Mr. Pu Hengjian is a first-class scholar and a senior scholar whom I respect. His online articles have a large number of readers, enliven the academic community, and contribute a lot of insights. Of course, as a post-graduate student, I sometimes can't fully grasp Mr. Pu's deep meaning - for example, Mr. Pu recently wrote an article titled "The Foolish 'Word and Word'".
Can Chinese singing ignore the "words and lines"?Of course, for example, Mr. Pu's example of "You came from the snowy mountains" in "Song of the Yangtze River". Why?Because "Song of the Yangtze River" is a Western tune, ** is a Western style as a whole, if it is required according to the words, the effect of singing will be nondescript.
But this does not mean that Chinese-style songs are "stupid" according to the word.
China has a long and colorful oral culture tradition, and the traditional Chinese singing art is an outstanding representative of Chinese oral culture. Oral culture attaches great importance to the communication effect on the spot, and "transmission must be sought", which inevitably involves the problem of phonetic and semantic coordination.
For singing in Western languages, there is no question of the pronunciation of words, because Western Indo-European languages have no tones. However, Chinese is the representative of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and the most prominent feature of the Sino-Tibetan language family is that the characters have tones - as we all know, Mandarin Chinese has four tones: Yin Ping, Yang Ping, Shang Sheng, and Go Sheng. However, Mr. Pu believes that "the stupidity of following the character and the tone is also deeply informed" also has deep historical resources, and the "Latinization of Chinese characters" movement from the New Culture Movement to the early period of New China was to abolish the tone and Chinese characters and replace them with Latin letters. However, the cancellation of tones in Chinese is obviously inappropriate, and the great linguist Zhao Yuanren wrote several homophones such as "Shi's Lion Eating History" to illustrate this problem.
After all, singing is different from language, so can you ignore the tone of Chinese characters?On the one hand, the requirements for tone in Chinese singing are certainly not as high as those in Chinese languageOn the other hand, Chinese-style Chinese singing cannot but consider the words and lines.
First of all, we need to see the difference in Chinese characters. Chinese characters not only have tones, but also have a particularly large number of homophones. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic, and all the pronunciations of modern Chinese add up to only 418 (including uncommon pronunciations such as yo, m, n, ng, and ê), but there are 8,505 standard characters (excluding 5,187 variant characters), with an average of 20 different Chinese characters under each pronunciation. At this time, if the lyrics do not take into account the tone of the Chinese language at all, it is easy to "invert the words", or even the foreign tone.
To this day, I clearly remember the situation when I learned Xi song "Learning Xi Lei Feng's Good Example" when I was a child. There is a sentence in the song, "Stand firm and fight (dòu) zhi (zhì) 强 (qiáng)", but the three characters "dou", "zhi" and "strong" are dubbed with low ping, high ping, and low ping, and the similar tones are yin ping, yin ping, and upper sound (the word "strong" follows the previous character gaoping and has the momentum of the upper sound), which has puzzled me for several years about what "dōu zhī qiǎng" is.
Not only children will have this threshold of understanding, but also specialized vocalists are not immune in the face of "new singing", such as Xue Liang, a ** scientist, has talked about this problem many times: "When I sit in front of the TV and radio and listen to solo singing, I often hear it.
Three or four sentences, I can't hear whether the singing is in Chinese or a foreign language, let alone understand what it means. ”
Secondly, we need to see the difference in Chinese singing. In Chinese singing, the sound of a character is often long, and it is common for words to be more than 10 seconds long, and in extreme cases, it can be more than 1 minute. This is absolutely impossible in Spanish singing. Such a long pronunciation also makes it possible for it to conform to the tonal trend.
Because there are many homophones in Chinese characters, and it is an isolated language without tense, numeric and additional morpheme changes, Western linguists believe that Chinese is relatively inferior. But this is only the arrogance of the West. First, the concept is based on Western languages, ignoring the expressive role of tones. Second, the concept is based on written characters, ignoring the meaning and expression of actual language. For example, "a handful of the handle", four consecutive homophonic but different meanings of the word "put", from the character point of view, is repetitive or even stuttering, in essence, it is a sentence that needs to mobilize pause, length, weight, tone amplitude, subtle tone, shape, expression and other means of expression.
Some of the traditional Chinese singing arts are in the form of songs, the tunes are roughly the same but the lyrics are different, but the subtlety of China's ** lies in the "dead songs and live singing". Peking Opera performance artist Mei Lanfang uses the "small sound method" to straighten out the language, avoid inverted words, and achieve smooth expression. At the same time, the "moist cavity" produced by the "small sound method" has also formed the characteristics of China, enriching the expression techniques and artistic types of human beings. For example, in the case of "We Are the Yellow River Taishan", experienced and conscious singers will use the "small tone method", which can not only avoid ambiguity but also make the singing more colorful.
Does the art of Chinese style singing have to be based on words?Not necessarily. If the duration of a word is very short, it is not easy to require that the sound of the word must conform to the tone. Even those words that are not short at the time, if they are not in an important position, they can not be considered according to the word line. Moreover, art allows for differences, if ten out of ten words are according to the words, and do not dare to cross the thunder pool by half a step, then the words are no longer a valuable singing consciousness, but become a singing shackle that needs to be smashed. Of course, if the ten words are completely ignored and sound strange in foreign tones, then it is really intolerable not to be abandoned by the masses.
Will it bring about the problem of "monotony" of Chinese singing?At first glance, this is true, but if you are more exposed to Chinese-style singing works, you will know that it is not only not monotonous, but also creates a unique Chinese art of "dragging". In short, the Chinese characters with a long time value in singing need to be divided into character cavity and passing cavity. The word cavity should consider the tone of the word, and the cavity behind the word cavity can be played freely, and the longer cavity also forms a splendid drag cavity. This is the basis for the Chinese style of singing art, which can last more than ten seconds per word.
"According to the words" is not the highest law of singing, let alone the only law of singing, but it is not "stupid", but a valuable singing consciousness that Chinese style singers must have.
Zhang Yiwen.