Wu Ge

Wu Ge

The folk songs and ballads of Wu area are generally called "Wu songs", which is an important part of Wu culture. Wu Song, originated in the southeast of Jiangsu Province, is a folk literature and art with strong national and regional characteristics. It has a history of more than 3200 years. Wu songs include "Songs" and "Ballads". In terms of content, they include not only love songs, but also labor songs and current political songs. According to musical forms, Wu songs include six kinds of music: Ming Xiao and Wu Sheng. It is one of the national intangible cultural heritage.

On May 20, 2006, Wu Ge was approved by the State Council of the people's Republic of China and listed in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list, heritage number: i-22.

Historical origin

Wu Song is the general name of Han folk songs and ballads in Wu area in the history of literature. It originated in the southeast of Jiangsu Province. Suzhou is the center of Wu Song. Wu Song is the oral literature creation of the lower class people in Wu dialect area. It mainly relies on the folk oral transmission and inherits from generation to generation. It is a rhyme with strong national and local characteristics. Wu Song has a long history. The songs of Chu evoke the soul: "Wu Wei, Cai you, play Da Lu some". When Guo Maoqian compiled Yuefu Poetry Anthology in Wei, Jin, southern and Northern Dynasties, he incorporated the collected Wu songs into Qing Shang poetry anthology Most of the five character sentences in Wu Song in Quci are love songs, and Midnight Song has the characteristics of folk songs at that time.

In the Ming Dynasty, Feng Menglong collected a large number of Wu songs which were popular from the song and Yuan Dynasties to the middle of the Ming Dynasty, recorded them in Wu dialect, and compiled them into folk songs and guazhier, most of which were love songs. The Qing Dynasty is the mature and prosperous period of long narrative Wu songs. A large number of long narrative Wu songs are preserved in the book business printing, literati copying and folk artists' oral transmission.

Before and after the May 4th movement, Peking University launched the Ballad Movement and published ballad weekly, Wu Ge Jia Ji, Wu Ge Yi Ji and Wu Ge Xiao Shi. Since the 1980s, a large number of Wu songs have been collected, sorted out and studied, especially the discovery and excavation of long narrative Wu songs, and the compilation and publication of "three sets of folk literature integration" Ballad volume, so that a large number of Wu songs have been salvaged and preserved. In the 21st century, we have published several million words of Wu Song oral and research materials, such as China Baimao folk song collection, China luxui folk song collection, Wu Song heritage collection and China Wu Song forum.

Cultural characteristics

primary coverage

Folk song of Lu Market

Luxui folk song is located in the southeast of Suzhou FenHu Valley folk song. It has a long history and is widely spread in luxui, Xinta, Beishe, Lili and other places. What made the folk songs of luxui famous was the publication of the long narrative Wu Song "five girls" collected and organized by Zhang Fanglan and other scholars in the early 1980s. "Wu Nong's Zhuyu dialect has been passed down to the fishing village. The old people in the village have a long lasting song. Mo Daohan's family has no great work. It's a long song" five girls. " This is a famous folklorist Professor Zhao Jingshen wrote seven unique poems for five girls. This epic is more than 2900 lines long. Her appearance completely broke the traditional saying that "Han nationality has no long narrative poem", and attracted the attention and investigation of scholars all over the country and even overseas. In 1998, luxui town was officially named "hometown of folk songs" by Jiangsu Provincial Department of culture.

Baimao folk song

Baimao folk song was born in the southeast of Changshu, Suzhou, and is known as "a unique place in Wu". Its history can be traced back to the time when a branch of Liangzhu Culture moved to Wuqiu village in Changshu baimaotang basin, which connects Taihu Lake and Yangtze River, about 4500 years ago Baimao folk song is an outstanding representative of Suzhou Wu Song. Even Japanese friends have written an inscription praising "the origin of Japanese folk song seems to be in the hometown of Baimao folk song in China". Although Changshu dialect, which is used to sing Baimao folk songs, is a little stiff compared with other Wu dialects, it shows a natural, frank, fresh and fluent style, forming a unique "three calls and three rings" melody in the Wu Song system.

Heyang folk song

Heyang folk song takes Fenghuang town of Zhangjiagang as its singing center, including port, Tianzhuang, Xizhang and surrounding areas. Compared with the folk songs of luxui and Baimao, the folk songs of Heyang are known to the world later because of the dense river network and closed environment, but the discovery of Zhuge is enough to shock the academic circles. It brings people's attention to the ancient Yellow Emperor period, and even rewrites the history of Chinese music and poetry. It is a living fossil of ancient Chinese music culture. Today's Zhangjiagang City is the only named "hometown of Wu songs in China". In addition to Zhuge, which can be traced back to ancient times, Heyang folk song is also the longest and most copied representative of Wu songs.

Jiangnanpo

Tian Shan song is also one of the folk songs in the south of the Yangtze River. It is mainly concentrated in Liantang, Zhaoxiang, Jinze and Shangta in Qingpu, Shanghai, Wujiang and Wuxian in Jiangsu, Jiashan and Jiaxing in Zhejiang.

Shanghai Tian Shan song

Shanghaitian folk song is sung by farmers when they work rice and weeding rice. It is in the form of one person leading the singing and others taking turns to sing. It is also called "yaomai folk song", "luoyangge" and "Datou mountain folk song". Shanghaitian folk songs are characterized by high pitch, free melody, and a large number of tunes and multi voice parts. The lyrics mainly come from the real life of the local people, and mostly show the people's labor, life, thought, love, etc. they are important materials for observing the social life, customs and folk customs of Shanghai and the surrounding rice growing areas.

Other branches

Suzhou also has many branches of Wu songs, such as Yangcheng Lake fishing songs, which have the characteristics of Jiangnan Water Town and are quite different from coastal fishing songs; Taicang Shuangfeng folk songs, which provide music materials for the "Shuimo tune" reform of Kunqu opera; Shengpu folk songs, Baiyangwan folk songs, Shiwan folk songs, kunbei folk songs, etc.

Main types

Wu Song originated from labor, which is closely related to the rice culture and boat culture in the south of Jiangsu Province. According to its content, Wu songs can be divided into ten categories

1、 The leading song is the starting folk song.

2、 Pan song, also known as "Q & a folk song", is sung by two or more people.

3、 Labor songs include farming songs, boat songs and craftsman songs.

4、 The working people comment on the current politics in the form of folk songs.

5、 Ritual songs, including folk festivals, weddings and funerals, etc.

6、 Love song is commonly known as "private love folk song".

7、 Life songs, with daily life as the theme, are composed and sung by themselves or in pairs.

8、 Most of the historical legend songs are about historical celebrities.

9、 Children's songs include lullabys, game songs, tongue twisters, etc.

10、 Long narrative Wu Song, such as "five girls", "Meng Jiangnu" and so on.

Among them, love songs are the most numerous, lyrical and rich in language.

artistic characteristics

Wu Song is performed by folk oral singing, and oral singing is the basic way of its artistic expression. Wu Song is a free song, which is sung without any musical instruments. There are several types of songs, such as lead songs (commonly known as "Song head" and long narrative songs as "Nao head"), labor songs, love songs, life customs and rituals songs, children's songs and long narrative songs. Liu Bannong wrote a preface to Gu Jiegang's Wu Ge Jia Ji, saying that the interest of Wu Ge is nothing more than "language, local customs and art", and "these three things, simply speaking, are the soul of the nation.".

There are also six kinds of music in Wu Songs: "Ming Xiao", "Hao Sheng", "you Qu", "ban zhe", "Liu Bian" and "Ba Jie", among which the latter three kinds have existed since the Han Dynasty. In addition, there is "shenxianqu", which is a local folk sacrificial music. In Wu Sheng, there is also an innovative arrangement method based on the old music, which is called "change".

Wu Song is rich in language, using Fu, Bi, Xing and other techniques, rendering, laying out, using words to make sentences is very simple. In addition to short sentences, long sentences are often used to strengthen the emotional color. The melody of Wu Song is soft and smooth, euphemistic and undulating, high pitched and soothing, just like flowing clouds and flowing water.

Singing style

Wu's songs are changed into four short folk songs. The singer mainly narrates the content of the story, using a basic tone to change according to the length of the sentence structure of the lyrics, but the falling tone of the four sentences remains unchanged. As far as the singer is concerned, a kind of basic melody changes repeatedly, which is easy to remember and spread, and also conforms to the aesthetic habits of the audience.

Wu Song is a kind of "Tuge" without musical instrument accompaniment. When singing, it has "Yingge" (commonly known as "Getou" and long narrative song as "naotou"). Its contents are classified into "labor songs", "love songs", "life customs songs", "children's songs", "long narrative songs" and so on. The music forms of HAOGE are generally divided into two categories. One is "short song", which includes not only short folk songs commonly known as "four sentence head folk songs", such as "shiyangge", "weeding rice song", "qianlongge", "boating song", "weeding song", "herding song", etc.; but also "Shidiao Xiaoqu" sung in rest, festivity, entertainment and other occasions, as well as some songs directly accompanied by labor singing. The other is "long narrative Wu Song". This kind of Wu Song's music uses the short song to change to carry on the singing, generally by one person to lead the singing, everybody takes turns to receive the singing, calls it "the Xiangshan song" or "the falling Yangge", also calls "Shoushan song".

Representative works

Wu Ge's representative works are "four court pillars", "one main beam" and "one golden beam". "Si Ting Zhu" refers to Xue Liu Lang, Xiao Qing Qing, Chen wa Gan and Jin Bu Huan; "Yi Zheng Liang" refers to Shen Qi Ge; "Yi Jin Liang" refers to Hua Bao Shan. Huabaoshan tells the story of the peasants who were oppressed by the government. Under the leadership of huabaoshan, they rose up to resist, took up the sword and spear, held an uprising, and fought many bloody battles. Zhonghua Baoshan stormed into battle until they died. Their descendants inherited their will and continued to fight

Chinese PinYin : Wu Ge