Caicha Opera
01 · Historical Records
In the Qing dynasty foreign operatic vocal styles including caicha opera spread along the Yangtze water routes and the Hubei–Jiangxi land routes to Yangxin county and combined with the tea songs of the Mufu mountains, forming Yangxin caicha opera in the Daoguang reign. In the late Qing and early Republic, under the influence of the Yangxin-born Han opera master Zhu Hongshou, Yangxin caicha opera made great strides and spread to neighbouring counties. In 1965 the Yangxin County Caicha Opera Troupe was founded, marking the genre's maturity. Drawing on local opera annals and Yangxin county cultural materials, Yangxin caicha opera formed on the basis of tea-lantern and huagu folk art, its singing comprising both banqiang-system principal tunes and florid-tune ditties, and after the 1950s it moved from amateur troupes towards professional performance.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Yangxin caicha opera's singing is made up of principal tunes, florid tunes and percussion; the principal tunes belong to the ban-style variation form and include such melodies as “Beiqiang”, “Hanqiang”, “Tanqiang” and “Siping”, fine and pleasing, highly malleable and expressive, while the florid tunes include more than forty dedicated ditty interludes, the florid-tune-based short plays being song-and-dance and plain and unrestrained in performance. Yangxin caicha opera has many traditional plays, about a hundred or more. For more than forty years the Yangxin County Caicha Opera Troupe has staged a large number of excellent plays, such as San Gu Chu Gong and Chuang Wang Sha Qing, some of which have won top provincial festival awards. Its principal tunes belong to the ban-style variation form, including Beiqiang, Hanqiang, Tanqiang and Siping, with more than forty dedicated florid-tune ditties; the florid-tune-based short plays are song-and-dance, plain and unrestrained, forming a song-and-dance genre style.
San Gu Chu Gong (Third Aunt Leaves the Palace)
An excellent play staged by the Yangxin County Caicha Opera Troupe, which won a top provincial festival award.
Chuang Wang Sha Qing (The Rebel King's Revenge)
An excellent play staged by the Yangxin County Caicha Opera Troupe, which won a top provincial festival award.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Yangxin caicha opera is one of Hubei's local genres, found mainly around Yangxin county. It is sung in dialect with vocal help-singing, its subject matter close to life and its dramatic feeling plain yet strong, much loved by the local people. It is found mainly in the Mufu mountains and the Fushui river basin and is sung in the Yangxin dialect with help-singing, sharing an origin with the caicha opera of northern Jiangxi and eastern Hunan yet with its own character; the Yangxin line is noted for giving equal weight to principal and florid tunes and for a strong flavour of life.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Caicha Opera · Caicha Opera · Caicha Opera · Caicha Opera · Caicha Opera · Caicha Opera.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Li Jiagao (as recorded in the official dossier of an associated inheritor): a national first-grade composer. In 1964 he began, with opera specialists of the Hubei Art College, to excavate, collate and study the traditional music of Yangxin caicha opera, and in 1965 he witnessed the founding of the Yangxin County Caicha Opera Troupe. He has successively published such monographs as Fra grant Mountain Camellias: Selected Arias of Li Jiagao, Collected Works of Li Jiagao and the Collected Music of Yangxin Caicha Opera. Male, Han, born in September 1938, died in February 2017, a native of Yangxin county, Hubei; a representative inheritor of caicha opera in the third batch of national intangible cultural heritage projects. He has composed for more than eighty plays, winning opera-composition awards many times. Yangxin caicha opera preserves precious traces of the blending of tea songs, lantern art and folk ditties and is a living sample for studying the relation between opera and folklore along the Hubei–Jiangxi border; relying on the caicha opera transmission centre, Yangxin county sustains the genre through reviving plays, collating music and training talent.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Chen Shengqiang 02-0595
- Li Jiagao 03-1057
- Chen Binmao 04-1647
- Wan Anan 04-1648
- Wu Yancheng 04-1649
- Peng Jinhua 05-2376
- Wu Lan
- Chu Fengrong
- Fei Lijun
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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