Chaoshan Music (Cold Ducks Padding in the Water)

This ancient form of folk music is popular in the plains area of Chaoshan in Guangdong Province and part of Fujian Province. It originated in the Central Plains, and when it was brought to the Chaoshan area it was influenced by the local dialect and temperament.It interacted with the local.

folk music, and the result was a mixture of Yiyang, Kunqu, Han and Qin musical elements, together with local tunes and musical structures. This kind of music is played on a set of instruments including the two-string, suona and shenbo gong. The two-string, with its sharp, clear sound, is mainly used for tone poems; the shenbo is a large, broad gong tapped with a muffled stick, giving out a rounded and mellow sound. Apart from these, the yehu, yangqin and small three-string are also used. Chaoshan music is divided into the two broad categories of indoor and outdoor: the outdoor variety is played mainly on gongs and drums while the indoor variety features tone-poem music, ancient tunes played on pipes, "fine music" and shrine music. Tone poems are a general name for poems set to music and played on plucked instruments. Fine music is performed either by soloists or by small ensembles, and is divided into two types ?soft and hard. Some of the best examples of Chaozhou music are as follows:

Cold Ducks Paddling in the Water. This is one of the ten most famous Chaozhou tone poems, and from it we can get a taste of the nature of the rhythms and characteristics of the tunes of Chaozhou music. The piece is divided into three parts. The second part uses elements from the first part, simplifies the tone, and forms a completely new rhythm with a flurry of beats ?a technique known as kaopai, or "rapping".

Miss Green Willow. This work chiefly uses a five-note scale. There are three changes of tempo, viz slow beats, changing to rapping beats, and then to rapidly flowing beats. This is one of the traditional pieces of music for the zheng and the Chaozhou genre, and is known among musicians as the "mother of tone poems".

Lady Zhaojun's Lament. This famous tone poem describes the grief of Wang Zhaojun, a palace lady who was sent far from home and kindred to marry a Hun chieftain.

Another tone poem, The Lion Plays With the Ball, is full of local color, and depicts the bustling scene of lion dancers playing with a ball on a folk festival day. It uses the techniques of dotted notes, syncopation, duplicated notes and long, fixed notes to change the mood of expression with every change of theme. The frequent shifts in the gong mode give a special flavor to the rhythm. The small drum which leads the orchestra not only controls the changes in tempo, it also adds touches of its own to the atmosphere.

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