Chongming Mountain Songs
01 · Historical Records
The inhabitants of Chongming come mainly from the Jiangnan Wu-speaking area, and some are migrants from the north who moved south to escape the wars.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The place of origin and the main area of transmission of Chongming mountain songs is Chongming District of Shanghai, together with Qidong City and Haimen City of Jiangsu Province. More than 3,000 Chongming mountain songs have been collated and registered, in more than 60 melodic varieties, mostly work songs, songs of daily life, love songs and funeral laments. There are beautiful and moving cotton-picking and spinning songs, high and resonant fishing and boating work chants, rice-cultivation marsh songs with freely changing melodies, love songs that are humorous and understated, and funeral laments that are like singing and like weeping. Among them, the funeral laments are crying-chant ballads performed along with funeral rites, comprising a complete and richly detailed set of ancient crying songs from the laying out of the body and the keeping of vigil through to the burial. Chongming mountain songs fall into two types, improvised songs and narrative songs; the former are made up on the spot, with lyrics of four to eight lines, while the latter have refined content, with lyrics running from some dozens of lines to several hundred. The melodies of Chongming mountain songs are divided into the Upper Sand songs and the Lower Sand songs. The former have a lingering, winding pitch with several melodic shapes for a single character, and variations of opening, joining, linking and beating; the latter have diverse melodies and free variation. Developed from Chongming mountain songs are also Chongming mountain song opera, the narrative chanting of mountain songs, the performed singing of mountain songs, the narrative singing of mountain songs and the solo singing of mountain songs. Chongming mountain songs use the pentatonic scale; some melodies add the pitches that raise the third degree, lower the fifth degree and raise the seventh degree, and apart from stepwise motion their melodic idiom also includes leaps of a fourth, a fifth, a minor sixth and a minor seventh. The sixth degree is very prominent in the mode, and the melodies have the character of ancient pitch sets. Chongming mountain songs take basic forms such as the Four-Line-Head Mountain Song and the Antiphonal Flower Melody, form their contrast with the three vocal registers of shang, zhi and yu, and consist of two structures, the banqiang type and the xiaodiao type. The banqiang type includes the sanban, manban, zhongban, qingban, liushui ban, jinban, fuziban and fast-drawn slow-sung types, while the xiaodiao type includes more than ten types such as the Qiaoni Seng Diao and the Paiming Diao.
Work songs
One class of Chongming mountain songs with labour as its subject, including the beautiful and moving cotton-picking and spinning songs, the high and resonant fishing and boating work chants, and the rice-cultivation marsh songs with freely changing melodies.
Love songs
One class of Chongming mountain songs with love as its subject, in a humorous and understated style, taking basic forms such as the Four-Line-Head Mountain Song and the Antiphonal Flower Melody.
Funeral laments
Crying-chant ballads performed along with funeral rites, comprising a complete and richly detailed set of ancient crying songs from the laying out of the body and the keeping of vigil through to the burial.
Improvised and narrative songs
The improvised songs are made up on the spot, with lyrics of four to eight lines; the narrative songs have refined content, with lyrics running from some dozens of lines to several hundred.
Upper and lower sand songs
The melodies of Chongming mountain songs are divided into the Upper Sand songs and the Lower Sand songs: the former have a lingering, winding pitch with several melodic shapes for a single character, and variations of opening, joining, linking and beating; the latter have diverse melodies and free variation.
Banqiang and xiaodiao structures
Chongming mountain songs form their contrast with the three vocal registers of shang, zhi and yu, and consist of two structures, the banqiang type and the xiaodiao type; the banqiang type includes the sanban, manban, zhongban, qingban, liushui ban, jinban, fuziban and fast-drawn slow-sung types.
Three-thousand-song corpus
More than 3,000 Chongming mountain songs have been collated and registered, in more than 60 melodic varieties, mostly work songs, songs of daily life, love songs and funeral laments.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Chongming mountain songs are the collective name for the folk songs and ballads of the Chongming dialect area; they circulate in the 13 districts and cities of the riverside and coastal area at the mouth of the Yangtze, over an area of about 4,500 square kilometres, and the population speaking the Chongming dialect locally numbers about four million. Chongming mountain songs are the collective name for the folk songs and ballads of the Chongming dialect area; they circulate in the 13 districts and cities of the riverside and coastal area at the mouth of the Yangtze, over an area of about 4,500 square kilometres, and the population speaking the Chongming dialect locally numbers about four million. The mother culture of Chongming is the Wu culture, which formed a new regional culture on the island of Chongming through continual accommodation with outside cultures. The Chongming dialect preserves a good deal of ancient Chinese and has the phonetic and tonal characteristics of Middle Chinese of the Tang and Song periods.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Chongming mountain songs are transmitted mainly by group transmission and by family transmission. At present the main inheriting teams of the project are the Chenjia Town Culture, Sports, Radio and Television Station of Chongming District, Shanghai, the Shanghai Shenyang Culture Development Service Centre and the Shanghai Changying Culture Media Co., Ltd.; they organize more than 80 inheritors and artistic backbone workers throughout the year to carry out the transmission and dissemination of Chongming mountain songs through performances, lectures, training and other forms. Chongming mountain songs are the deposit of local culture, an important element forming Chongming's regional humanistic environment, and an important component of the culture of the mouth of the Yangtze; they record the process by which the people of the island reclaimed land, worked and lived, and they reflect the customs, ways of thinking and humanistic feelings of generation after generation of Chongming people. They are a precious cultural resource, with considerable historical, linguistic and folklore research value and with artistic appreciation value.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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