and haozi, in forms such as solo and antiphonal duet. The content of Haimen mountain songs is extremely rich and touches on almost every aspect of social life. Among them are works praising labour and expressing the people's longing for a happy life, such as Da Hang Shan Ge; works singing of love and expressing the persistent pursuit of sincere feeling by young men and women, such as Hua Wang Lang; works expressing an optimistic spirit, such as Wo Mai Shan Ge Wu Yao Qian; and works reflecting working people rising in revolt against exploiters, such as Xia Zao Tou Qing Wo Wu Gong Fu. Haimen mountain songs are handed down generation by generation among the people in an orderly succession. There are countless Haimen mountain singers in the countryside, and it is not unusual to find singers who can perform more than a hundred folk songs. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Da Hang Shan Ge": A work among Haimen mountain songs that praises labour and expresses the people's longing for a happy life. "Hua Wang Lang": A work among Haimen mountain songs that sings of love and expresses the persistent pursuit of sincere feeling by young men and women. "Wo Mai Shan Ge Wu Yao Qian": A work among Haimen mountain songs that expresses an optimistic spirit. "Xia Zao Tou Qing Wo Wu Gong Fu": A work among Haimen mountain songs that reflects working people rising in revolt against exploiters.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

National representative bearer of Haimen Mountain Songs, a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. For many years she has served as a campus counsellor for Haimen mountain songs, coaching tens of thousands of students in more than thirty colleges and schools, and has trained more than twenty young mountain-song performers for the Haimen Mountain Song Opera Troupe.

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. Song Weixiang · National Representative Bearer Archive