Singing Music of Cantonese Opera

The singing music of Cantonese Opera is mainly divided into three categories, namely, Banqiang (板腔), Quqiang (曲牌), and Shizan (诗赞). In fact, they are all related to the development of opera and Cantonese opera.

The poetry and praise category is generally also known as the rap category. The local opera music of Guangdong should be based on the rap category, such as Nanyin, Muyu, Longzhou, Banyei, Yue Acura, etc., because it is composed according to the linguistic characteristics of the Cantonese language. On the basis of the language divided into level and tone, and the sentence divided into up and down, the Cantonese rap category of the cantata, the quzan sentence pattern must be divided into two groups of up and down sentence pattern, because the Cantonese language is divided into yin and yang ping, which is different from the yin and yang ping of the northern language family, and the phonetics has a great deal of difference.

The basic characteristic of Cantonese opera singing music is the board cavity type, i.e., clappers and Erhuang, commonly known as "banghuang", which is similar to the "pihuang" of Peking Opera, so Cantonese opera also belongs to the north-south road opera, i.e., there are the south road " Erhuang" singing and the south road " Erhuang" singing and the south road "pihuang" singing. The Cantonese opera also belongs to the north-south road opera, that is, there are the south road "Erhuang" singing voice and the north road "bang bang" singing voice.

The most fundamental difference between the plate-cavity, poem-and-hymn style opera singing and the qupai style opera singing is that the plate-cavity and poem-and-hymn style opera singing do not have a fixed melody, and the melody is determined by the voice of the lyrics, so even if the same is a "slow" or "medium", there can be different melodies because of the different lyrics.

The opera cantata has a musical melody first, and then fill in the lyrics, in which the backbone of the sound can not be modified, so no matter how many hundreds of the same song, even if the lyrics are different, but the distribution of the tone must be the same, or else different to fill in a small song.

While the Cantonese opera "bang huang" has different boards and different tunes, there are mainly two types of tunes [of course, some of the newly-created tunes such as the orderly Chinese boards are not counted, and the Cantonese opera's xi pi and ren dan, which are special cases], namely, the old tunes and the new tunes of the two types.

The old style refers to the different styles developed from seven-character lines to cross lines, which are characterized by being divided into upper and lower lines according to the level and oblique meters of recent poems. It initially started with the rolling singing of QiYin's seven-character stanzas, developed into the seven-character stanza center panel, which then evolved into the cross-stanza center panel, which then evolved into the cross-stanza slow panel, which then evolved into the seven-character stanza slow panel.

The expansion of the seven-character stanza into the cross stanza is accomplished by adding a character before the first character, a character before the third character that is the opposite of the level of the second and fourth characters, and a character before the fifth character to make the cross stanza. An example is as follows: "Golden hooks and silver baits fishing for cold rivers" - a slow head dong sung by the young student Ji Tong Shang in "The Wrong Dream of the Western Building".

In addition to being sung as "Quickly", this song can also be changed into a slow or middle board with cross stanzas, as follows: "Fishing with golden hooks and silver bait, fishing alone, on a cold river."

Similarly, some of the cross-stanzas can be inverted, such as: "I want to steal the flowers from the hedge, remember the willow by the embankment, allow me to tell you about the past." --Red Plum Memoirs of a Second Life

The body of the cross-sentence form is as follows: "Hedgerow flowers, willows by the embankment, past events, bleak." In the early days of Cantonese opera, the only musical instruments used were the two-stringed instrument, the fiddle, the moon zither, the xiao flute, the three-stringed instrument, and the gongs, cymbals, and drums, which made the tones relatively simple. After the ban on Cantonese opera was lifted in the Qing Dynasty, clappers were added.

After entering the mature stage, Cantonese opera used more than forty kinds of musical instruments, which can be roughly categorized into four main types: wind instruments, plucked instruments, stringed instruments and percussion instruments. The plucked instruments include the guzheng, pipa and butterfly zither, while the gongs and drums include the pugilist's board, sha's, double-skinned drums/bang drums, cymbals, Jing gongs, hook gongs, war drums, large wooden fish, small wooden fish, large gongs and cymbals, and the big hall drums. After the reform of Cantonese Opera, many western instruments such as saxophone and violin were introduced to complete the musical effect.

The clapper belongs to the bamboo and wood percussion instruments with no fixed pitch. The north said "bang bang", the south said "south bang bang", also known as "square bang bang". The clappers used in northern opera are solid, referred to as "clappers", and southern clappers are large, medium and small, made of rectangular hollow wooden blocks, hung on a stand when playing, and played with a drum stick. The drum sticks are used to play the drums. Since the drums can be struck continuously and quickly, it is easy to create a warm and tense atmosphere. Because the clappers are used to make a beat, the "clapper" was created. Also known as Qinqiang or Western Qinqiang, it originated in Shaanxi, Shanxi and Gansu, and was slowly spread to Guangdong in the early 17th century (early Qing Dynasty). There are different styles of music, such as the first, slow, middle, rolling, sighing, and braking styles.

The wooden fish also belongs to the bamboo and wooden percussion instruments without fixed pitch. Outer shape like a fish head, the center hollowed out into a *** sound box, the front open a long fish mouth, holding a small mallet to hit the sound. Wooden fish is initially a Buddhist instrument, is also a religious music accompaniment, and later gradually used for folk instrumental music. Wooden fish tone hollow, short pronunciation, light and lively, often play the role of accompaniment, in the "number of white olive" for the beat of the beat with oh! The orchestra or musicians in the industry are known as "hut-men", and the leaders of the gongs and drums are known as "palm-boards". They sit on the left side of the stage. The musicians have to be familiar with the drums and gongs in order to create an atmosphere for the audience. For example, the first mallet for singing, the first mallet for closing, the third mallet for closing, the white drum and gong, the white olive drum and gong, the flashing mallet, the rapid wind, and the laconic drum.

In the early days, the shangmian*** was divided into ten hands: xiao flute, three-stringed xiao playing clang and blowing snail, (day) cymbal (night) two-stringed, (day) palm board (night) drum, (day) gong (night) palm board, (day) drum/secondary two-stringed, (day) report drum/drum, violin/small gong cymbals, cross-barrel dongo, small dongo, and back-up. Later, it absorbed other local repertoire and added short throat, long throat, jinghu and yangqin. Xue Juexian was the first to introduce Western musical instruments, and created the "Western Music Section", when the folk instruments included the wondrous mute bell, xylophone, wendelian, guitar, saxophone and banshu. The musical score of Cantonese Opera is called Gongshi Sheet Music, which is the traditional notation of Cantonese Opera. It is similar to that used by other local opera styles, in that it utilizes musical characters such as "合", "士", "乙", "上", "尺", "工", "反", and "六", etc., to represent musical notes in the cantata. Qu pai refers to the names of tunes that are sung outside of the qu pai system, as well as those that are sung in a plate style. Cantonese opera singing is divided into two systems, one is the plate system, and the other is the tune system. It is mainly categorized into plate, major key and minor key. The tunes have a fixed melody, including: "The Yin Tell", "On the Silver Stage", "Scolding Yulang", "Crying Farewell in the Autumn River" and "The Autumn Moon on the Pinghu Lake".