Nanpa, bent-neck pipa, is an
important musical instrument used inplaying
Nanyin. |
Kristofer Schipper, a French
historian of religion and a cultural anthropologist, will celebrate his 70th
birthday next week in Quanzhou in East China's Fujian Province.
He teaches at Fuzhou University in a city about 200 kilometres from Quanzhou.
Professor Schipper says the best birthday gift would be a performance of Nanyin
in Quanzhou where the ancient music genre was born some 1,000 years ago.
And it seems his wish will come true ahead of time, though not in Quanzhou.
For tonight, a concert featuring both original and arranged repertoire will be
performed by the Nanyin Ensemble from Quanzhou and students from China
Conservatory of Music at the Century Theatre in Beijing.
Conducting the concert will be Professor Liu Dehai from the China
Conservatory of Music. He has included Nanyin to his Action One Project which
aims at preserving Chinese traditional folk music.
A master of pipa, a four-stringed plucked instrument, Liu paid a long visit
to Quanzhou earlier this year with colleagues to collect and study Nanyin music.
"It is such a beautiful form that retains its original flavour, real dialect
and is played on the old instrument," says Liu.
It was just with this charm that Schipper also became attracted to it after
studying Chinese history and culture for a decade in Paris. Schipper first heard
Nanyin in Taiwan where he worked on Chinese culture, especially Taoism, for
eight years in the 1980s.
Ever since, he has tried every effort to study and promote Nanyin and has
formed an amateur ensemble in Tainan. The band toured around Europe to introduce
the ancient Chinese music to the outside world.
But Schipper and Liu are not the only people fascinated by this folk opera
form and who work to preserve it.
Quanzhou, birth place of the Nanyin, is a harbour city which during the Tang
(AD 618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties saw the arrival of ships from foreign
shores. It was considered similar to Alexandria in Egypt.
Dongxiao, a vertical flute is an important
musical instrument used inplaying
Nanyin. |
During the Yuan Dynasty
(1271-1368), Marco Polo declared it as the beginning of the Silk Road.
According to researches, the founders of Quanzhou were aristocrats who fled
the great upheavals in the central and northern China during the Western Jin (AD
265-316) and who, due to the isolated nature of the area, were able to escape
from the ravages of war.
During the Tang and Song dynasties, more and more people migrated into the
area.
Nanyin is a traditional opera sung in the Minnan (south Fujian) dialect.
Closely tied with imperial and Buddhist music, poetic rhythm and drama tunes
from Central China, Nanyin is accompanied by a band of erxian, a two-stringed
vertical instrument, sanxian, a three-stringed plucked instrument, dongxiao, a
vertical flute, nanpa (bent-neck pipa) and paiban (clappers).
Among them, dongxiao and nanpa were instruments popular in Tang Dynasty.
The tunes of Nanyin were all notated in the form of gongchepu, a Chinese
traditional form for notation.
So far, researchers have discovered 13 pieces of pu, which are tunes without
lyrics, 48 sets of zhi, each zhi includes several songs and more than 2,000
songs.
Protection measures
In the 1950s and 1960s, two documentaries and notations of Nanyin were
discovered in libraries in Britain and Germany. The two notations were later
published in Taiwan.
According to Zheng Guoquan, a fellow researcher of Quanzhou Folk Opera
Institute, over 100 Nanyin pieces have been republished in both gongchepu and
simplified notation.
"Although modern notation can't really convey the charm of the ancient music,
it will definitely widen its appeal and help spread the music," said Zheng.
The Nanyin has been not only treasured and protected by scholars and
literatus, but they are also loved by the local people.
Over the centuries, people from the southern Fujian Province (Minnan people)
have spread the music to Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas to Malaysia, Indonesia,
the Philippines, Singapore and Europe as they emigrated.
Wherever there are Minnan people, one could hear the resonance of the Nanyin.
Since 1977, Minnan people around the world have launched 14 International
Nanyin Festivals and Quanzhou has hosted seven of them since 1981. The eighth
will be held next year.
Holding festivals to showcase the Nanyin performance is one of the measures
that the local government has taken to preserve and promote the ancient art.
They have made some far-reaching decisions such as compiling about 20 popular
Nanyin songs in the music books for the primary and secondary school students in
Quanzhou since 1990. The Quanzhou Normal College and Quanzhou Art School have
opened courses of Nanyin.
"It's our duty to pass the ancient music to the future. Hopefully, most of
the local young generation could learn the Nanyin songs," said Hong Zeshen,
vice-mayor of Quanzhou.
According to You Chuncheng, vice-director of the Quanzhou Nanyin Ensemble,
there are two professional Nanyin bands in Fujian Province and hundreds of
amateur salons and clubs where the music is played. Taiwan Province has over 70
Nanyin groups, most of whose members come from Quanzhou.
In June 2002, Quanzhou has applied Nanyin to the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a masterpiece of the oral and
intangible heritage of humanity.
Chinese Kunqu Opera was granted the title on May 18, 2001.
Time for action
Started in 2002 and initiated by professor Liu Dehai, the Action One Project
was carried out by the faculty and students majoring in Chinese traditional and
folk music at China Conservatory of Music. They were to study one type of such
music every year, building a "gene library" of Chinese traditional and folk
music and an education system for teaching these music.
The goals will aid the development of performance, composition and
theoretical research of traditional Chinese folk music.
The first 2002 target was the Chaozhou music, which is a genre popular in the
eastern part of South China's Guangdong Province.
Last year's SARS outbreak affected Liu's schedule so that the second genre -
the Nanyin music - became the theme for 2004.
It will be followed with the Cantonese music, Dongjing Taoist music, Jiangnan
Bamboo and Silk Music and Naxi music, which derived from the Dongjing Taoist
music but has taken on its own features among the Naxi ethnic minority in
Southwest China's Yunnan Province, among others.
"On New Year's Eve 2002, I drafted out the plan in my mind because I felt a
sense of urgency to protect our musical heritage as globalization speeds up and
young Chinese are immersed by Western pop music," said Liu.
"The forestry of Chinese music is turning into a desert at a terrifying
speed," he added.
He said many Chinese hold a biased view towards traditional and folk Chinese
music believing "Chinese folk instruments are roughly-made," "Chinese folk music
does not require techniques as difficult as Western classical music," and
"Chinese traditional music are not as harmonious as the symphonies."
"Such bias comes from the lack of knowledge of traditional and folk Chinese
music. Chinese music features rich rhythm and musical languages," said Liu.
But how best to preserve and revive Chinese traditional music? The question
haunts him.
"Before reviving it, we should go back to explore the 'roots.' People know of
the idea but few truly get to the core of it," he said, adding that Chinese
experts have collected and compiled about 160,000 pieces of folk and ethnic
music since 1979. But these have been written into books and stored in libraries
that few people would visit.
"The aim of collecting is not to stack them into libraries or museums but to
let more people know about them, listen to them and enjoy them. The music
heritage should be taught to the music students as well as performed for the
general public."
In the past two years, Liu and his colleagues have received much support from
the China Conservatory of Music which was established in 1964 as the leading
national conservatory focusing on Chinese music.
"Chinese music studies is what the conservatory is famous for," said Zhang
Xue, a member of the faculty staff.
"We have the advantages to explore the traditional and folk music for we have
the best faculty of these music and a good environment and government financial
support. So we hope professor Liu and his peers will protect and revive Chinese
traditional and folk music such as Nanyin."
