Hezhen Jialingkuo
01 · Historical Records
The origin and development of Hezhen folk music are inseparably bound up with religion and productive labour. The Hezhen people believe in the shaman and live by fishing and hunting; both their musical language and the musical materials of their music derive from this. According to the "Treatise on Music" section of the History of the Jin dynasty, Hezhen folk music had already begun to take shape in the Jin dynasty and gradually matured in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hezhen music had rich subjects and contents and diverse forms, combining singing and dancing, speech and song.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Hezhen people live mainly on the Sanjiang Plain in northeast China. Though they have no ethnic script of their own, they possess a long and deep tradition of ethnic language and literature. Over the course of history they have created a distinctive art of music and a literature and art of their own. For thousands of years the Hezhen people have used jialingkuo to express their pursuit of a good life and their prayers for light and happiness. Jialingkuo is performed mainly with fixed melodies and improvised words, accompanied by the mouth-string instrument and dancing for atmosphere. Singing of love, longing for light and beauty, and emotion stirred by the scene are its important themes and forms. Its lyrics mostly employ artistic devices such as exaggeration, metaphor and association; the melodies are beautiful, bright and lyrical, the tunes flowing, steady and gentle, with simple formal structures that are easy to learn and pass on, mostly a single section but sometimes two mutually corresponding sections; the music is built on pentatonic scales, the metres being mostly 2/4, 3/4 or 4/4, with mixed and free metres also occurring. It was around this period that comparatively complete records of Hezhen folk music first began to exist.
Love and longing themes
Singing of love, longing for light and beauty, and emotion stirred by the scene are the important themes and forms of jialingkuo; the lyrics mostly employ artistic devices such as exaggeration, metaphor and association.
Fixed tunes with improvised words
Jialingkuo is performed mainly with fixed melodies and improvised words, with the mouth-string instrument and dancing providing accompaniment; the melodies are beautiful, bright and lyrical, mostly a single section but sometimes two mutually corresponding sections, built on pentatonic scales.
Hezhen settlement areas
Jialingkuo is the collective name for Hezhen folk songs, distributed mainly in the Hezhen settlements of Aoqi of Jiamusi, Jiekou of Tongjiang, Bacha and Raohai Sipai in Heilongjiang Province.
Three-generation transmission
As intangible cultural heritage protection work has proceeded, the succession team of jialingkuo inheritors has been continuously strengthened, forming a good situation in which inheritors of the old, middle and young generations study and transmit the tradition together; protection units have further advanced protection and transmission by forming folk jialingkuo performance troupes, going into classrooms and by other means.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Jialingkuo is the collective name for Hezhen folk songs, distributed mainly in the Hezhen settlements of Aoqi of Jiamusi, Jiekou of Tongjiang, Bacha and Raohai Sipai in Heilongjiang Province.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
As intangible cultural heritage protection work has proceeded, the succession team of jialingkuo inheritors has been continuously strengthened, forming a good situation in which inheritors of the old, middle and young generations study and transmit the tradition together. Protection units have also kept advancing protection and transmission of this heritage item by forming folk jialingkuo performance troupes, going into classrooms and by other means. Hezhen jialingkuo is an important resource for studying Hezhen fishing-and-hunting culture, living conditions, cultural transmission and development, and also an important foundation for making literature and art more national in character and more accessible to the public. Further protecting, excavating and analysing it is of important value for studying the historical development of the ethnic group, and is of far-reaching significance for preserving the cultural ecology and cultural characteristics of a small-population people, and for promoting and developing traditional culture.
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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