Zuoquankaihuadiao
01 · Historical Records
From the 1940s onwards music workers began collecting and recording folk songs in Zuoquan, a process lasting more than half a century, and the blossom tunes collected alone number more than a hundred; representative pieces include Peach Blossoms Red, Apricot Blossoms White; With Thoughts, Take It Slowly; Meeting My Elder Brother; Gedan Kin; Longing for My Beloved Brother; and The Land Comes Home. The Zuoquan folk songs represented by the blossom tune once declined in the 1970s and 1980s, their ecology falling out of balance.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Zuoquan county lies on the western side of the main ridge of the Taihang mountains, on the eastern edge of Shanxi province; it was called Liaozhou and then Liao county in antiquity, and was later renamed Zuoquan in memory of the famous anti-Japanese general who fell there. Folk songs of this kind belong to the “mountain-song style”, and because all their lyrics take “flower” as the centre and use “blossoming” as the analogy, they are called blossom tunes. More distinctively, the “flowers” in question are not only the flowers of plants but also the “flowers” of every kind of daily utensil and object, as in “the door-latch blossoms and comes loose, and my elder brother walks in at the door”, “the glass blossoms and is bright inside and out, and from afar I see my Gedan dear”, and “the oil lamp blossoms with a single point of light, and I would not mind your poverty though you measure rice in a wine cup”. These folk songs are ingeniously conceived and fresh in diction and are loved by the broad masses. The blossom tune is simple in melody and deeply moving; the great majority are made up of two mutually answering phrases, upper and lower, and the melody proceeds mainly in a stepwise heptatonic scale, with occasional wide leaps used to express the rise and fall of emotion, greatly increasing the music's power to move. Liu Gaiyu, Ji Aifang and Shi Zhanming are all outstanding transmitters of the blossom tune.
Peach Blossoms Red, Apricot Blossoms White
Representative pieces include Peach Blossoms Red, Apricot Blossoms White; With Thoughts, Take It Slowly; Meeting My Elder Brother; Gedan Kin; Longing for My Beloved Brother; and The Land Comes Home.
With Thoughts, Take It Slowly
One of the representative blossom tunes collected in Zuoquan, listed in the same source among the more than a hundred tunes gathered over half a century.
Meeting My Elder Brother
A representative blossom tune of Zuoquan, sung in the local dialect.
Gedan Kin
A representative blossom tune of Zuoquan, its title drawn from the local term of endearment for a sweetheart.
Longing for My Beloved Brother
A representative blossom tune of Zuoquan, belonging to the love-song group.
The Land Comes Home
A representative blossom tune of Zuoquan, also a signature piece of the bearer Liu Gaiyu.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Zuoquan is rich in folk songs; according to the Gazetteer of Liaozhou, since the Song and Yuan the locality has had the traditional customs of “making merry at the Lantern Festival”, “making merry at the village festival” and “making merry in the red fire”. Moreover, the padding words and padding lines formed from the local dialect in these songs are superb, such as “a-ge-ya-ya-dai”, “qin-ge-dan-er” and “qin-ya-ge-qin-ya-me-dai-ya-ge-dai”, all of which excellently bring out a strong local colour.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Through the ages the people have continually created and transmitted it, producing one after another many kinds of folk musical genre, such as the mountain song, the minor, the work chantey, the suite, the small flower play and the wind-and-percussion, among which the blossom tune is the most representative. Recently, through the common efforts of the broad masses and the competent government departments, the traditional style of song has been gradually restored and new transmitters have appeared one after another, providing a relatively good basis for the protection and transmission of the folk-song heritage. (Associated bearer recorded in the official archive:) Liu Gaiyu, female, Han, born December 1939, a native of Zuoquan county, Shanxi. A first-class national actor, she loved singing from childhood and learned the Zuoquan folk songs and the daqiang from the folk singers Cheng Jinian, Hao Yulan, Zhao Lanzhu and Headman Liu and from the artists of the Zihui daqiang troupe. At nineteen she entered the folk-song choir of the Central Song and Dance Ensemble, and the following year was transferred back to the Shanxi provincial song and dance troupe as a soloist. Through many years of practice she accumulated rich experience in singing folk songs and summed up the three keys to singing them as “sound (exquisite), feeling (true) and flavour (rich)”, forming a distinctive singing style praised alike by the masses and by experts. Her representative pieces include The Land Comes Home, Bitter Longing, General Zuoquan, Peach Blossoms Red and Apricot Blossoms White, and The Door-Latch Blossoms. She has long devoted herself to folk-song performance, the collection of materials and the training of successors, has been engaged by many colleges and schools to teach folk-song singing, and has trained many well-known artists of the Zuoquan blossom tune. She is a representative bearer of the third batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage items, the Zuoquan blossom tune.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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