Saving Old Songs

2015-05-26  Source: Chinadaily

Members of the Hani ethnic group in Puchun village in Yunnan province's Honghe county, Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture, sing their polyphonic folk songs, which are listed as national intangible cultural heritage.

The terraces are singing.

More than 100 members of the Hani ethnic group in Puchun village have turned this valley into a massive stage. Several women are busily transplanting rice seedlings. Perhaps the songs bouncing off every corner of the fields here are a hymn for not only nature, but the spirit of labor.

Chen Xialing, 28, stands on the ridge of fields and plucks her three-stringed instrument in celebration of this important moment.

"It is not a performance. It is a scene from daily life," Chen says.

This mountainous village is in Honghe county, in Yunnan province's Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture. An outsider coming to the village will have a white-knuckled drive, navigating the rough, zigzagging roads. This road is the only way to access the village by car, and few visitors dare to make the journey, leaving the place relatively unspoiled.

Well, almost.

Members of the Hani ethnic group in Puchun village in Yunnan province's Honghe county, Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture, sing their polyphonic folk songs, which are listed as national intangible cultural heritage.

"You cannot find many people from my generation singing songs at home. They all leave the village to look for jobs," Chen says.

She had left the village three times, but her father always persuaded her to return. The county's cultural bureau eventually offered her a musician's job.

"She sings well, and deserves to stay here," says Chen Xiniang, Chen's father, who is also a national-level inheritor of Hani polyphonic folk music. The genre was registered as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2008. "But most people singing today are older than 40. In the old days, if you couldn't sing, you cannot do anything. You would never find a girlfriend."

Unlike folk songs of other ethnic groups in southwestern China, which are usually upbeat, the songs of the Hani people have a more somber mood.

"No one can say why it is so, but you will probably understand part of the reason when reviewing Hani history," says Wu Zhiming, from Honghe county's cultural promotion office, who has collected Hani folk songs since the 1980s.

The Hani ethnic group is believed to have originally migrated from the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau after continuous conflicts with other tribes. They eventually settled in the mountainous area of southern Yunnan.

Members of the Hani ethnic group in Puchun village in Yunnan province's Honghe county, Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture, sing their polyphonic folk songs, which are listed as national intangible cultural heritage.

To survive in the rough environment, they gradually built the Hani Rice Terraces, the agricultural landscape in Honghe prefecture. The 1,300-year-old terraces were listed on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage register in 2013.

"Hani music has an important function in daily life," Wu says. "People sing to worship ancestors and nature. When I first organized villagers to perform a chorus in front of visitors, many initially refused. They consider the process sacred and secret.

"It is blasphemous to perform seedling-transplanting songs when it is not the season for that farmwork. We need to explore a more diverse repertoire of Hani festivals and rituals."

Similar rescue attempts have been made in nearby Yuanyang county in the same prefecture. Hani Ancient Song (Hani-haba), which is considered an "epic of Hani people", was registered as national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. After the Hani Terraces were recognized by UNESCO, the local government began a project to establish a database of recorded musical scores and scripts. It also plans to teach relevant courses in local primary schools.

Hani-haba is also spreading internationally. Eight community members will perform the traditional music at the Expo 2015 in Milan. However, despite the promising developments, the ongoing viability of the music is still in doubt.

Members of the Hani ethnic group in Puchun village in Yunnan province's Honghe county, Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture, sing their polyphonic folk songs, which are listed as national intangible cultural heritage.

"If traditional Hani music fails to become known by the outside world, it will soon perish," Zhu Lihong, deputy director of the prefecture's cultural bureau, says. "However, simple presentations of techniques are also far from enough, and relevant academic research is insufficient."

"Generally speaking, today's adaptations of ethnic music in Yunnan are superficial. We need to truly explore the humanity and characteristics beneath the surface," says Huang Hui, a Beijing-based musician best known for his work with ethnic music.

He says that after the polyphonic Dongzu Dage choir (Grand Song of the Dong People) from Guizhou province became a worldwide hit, other ethnic communities in southwestern China started to embellish their original songs by adding harmonies to realize similar success.

"Traditional Hani polyphonic folk songs usually only have three basic parts and impromptu variations, but we often find many parts deliberately added to performances," he says. "Authenticity is more important than complexity. If we apply Western music criteria to judge folk music, it will be very dangerous."

Nevertheless, practitioners of Western music are still able to learn from Hani folk music to create unique flavors. For example, China National Symphony Orchestra plans to hold a concert next spring presenting their adaptation of traditional Hani music.

"Some unique parts of Hani music aren't found elsewhere and are able to change the music textbooks," says Guan Xia, director of CNSO, who recently visited Honghe to prepare for the new work.

He says that unlike most folk music styles in China, which usually have a stable tonality, Hani songs have abundant varieties and freer expressions.