Yangzhou Tanci Balladry
01 · Historical Records
Yangzhou tanci is popular mainly in Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, and the surrounding area. It was originally called 'xianci' and 'duibai xianci', took shape at the end of the Ming dynasty, flourished in the early Qing dynasty, and has a history of more than four hundred years.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Yangzhou tanci is centred on narration, with singing to instrumental accompaniment as an aid. Originally one person sang while seated and playing a sanxian unaided, hence the name 'xianci'. It later developed into the 'shuangdang' format performed by two people in coordination, adding pipa accompaniment, and was therefore called 'duibai xianci'. The sung text of Yangzhou tanci is arranged within the book text and takes two forms, the voiced-speech form and the narrative form, mainly using seven-character lines, with added single lines called 'fengdiandou'. Its performance is broadly the same as that of pinghua, differing in two respects: first, it pays more attention to the flavour of the tone and stresses correct diction and rounded vocal tone; second, the accompanying gestures are smaller in amplitude, the emphasis being on the display of facial expression. In shuangdang performance the two performers simulate the speech and tones of different characters in dialogue; the senior actor concentrates on the narration, and the singing of tunes is mostly undertaken by the junior actor. The tune patterns commonly used in Yangzhou tanci include [Suonanzhi], [Shuaha'er], [Sanqi Lihua], [Chenshui] and [Nandiao], with the yu mode and the shang mode predominating; plain and elegant, with an antique flavour, they have changed little over the years. The sanxian accompaniment plays the skeleton notes, sparse and plain, while the pipa is dense and varied, full of movement and ornament, whence the saying that 'the sanxian is the bone and the pipa is the flesh'. The representative repertoires of this school include Twin Gold Ingots, The Pearl Tower, The Falling Gold Fan and The Diao-Liu Story; after more than a hundred years of development, the art of singing has become increasingly polished.
Xianci and its paired form
Once a single singer with a three-string lute, the form grew into a pair playing lute and pipa in dialogue.
The phoenix nod
A single added line, mostly of seven characters, used to cap a passage with a fresh turn.
Frequently used tunes
Stock melodies in the yu and shang modes, plain and antique and little changed over the years.
Lute as bone, pipa as flesh
The three-string lute supplies the skeletal notes while the pipa fills them out with dense ornament.
The Zhou, Kong and Zhang lineages
Three transmission lines emerged in the late Qing, of which only the Zhang school survives today.
Representative books
The Zhang school's core titles, among them The Pearl Pagoda and The Golden Fan.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Yangzhou tanci uses the Yangzhou dialect for most of its narration, and when a character first appears it also uses the 'dock speech' of out-of-town regions, in order to show the identity of the character and delineate the character's nature. Since the late Qing dynasty Yangzhou tanci has formed several schools of singing, including the Zhou school, the Kong school and the Zhang school; today only the Zhang school is still transmitted.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
At present, under the dual impact of the economic tide and incoming foreign culture, Yangzhou tanci survives with difficulty and has few successors, so it urgently needs protection for the sake of transmission and development. Li Renzhen (as recorded in the official archival record of the associated inheritor): Female, of Han ethnicity, born in February 1946, a native of Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province. A national first-class actor. She learned her art from the pinghua master Wang Shaotang, the qingqu master Wang Wanqing and the tanci master Zhang Huixiang. Her basic skills in dental articulation, vocal tone and throat placement are solid; her narration is fine-grained, its layers clear and its characters sharply distinct, and her foundation is deep. From the 1960s onward she reformed the musical vocal styles, composition and performance of the art, making a major contribution to the 'dandang' single-person performance of Yangzhou tanci. She is skilled in composing music and in adapting and creating repertoires, writing, arranging and performing them herself. She is also proficient in playing instruments such as the pipa and the sanxian. Her representative works include The Falling Gold Fan, The Trial of the Diao Case and The Pearl Tower. She attaches importance to transmission and teaches at the Yangzhou School of Culture and Arts. After 2000 she began taking apprentices, transmitting orally traditional repertoires of four hundred thousand characters. She lectures on the history of Yangzhou quyi at universities and demonstrates and performs Yangzhou tanci and Yangzhou qingqu on the spot. Representative inheritor of Yangzhou tanci of the third batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage projects.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Li Renzhen 03-1169
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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