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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Cantonese Music Used to Make My Little Head Hurt

One of my earliest memories was watching our maid ironed clothes impatiently (back when Hong Kong middle class families had help). I had to have asked her countless times: "When are you going to be done?"  She replied: "In a moment", then I would follow with: "How long is a moment? Is it a moment yet?"  More than the unbearable boredom every child felt, it was the Cantonese opera music she put on the radio, it was that sad music and the high falsetto singing that made me check and re-check the minute hand and the spot she said where a moment was to be due. 

That's probably why I disliked Cantonese operas so much in my youth. I surprised myself last weekend taking a small interest in it, instead of doing Chinese grocery shopping in Boston Chinatown, I watched the amateur performers till they packed up their instruments.



I've been told in Mainland China even traditional Chinese musicians use Western music notation. 
These Chinatown players used Chinese sheet music (工尺譜) where each of the seven full notes are represented by a character. In Cantonese music, all seven heptatonic notes are commonly used, the reason there are more than 7 different characters is because a note in different octaves may have different names (sometimes it's just a dot under the word to lower an octave). The music usually has a strong beat and there are 板s and 眼s marks for the percussion instruments on the right on some of the notes (look like accents).

The cadence and time measures follow some well known patterns (板) and is written before a segment.  This obviously leaves a lot of room for the musicians to interpret or improvise. The 板s are very similar between different regional Chinese music.

(1 or 2 columns of notes and lyrics,  Read from top to bottom, rightmost columns first. 工尺譜 could be the only actively used word based musical notation in the world.)





I was breathing down this poor lady's neck for half an hour, during breaks she was happy to explain the basic notation to me.  
  





Even the sax player used Chinese sheet music. Of all the instrument players, only one of them used western notation. The reason they can mix traditional Chinese instruments with western is because they are all tuned the same these days. Near the end of Ming dynasty, a Chinese prince 朱載堉calculated the equal temperament frequencies, it spread quickly to Europe and Johann Sebastian Bach was the most notable beneficiary. (Possibly brought to Europe by the Jesuits. The Jesuits were scholars, the importance of this 5,000 page book on music 樂律全書 had to be apparent to them.)

Here's the wiki page of its come about and how it became the foundation of western music theory:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament


The main erhu player (probably equivalent to the first violinist) was a young white man.  He didn't use any sheet music. (I saw on the news he's studying music in Asia now.)

Because the lyrics was also on the music, I knew the first opera was 三策論乾坤a story about a real Tang Dynasty hero 李靖 and the loveliest (probably fictional) girl 張出塵 (紅拂).

The 2nd was 紫釵記, this version was written by 唐滌生, a modern genius (born 1917) who wrote over 400 operas in his short life.  (The gist of this play is just a man and a woman flirting, a perfect vehicle to showcase his writing skills.)