The Chinese vocal music sector is based on bel canto and folk-style singing. The bel canto is largely applied to sing foreign art songs and operas, while folk-style singing stresses overmuch the method of integrating Chinese and western modes, resulting in the loss of national styles and features that should have been a unique characteristic of its own. The songs sung under the method are generally new folk songs composed by musicians. The rich primitive folk songs, left over by the ancestors, remain in deep freeze. In recent years, primitive folk songs have had their day in the limelight as they frequently appear in young singer competitions in CCTV, arena contests of folk songs from north and south China, primitive folk songs vocal concerts, and all sorts of performances. They have also aroused intense interests of common people and experts. However, when all these calm down, the native-born primitive folk songs remain to fail taking its place in the country’s vocal music sector. Nie Junying, a music lecturer, points out primitive folk songs might be prosperous in some places. But on the whole and in the long run, primitive folk songs remain under severe threat essentially.
The programs of singing folk songs in new modes, in the eye of the opposition party, exactly materialize the severe challenge to the existence of primitive folk songs.
In allusion to the doubts on “singing folk songs in new ways”, the Guangming Daily published an article entitled Applaud Popularizing Folk Songs, which elaborates on the positive significance of the move in the perspective of inheriting and promoting folk songs.
Folk songs are actually a history of music, recording the labor, multiplication and struggles of Chinese people over the past thousands of years. Following the social progress in the past six decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese civilization has experienced great changes in inherent life styles. Agricultural lives and lands, the foundations of folk songs, are no longer the exclusive themes of people’s lives.
In the process of urbanization, the soils and nutrition of folk songs are losing little by little. It ends in the absence of classical works that are widespread to represent the era, although a few masterpieces are composed occasionally, in recent years. We cannot feel satisfied at the present development of the folk songs, compared with the splendor of folk songs soon after the establishment of New China in 1949. In the present days, folk songs are no longer main entertainment programs of young people. Today as the media communications are highly developed, folk songs that are out-dated in forms and come apart with the living environments of contemporary people, could hardly attract the younger generation who grow up watching Disney movies and listening to pop music. Folk songs, losing the support of young people, perform equally undesirable in the perspective of “inheritance”.
However, Chinese musicians have never abandoned their duty to write history with music. They have made many explorations and experiments to pass and promote our folk songs. When the Chinese melodies are expressed in their favorite new forms, young people who used to show no interest, start to take the initiative to understand folk songs and love folk songs through such experiments. Such attempts have explored a new way to pass down Chinese folk songs. In the perspective of developing folk songs, we have heard in the Folk Song Assembly that many musicians of the young generation have, through their own understanding, applied a large number of modern musical expression modes to re-compose folk songs, in the course of keeping the unique melodies and ethnic living contents of Chinese folk songs. Singing in praise of the time with the music language of the time is exactly the biggest feature of folk songs. By transforming folk songs into entertainment, such a program has made a useful effort in exploration of TV programs to pass down and develop folk songs.
Editor: Wen Yi
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