Recital & Singing

The Ming and Qing dynasties saw an increasingly rich crop of dramatic recital and singing, and music, these being the two main forms of theatrical technique. The recital and singing part mainly consisted of southern tanci (storytelling to the accompaniment of stringed instruments) and northern guci (later called dagu), together with Paizi tunes fashionable in both the north and the south. Tanci can be traced back to the "taozhen" of the Song Dynasty (This was a kind of recital and singing performance to the accompaniment of the pipa, popular in the south). It was recorded as tanci in the Ming Dynasty, but was still called taozhen in some places. During the Qing Dynasty, tanci was accompanied on the pipa and on a three-stringed instrument simply called "three-string",(Fig.1-20) which had appeared for the first time during the Song Dynasty. There also sprang up the custom of naming tunes after the skilled musicians who had created them. It is highly likely that guci was a continuation of the ci sung to drum accompaniment of Song times, but the extant guci scores were printed in the 16th or 17th century, during the Ming Dynasty. Later, guci came to be known as dagu, but the forms of dagu popular in localities differed, and different instruments were used as accompaniment, so dagu went under various names, such as Jingyun dagu in the Beijing and Tianjin area, and Lihua dagu, which used the clashing of plowshares. The main instruments used to accompany dagu were drums, clappers and the three-string.

Tanci and dagu no longer used the qu tunes format of linked sets, but one consisting of accented beats. This meant that the changes in the rhythm formed the main part of the musical structure as the means of developing the thrust of the music. This form resulted from the accumulation and articulation of the rules of changes applied in the qu tunes. It also emphasized the structure of the lines formed under the influence of the parallelism in literary compositions which is characteristic of the Chinese language. The basic form of both tanci and dagu was pairs of antithetical lines (or four lines) which were freely repeated. The form of the lines and their number followed a basic rule in all qu tunes, which was unsuitable for the system of accented beats, which produced a format of lines containing seven or ten characters each. The number of lines varied, depending on how the plot of the story developed. It was a free and lively arrangement; at the same time, the changes and developments of the clapper rhythm gave the music a more colorful dimension and increased the dramatic quality of the performance.

Paizi qu, or folk tunes, had their historical origin chiefly in the folksongs of the south. They bear different names, depending on the region they were popular in, such as qingyin, qingqu and wenchang. They were accompanied chiefly on the pipa, three-string and clappers. At different times and in different places zheng-type instruments were added. Paizi qu broke out of the mold of the northern and southern music, which was limited to sets of gong diao music, by frequently inserting into the sets qu tunes of different gong diao, creating musical contrast and development through tonal interchanges. Many of the performances using mixed recitation and singing which were produced in the Ming and Qing dynasties are still extant, and in fact are still performed. In the process of being handed down for several hundred years, there have been changes to various extents to the music, but as they were transmitted orally and there were no scores, there is no documentary evidence to show what the concrete changes were.

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