Dabieshan Folk Songs
01 · Historical Records
The music of the Dabie Mountain folk songs is inseparable from the long history of Lu'an; it developed and changed out of the tribal ditties of remote antiquity, and its content reflects ancient social history, such as Gao Yao dispensing justice, Yu the Great controlling the floods and the Chu-Han contention; it also reflects modern revolutionary, labour and living conditions, such as the Xinhai Revolution and the Red Army uprisings; and it also reflects life, production and the local customs and human feelings of Lu'an in the socialist construction period and in the various historical periods, among which the traditional folk songs Zheng Jing Hong and Man Gan Niu and the revolutionary folk songs Ba Yue Gui Hua Bian Di Kai and Song Lang Dang Hong Jun are the most influential.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Dabie Mountain folk songs consist mainly of mountain songs, tea songs, seedling songs, rowing songs, xiaoqu and labour songs; their melodies take as their main body the bold and uninhibited style of the mountain song, supplemented by the lyrical and lingering character of the xiaoqu, seedling songs and door songs of the Huai River basin. The basic mode of the mountain song has a comparatively wide range, while the range of the xiaoqu is not very wide. The melodies of the mountain songs are highly varied, based mainly on stirring shouts and supplemented by more placid tunes; the xiaoqu, by contrast, have little rhythmic variation, follow fixed patterns and are relatively stable. In its development the Dabie Mountain folk songs of western Anhui drew artistic elements from folk songs of other forms that came by the water route, while at the same time not losing their own character as mountain songs.
Zheng Jing Hong
One of the most influential works of the traditional Dabie Mountain folk songs; it belongs to the high-pitched mountain songs.
Man Gan Niu
One of the most influential works of the traditional Dabie Mountain folk songs, and the representative work of the inheritor Yu Shufan.
Ba Yue Gui Hua Bian Di Kai
One of the most influential works of the Dabie Mountain revolutionary folk songs.
Song Lang Dang Hong Jun
One of the most influential works of the Dabie Mountain revolutionary folk songs.
Mountain, tea, seedling, row, minor and work songs
Taking as its main body the bold and uninhibited style of the mountain song, and supplementing it with the lyrical and lingering character of the xiaoqu, seedling songs and door songs of the Huai River basin; the basic mode of the mountain song has a comparatively wide range, while the range of the xiaoqu is not very wide.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
In the Lu'an area of Anhui province the Dabie Mountains run for a thousand li and the Huai River flows across the territory; the Dabie Mountain folk songs of western Anhui which circulate in this area were born of the mountains and spread by the water, handed down generation by generation, never ceasing.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Through continuous singing by successive generations they have recorded some historical traces of social development and the living conditions of the local people, and they have fairly high research value for social history and for folk art. The Dabie Mountain folk songs have a group of representative inheritors. At present, as society changes and time passes, most of the older singers are no longer living, middle-aged singers are occupied with making a living and seldom take part in singing, and even where young people are willing to take up the Dabie Mountain folk songs they often cannot learn them for want of first-hand material. Under these conditions many fine Dabie Mountain folk songs of western Anhui are on the verge of being lost and urgently need rescue. Yu Shufan (as recorded in the official dossier of an associated inheritor): male, Han, born in July 1960, a native of Jinzhai county, Anhui Province. Influenced by his mother Liao Chiyue from childhood, he took to folk songs and learned to sing them. At the age of ten he began to learn from the old folk singers of his own village, Wang Xianqing and Ma Chaozhen. After finishing junior high school he sang Dabie Mountain folk songs in places such as Shuanghe and Meishan, and began to visit the old artists of the Dabie Mountain folk songs, learning and mastering the singing of more than one hundred of them and gradually forming his own distinctive style, with a wide range and a clear, high and mellow tone, and with a special skill in singing the high-pitched Dabie Mountain folk songs and xiaoqu. His representative work is the high-pitched Dabie Mountain folk song Man Gan Niu. Most of what he has mastered is the western-route mountain songs of Jinzhai. Representative inheritor of Dabie Mountain folk songs in the fifth national-level batch of intangible cultural heritage projects. As the main body of the Dabie Mountain folk songs, the western-route mountain songs have been fairly well handed down through his teaching.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Yu Shufan 05-2095
- Wang Fengqin
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。