“(In Cantonese) Wherever you are from, come to Guangzhou, and we will be a family.” A Guangdong Lingnan style scene of prosperity with strong historic cultural elements was gently unfolded in the song “Guangzhou Image”.
In the evening of November 11, the original choral works concert “New Cantonese Sound – Hear Guangdong”, co-produced by the Guangzhou Opera House and the South China University of Technology (SCUT), was premiered at the Guangzhou Opera House, Experimental Theatre. A dozen of original songs and more than hundred and forty students made harmonious and splendid sound to chant the great motherland and beautiful Guangdong. It demonstrated the exploration of compositional techniques and the innovative use of harmony and voices, and furthermore, the artistic outcome illustrated the responsibility and commitment of Chinese cultural heritage from the new generation of youth.
The SCUT deputy party secretary TAO Shao Jing and vice principals ZHU Min and LI Wei Qing, the Guangdong Province Federation of Literary and Arts sole duty vice chairman ZHOU Hua, and the Guangdong Province Musicians Association sole duty vice chairman JIN Xu Geng attended the concert.
Guangzhou Opera House united SCUT, made an auditory Lingnan landscape
The concert gathered tradition and modernity, avant-garde and classic together, mixed various musical styles. It was based on the Lingnan fine traditional music culture, absorbed humanistic nutrition, and eventually revealed a choral sound painting with rich Cantonese humanity and culture.
In this concert, the selection of textual source elements, the use of musical source elements, the rhythmic rhymes, and singing techniques, all had artistic elements of localization, new epoch character, and innovation. The entire program was constructed with pieces composed by the faculty and students from SCUT. They used Cantonese traditional music as cornerstone, and applied contemporary compositional techniques, refining and restructuring local music features. Through vocal music, they wanted to develop traditional music source material and contemporary aesthetic into organic integration. “Distinguished from the usual vocal music melody, these pieces express exquisite, academic, and rational cultural quality, cultural character, and aesthetic features. They are really elegant, and these are the cultural characters I think we should focus on in the Cantonese culture.” Said professor LIANG Jun, the conductor of this concert and dean of the School of Arts, SCUT.
Earlier in 2018 the choral painting “Hear Guangdong” was selected for the firsts of Ministry of Education “Excellent Original Cultural in Campus Plan”. As a final result concert, this time SCUT, together with the Guangzhou Opera House, meticulously rearranged the performance of the pieces. Brand-new songs and brand-new compositional techniques crossing times and the entire Guangdong Province, chant the humanistic culture of Guangdong, and for the audience to better understand the pieces, the professional text writer ZHU Ming was invited to provide the song texts.
Traditions and contemporary elements crash,
“Hear Guangdong” explores new choral form
Night view of Pearl River, bank of Xiangzi Bridge, Mei ridge of Nanxiong… when various regional styles were expressed through music, diversified music characters applied with multiple artistic forms, under irregular harmonic languages, the penetrating chorus showed the scenes of different regions in sequence. The compositions in this concert experimentally explored the use of harmony and human voice.
Minor-second, augmented octave, chord with added notes, frequent modulation, and sudden modulation gave the pieces distinctive power and color. The conductor and composer professor LIANG Jun introduced: “By reconstructing Lingnan area music elements, we explore instrumental characteristics in the use of human voices. In some of the pieces, local folk source materials of Canton music are used with multiple music style elements, including those from Cantonese Opera, Peking Opera, Han Opera, and also phonetics.”
“Hear Guangdong” would include Cantonese songs as expected, the nine-tone Cantonese language in choral singing was distinguished from mandarin singing. “In our rehearsals, we made adjustments on oral resonance to make best sound effect for the stage of Guangzhou Opera House.”
To highlight the spirit and connotation of Guangdong culture as well as the elegance, the text of the songs in the concert were mainly ancient and modern poems about the living condition in Guangdong, for example “Watching the Moon and Reminiscing Old Time” by Zhang Jiuling from Shaoguan. In addition, new text with Guangdong humanistic culture characteristics was written, and the text from gong-and-drum playing lection was consulted. About the music styles, the references were mainly Guangdong local drama and folk songs, or traditional folk tunes from mountain area, for examples “Sing until the Flowers Blossomed and the Moonlight Rounded” with Hakka folk tune elements; the “Chaozhou Impression” with Chaozhou special instrumental elements and their tunes; and “Guangzhou Impression” and “Cantonese Little Tune” with Guangdong capital singing style, Cantonese opera and gong-and-drum playing lection elements.
From the pure artistic enjoyment in “Youlan Exercise” and “Song of Divination - Ode to the Plum”, to the historical passion in “Warrior” and “Walk Across Mountains and Rivers, and again to the warmness and sweetness in “Winter’s Gone and Spring Will Come”, how to make the music in Guangdong style but not copying old melodies, with modern compositional techniques but not sounding western, became the breakthrough point of this original concert production. 18 musical pieces, the harmony, accompaniment, structure, and melody, were all exploratory. The notes on the staff lines, the singing text in the gong-and-drum playing lection, these diversified elements in one concert made every tune of the songs special in style and linguistic character.
Guangzhou Opera House made a platform for practice,
aided SCUT’s performance of original compositions
By the end of the concert, “Winter’s Gone and Spring Will Come” started gently. The welcomed style of the music warmed the theatre. This song was composed during the covid pandemic, and the warm melody encouraged everyone that no matter how difficult it was, the spring would eventually arrive.
In the original choral works concert “New Cantonese Sound - Hear Guangdong”, the SCUT School of Arts Chorus, the SCUT College Students Chorus, and the 2020 Music Performance Class One of the School of Arts were performed together. The three choruses used female chorus, male chorus, and a cappella mixed chorus, demonstrated the Lingnan taste vividly on the stage of the Fifth Season of Monday Star Theatre, showing the creative thinking of the new generation of the youth students, and furthermore their responsibility and commitment to the culture.
Vice general manager of Guangzhou Opera House LIANG Lizhen said: “We are always making effort to nurture talented future artists, and in this performance, we would like to promote traditional culture in the form of stage performing arts. Unit the power of theatre and college can better support the sustainable inheritance and development of the traditional local music, and exploit more possibilities.”
The School of Arts emphasizes practice, and insists to train talented students and show artistic elaborate productions on first-class stages, and thus “form ties” with Guangzhou Opera House quite a few times. The programs that SCUT Youth Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra, Symphonic Band, Chorus, and Dance Troupe have performed at the Guangzhou Opera House including “Piano Concerto Yellow River” Symphonic Concert (2011), 3 “Savor Classics” Symphonic Concerts (2014), taking part in “Weekend Opera - Madame Butterfly and Rigoletto Highlights” (2016), opera “Aida” (2017), original dance concert “Beautiful China” (2018), National Art Foundation 2019 Small-Scale Program and Production original chamber music concert “Qin Yue Time and Space” (2019), and taking part in the global premiere of ancestral temple version dragon boat dram “Chebei Dragonboat is the Most Promising” (2019). In 4 December 2019, the School of Arts and the Guangzhou Opera House signed a memorandum and built the “Student Employment and Entrepreneurial Practice Base” together. (Photo and Text/ Correspondent: SUN Lei, School of Arts SCUT, Guangzhou Opera House)