Tujia Folk Songs
01 · Historical Records
The Tujia-inhabited area of western Hunan lies in the Wuling mountain district, where the mountains are high, the valleys deep and the villages scattered; folk songs therefore became the principal means of carrying information across the ridges and reaching one another's feelings, and they have been kept alive jointly by the tima, the song masters and the people in rituals and in daily life.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Tujia folk songs are a form of traditional musical expression handed down generation after generation among the Tujia people of China; they are current mainly in the Tujia-inhabited areas of Longshan County, Yongshun County, Baojing County and Gzhang County in Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Hunan Province, and in Tujia settlements in Hubei, Chongqing, Guizhou and other provinces. Tujia folk songs of western Hunan have such types as mountain songs, hand-waving songs, tima songs, customary songs, production and work songs, and ditties. Mountain songs are widely sung by the Tujia of western Hunan; by vocal style they fall into two main categories, the high register and the level register. Hand-waving songs are the folk songs sung while the Tujia perform the hand-waving dance, combining movement and singing, of rich colouring and much loved by the Tujia people. Tima songs are sung by the tima (also called the “village elder”, who conducts sacrificial rites and also practises medicine) when he performs religious ritual; they constitute a long ballad and are an encyclopaedia of Tujia history, production and life. Customary songs are generally sung during particular Tujia customary activities and are very rich as well, such as “Filial Songs” and “Songs of Crying at Marriage”. Production and work songs are a form of musical expression created by the Tujia people over long periods of production and labour, and include weeding gong-and-drum songs, mountain labour haozi, boatmen's haozi on the water and so on. In addition there are also dong-dong-kui songs and the like. The Tujia people who live in the great mountains of western Hunan are open in character and vigorous in spirit, and their folk songs have equally distinct artistic features: the course of the melody, the scale and mode, the form and structure, the methods of singing and so on are all sharply characterized, and they are an important component of Chinese folk song. Traditional Tujia folk songs have such varied performing forms as solo, antiphonal duet and unison chorus. They are based on the 5-6-1-2-5 set of pitches; their formal structure is mostly four lines, and they use the pentatonic scale system. Tujia folk songs are extremely broad and rich in form and content, and their methods of singing are very varied, broadly falling into the true-voice method, the combined true-voice and falsetto method, the soft-voice method and so on. Tujia folk songs of western Hunan have a long history and a broad mass base. The “Yongshun County Gazetteer, Customs section” records Peng Shiduo's “Bamboo Branch Songs”: “In Fushi City the brocade is piled into nests; by the shrine of the Earth King the water breaks in waves; ten thousand red lanterns and a thousand tiers of people, one stretch of brocade — the hand-waving song.” These lines vividly depict the singing scene of Tujia folk songs.
Mountain songs
The genre of song widely sung by the Tujia of western Hunan; by vocal style it falls into two main categories, the high register and the level register.
Hand-waving songs
The folk songs sung by the Tujia while they perform the hand-waving dance, combining movement and singing, rich in colouring and much loved by the Tujia people.
Tima ritual songs
The songs sung by the Tujia tima (also called the “village elder”, who conducts sacrificial rites and also practises medicine) when performing religious ritual; they constitute a long ballad and are called the encyclopaedia of Tujia history, production and life.
Customary songs
They are generally sung during particular Tujia customary activities, and their content is rich.
Work songs
A form of musical expression created by the Tujia people over long periods of production and labour.
Dong-dong-kui songs
One of the component parts of Tujia folk songs of western Hunan, sung to the accompaniment of the Tujia reed-pipe instrument called the dong-dong-kui.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Tujia folk songs of western Hunan are sung in Tujia and Chinese alike; old song masters in Gzhang, Longshan and Yongshun counties teach by family transmission and from master to apprentice, and the hand-waving songs depend on the collective song-and-dance of the hand-waving halls, rehearsed year by year.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Tujia Folk Songs.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
More than 800 folk songs survive in the western Hunan region, and in some areas the lineage of transmission reaches 25 generations. Tujia folk songs of western Hunan are an important part of Tujia culture and of western Hunan culture; they are rich in content and distinct in character, they embody the natural outlook, the moral outlook and the love outlook of the local Tujia people, and they condense that people's historical memory, the wisdom of their production and life and their emotional wishes, so that they are of important value for the transmission and study of Tujia history, art, language and custom. Xiang Hanguang (official archive record of the associated inheritor): Male, Tujia, born in December 1942, a native of Gzhang County, Hunan Province. Because he heard his elders sing earth-digging gong-and-drum songs from childhood, he learnt the essentials of singing Tujia mountain songs. After starting work he took an active part in the protection, discovery and sorting of ethnic folk cultural heritage, travelling to every village and hamlet of Gzhang County, and humbly studied under the noted local Tujia tima old artists Tian Guangnan and Li Zhongyang, comprehensively and systematically mastering the words, the vocal style and the function of the songs sung by the tima in the sacrificial rites of the traditional Tujia festivals. Because he long devoted himself to the study and accumulation of Tujia folk songs and Tujia culture, he formed his own distinctive ethnic style in folk song performance, greatly strengthened the expressive appeal of the songs, and became one of the very few representative singers in Xiangxi Prefecture able to sing in the Tujia language. Representative inheritor of Tujia folk songs of the fifth national-level batch of intangible cultural heritage.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Xiang Hanguang 05-2171
- Wang Bo 05-2172
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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