Yao Folk Songs

01 · Historical Records

Wuwa mountain songs originated in the work chants of the ancestors of the Hua Yao, and after long development gradually formed a distinctive style, finally becoming a high-register mountain song. Their development history comprises such stages as germination in the era of the ancestors, gestation from the late Yuan and early Ming, and maturity from the Ming and Qing to the Republic of China.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Yao folk songs have many line forms, including five-character, seven-character, tune-pattern and mixed long-and-short lines; their tunes are intricate and their structures varied. Hua Yao Wuwa mountain songs are an ancient folk music art possessed by the Hua Yao people alone, now more than a thousand years old and circulated mainly in Huxingshan Yao Township, Longhui County, Hunan Province. Hua Yao Wuwa mountain songs are usually sung as a chorus by adult men combining chest and falsetto voice; the melody and rhythm are free, the sound high and resonant, with long drawn-out melismas and frequent interjections such as “wu wa”. The lines and segments of Wuwa mountain songs are fairly regular, generally seven, nine or eleven characters to a line; most songs have six lines of text and generally rhyme in pairs. The texts often employ direct statement, simile, evocative opening, exaggeration, parallelism, enumeration, repetition and question-and-answer devices. The rhymes of Wuwa mountain songs are called diaozi; each diaozi has a fixed name of three characters, resembling a tune-pattern name, which is not found in other mountain songs. Wuwa mountain songs comprehensively and vividly embody the life form and cultural traditions of the Hua Yao of Longhui; their content amounts to a growth history of the Hua Yao people. The high-register melody of this mountain song is unequalled among other mountain songs; as music experts have said, even the most famous singers in the world would find it hard to sing the high notes of the Wuwa mountain songs.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

The Yao are a comparatively typical mountain people of south China, distributed mainly in the mountainous areas of Guangxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hainan and other provinces and regions. These folk songs are divided by subject into love songs, custom songs, production songs, songs of hardship and songs of resistance and struggle. Love songs are further divided into love-drawing songs, songs of attachment, songs of parting, songs of sending affection, songs of love and hate, songs of freedom and pan songs. Hua Yao Wuwa mountain songs draw on production, daily life and folk legends, and fall roughly into four categories: historical songs, songs of custom and exhortation, production and labour songs, and love songs, of which the love songs are the most brilliant part.

Other submitting regions for the same item: Yao Folk Songs.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

Research shows that Hua Yao Wuwa mountain songs have twenty-four diaozi in all, of which some ten-odd are still circulated today, among them Shao Nian Guai, Wo Lao Ge, Wo Ge Xian and Hua Lai Ting. In these songs the “wu wa” that pierces the clouds and the vocal line that follows it symbolise the tenacious spirit of the Hua Yao in daring to struggle with a harsh environment; even their pursuit of love is expressed with vast, heaven-shaking force, fully reflecting the resolute, optimistic, sincere and warm national character of the Hua Yao people and providing a vivid example for ethnological study. At present few of the older generation of Hua Yao singers are still alive, and the transmission of Wuwa mountain songs urgently needs to be resolved. Dai Bisheng (as recorded in the official file of the associated inheritor): male, Han, born in December 1949, a native of Longhui County, Hunan Province. He was selected into the folk performance team of Huxingshan Yao Township in 2001. On the basis of what he inherited from his predecessors he dared to innovate, carrying the high-register character of the Hua Yao Wuwa mountain songs to the extreme. When singing, he is good at combining chest and falsetto voice; the melody and rhythm are free, the sound high and resonant, and the drawn-out melismas are both extended and urgent, at once flowing like clouds and surging like a rainbow spanning the sky. In the devices of the text he is good at using direct statement, simile, evocative opening, exaggeration, parallelism, enumeration, repetition and question-and-answer. He has his own way of handling the rhymes. Representative inheritor of Yao folk songs (Hua Yao Wuwa mountain songs), inscribed in the third national-level batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage. He began taking apprentices and teaching in 2007; among them are Dai Longxiu, Tan Xiaoqian, Chen Heying and Dai Longwei.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:

• Dai Bisheng 03-0868
• Zhao Xinrong 05-2119

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

1. Yao Folk Songs (Longhui, Hunan) · China ICH Official Project Archive
2. Dai Bisheng · National Representative Bearer Archive

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗