Weeding Gong and Drum
01 · Historical Records
The Jinhu rice-transplanting song is a field song sung at rice-transplanting labour in Jinhu county, Jiangsu, and its surrounding areas, and is connected in origin with the ancient “incense-fire play”.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Jinhu rice-transplanting song is a field song sung at rice-transplanting labour in Jinhu county, Jiangsu, and its surrounding areas, and is one of the weeding gong-and-drum folk-song forms. Jinhu county lies in the Lixiahe region of northern Jiangsu, with broad waters and a dense network of rivers, and its crops are mainly rice and wheat. Its farming culture provided a good foundation for the birth and development of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song. The song has a history of more than a hundred years and is connected in origin with the ancient “incense-fire play”: part of its forms of singing, line formats, percussion instruments and singing content are basically the same as those of the incense-fire play. Its tunes are chiefly the “four-line head”, the “five-and-a-half lines”, the “string of tens” and the “snatched eight lines”. It is divided into the three forms of singing: the “rice chantey”, the “gong-and-drum rice-transplanting song” and the “drum-sung singing”. The “rice chanteys” are mostly improvised short songs, representative pieces being The Eagle Has Come, Seven Eight Fifteen Generations, The Sixth-Month Lotus Joined to a Lotus Root, Making Embroidered Shoes and The Yellow Flower. The “gong-and-drum rice-transplanting song” is a long narrative song sung by professional gong-and-drum masters, one striking the gong and one beating the drum and taking the lead in singing. The most striking is the “drum-sung singing”, in which one or more sing the Ge Dong Dai, commonly called “drumming”, and one takes up the singing, called “singing”. Its tune style is distinctive, its lyrics rich in content and its melody mild and smooth. It has the pentatonic shang and yu modes, fresh and pleasing to the ear. It uses the pentatonic scale, with the shang and yu modes alternating; the melody is mainly stepwise with little undulation, moving downward in direction, the tune mild and smooth. It is ornamented with descending and ascending glides, mordents and front appoggiaturas, with highly colouristic altered tones. Its use of the modal alternation techniques of treating the leading note as the mediant, the sharpened fourth as the tonic and the raised fourth as the mediant, forming an alternating mode of shifting mode and tonality, is the most striking feature of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song. The Jinhu rice-transplanting song has both short song chanteys of one tune to one set of words, and the long narrative “gong-and-drum rice-transplanting song”, and the “drum-sung singing” of one tune to many sets of words. Its forms of singing are mostly one-singing-and-the-many-responding and the one-singing-one-responding antiphonal form, and there is also the interspersed form of “intervening speech”.
The Eagle Has Come
One of the representative pieces of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
Seven Eight Fifteen Generations
One of the representative pieces of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
The Sixth-Month Lotus Joined to a Lotus Root
One of the representative pieces of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
Making Embroidered Shoes
One of the representative pieces of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
The Yellow Flower
One of the representative pieces of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
The Rice Chantey, the Gong-and-Drum Rice-Transplanting Song and the Drum-Sung Singing
The three forms of singing of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
The Four-Line Head, the Five-and-a-Half Lines, the String of Tens and the Snatched Eight Lines
The main tunes of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
The Modal Alternation of Treating the Leading Note as the Mediant and the Like
Forming an alternating mode of shifting mode and tonality, the most striking feature of the Jinhu rice-transplanting song.
One Singing and the Many Responding, and Antiphonal Singing
The forms of singing, mostly one-singing-and-the-many-responding and the one-singing-one-responding antiphonal form, and also the interspersed “intervening speech”.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The Jinhu rice-transplanting song belongs to the category of work chanteys, but differs from ordinary chanteys in that its music is not strongly rhythmic, its phrase structures are mostly asymmetrical, its rhythm is drawn out and its lyrical character is marked. Its language is the Jianghuai dialect, with many padding words and padding tunes, and its content covers every aspect of rural life in the Jinhu area over the past hundred years.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Chuanbeihaocao Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum · Weeding Gong and Drum.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The core area of transmission of this heritage item is Jinhu county, Jiangsu, and its radiating area is Baoying county, Gaoyou city, Xuyi county, Hongze county (now Hongze district) and Huai'an district in Jiangsu and Tianchang city in Anhui. The gong-and-drum rice-transplanting song is transmitted both within the family and from master to apprentice, with a clear lineage. Those transmitting it collectively number in the thousands, and the young people who sing the rice-transplanting song increase continually. The Jinhu rice-transplanting song is a composite of the farming culture, rice culture, water culture and religious culture of the Lixiahe region and has a certain reference value for the study of the local customs and the conditions of production and life there. Its technique of shifting among multiple modes and tonalities has a certain reference significance for the study of ethnic musical technique. (Associated bearer recorded in the official archive:) Zhang Zhongxiang, male, Han, born August 1937, a native of Jinhu county, Jiangsu. By 1955 he could sing independently and has now sung the rice-transplanting song for more than sixty years. His representative pieces include more than thirty, such as The Great Gardenia Flower, The Great Matchmaker, The Clothes-Rack Sister, Sister Longs for Love and Picking Reed Leaves. His articulation in singing is clear and his voice powerful, and he often uses ascending and descending glides to ornament the melody; together with the padding words and phrases of local colour, this gives his singing a strong local character. The content he sings includes both absorbing long narrative stories and witty and humorous short song heads. His long rice-transplanting songs in particular fill the gap of northern Jiangsu's lack of long narrative poems. He is a representative bearer of the fifth batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage items, the weeding gong-and-drum (Jinhu rice-transplanting song).
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Wang Shaoxing 02-0252
- Meng Fanlin 03-0824
- Wang Aimin 03-0825
- Zhang Zhongxiang 05-2047
- Fang Yougen 05-2048
- Leng Haoran 05-2049
- Li Decui
- Xiao Shiqin
- Zhang Yuzhen
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。