Author: Wang Zheng.
At the end of last year, I suddenly saw that Yangzhou and Taizhou, Jiangsu Province set off a wave of commemoration of Zheng Banqiao at the same time, which turned out to be the 330th anniversary of the birth of Mr. Zheng Xie, who was the head of the Eight Monsters of Yangzhou in the Qing Dynasty and was originally from Xinghua and has now been reassigned to Taizhou.
I can't help but recall the Spring Festival party of the Intermediate Court in 2020, where I led the veteran cadres choir to perform on stage, and the performance was the Yangzhou Qingqu "Banqiao Daoqing" written by Zheng Xie.
At that time, there was this idea, firstly, because "Banqiao Daoqing" is a famous passage that Mr. Zheng Xie has recited for generations, secondly, because the Yangzhou Qingqu accompanied by the chant is a folk tune with local characteristics of national intangible cultural heritage, and thirdly, because the content of the lyrics has the practical significance of suppressing evil, promoting good, warning the world, and persuading the world.
After making up my mind, I began to plan and operate it on my own. That is, from song selection to editing, from teaching songs to leading singing, from modeling to sets, from costumes to props, everything must be done personally. Although it was hard work, I enjoyed it.
It is better to be happy alone than to be happy with all, and I will take advantage of the Spring Festival leisure to sort out and share those trivial things 4 years ago, even if I am smiling and generous.
The two cities of Yangtai commemorate the 330th anniversary of Zheng Banqiao's birth.
The so-called Taoism, as the name suggests, is originally a Taoist vocal art, which aims to tell the story of cultivating the virtuous and persuading the good, that is, "the Tao is reasonable". At first, it was used for monks to propagate teachings and raise donations, and later evolved into a kind of folk rap art in China.
Zheng Xie returned in Yongzheng three years because of the frustration of seeking progress in Beijing, returned to Yangzhou to start the Tao, Yongzheng completed the first draft of ten songs in seven years, which lasted 14 years and repeatedly revised until the eighth year of Qianlong, which was named "Little Song" at that time. Because Zheng Xie claimed to be a native of Banqiao Road, he called it "Banqiao Road", and the engraved book was all the rage in the south, especially in the Huaiyang area, and it was circulated from the Qing Dynasty to ** 200 years.
Strange to say, Zheng Xieshi called the "Three Uniques of Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting", and these three seem to be inferior to the ten "small songs" compiled by him, so elegant and vulgar have a far-reaching impact. Even in October 2000, the elders of his hometown Yangzhou received the French ** Chirac who visited China in his hometown, and he personally sang a piece of "Banqiao Love" with his own hands with fishing drums and simple boards.
Today, "Banqiao Road" has been included in the list of intangible cultural heritage protection in Jiangsu Province, and it has also been featured in the 2024 China Intangible Cultural Heritage Spring Festival Gala.
Zheng Banqiao's handwritten "Little Singing" is engraved with ten poems.
After finishing the lyrics, let's talk about the tune.
According to the "Zhang Jutian Qin Score" engraved in the Daoguang period of the Qing Dynasty, the singing tone of "Banqiao Daoqing" adopts the Yangzhou Qingqu "Playing Children" song card. However, there are also changes in the ten mood styles, one is the "palace" tone and the other is the "feather" tone. In Yangzhou, the "palace" tune is the most popular, and the well-known "Old Fisherman" is one of them.
The first time I heard the Taoist mood was in the early 80s, when the Hong Kong comedy film "Three Smiles" caused a sensation in the mainland. In the film, Tang Bohu chased Qiu Xiang to the door of the Prime Minister's Mansion of Hua Taishi, pretending to be a poor student and singing to the big housekeeper about his life experience:
Crying Yuanhe, hanging soldiers, sighing Mengzheng, sad Han Xin. **Who has mercy in Kure City?There is no need to ask where to find the charcoal in the snowwas angry and hated in vain, only to end up on the long street, looking forward to the leftovers of cold rice. The lyrics format of the song is modeled after the Banqiao Road.
In particular, the first line of the lyrics "Crying Yuanhe" tells the allusion of Zheng Yuanhe, a scholar in the Tang Dynasty, who once begged along the street and even taught to sing elegy before he won the title in high school.
Zheng Banqiao also pretended that Zheng Yuanhe was his distant ancestor, and confessed in the preface to "Little Song": "My ancestor Yuanhe father-in-law, wandered in the world, and taught songs and songs. This shows that the literati and scholars have been singing Taoism since ancient times, and it is not a loss to inherit folk art.
The first on the right of the screen sings and cries for Tang Bohu.
There are ten poems in "Banqiao Taoism", which respectively describe the living conditions of fishermen, woodcutters, farmers, Taoists, monks, scholars, beggars, hermits and other people at the bottom of the Qing Dynasty society.
There are also four classic versions sung by "Prince of Yangju" Lee Jung-sung, and I decided to choose three of them. The first song "Old Fisherman" was kept in place, and the order of the second song "Old Woodcutter", which is also in the "Palace" key, and the third song "Old Scholar" in the "Yu" key, were interchanged, so that the key was interspersed with the beginning and the end to form an auditory change between the tracks. Abandon the fourth song "Little Beggar", firstly, the singing time can be appropriately shortened, and secondly, the New Year's Eve will be begging.
I went online ** multiple versions of "Banqiao Dao Qing" accompaniment**, and then compared the sound quality and chose the best one. Because the repertoire is shuffled and rearranged, the selected accompaniment** needs to be edited by computer software, and the melody needs to be seamlessly transitioned after the order is reversed.
The hard work pays off,I used several audio software to debug repeatedly and the result was satisfactory,**Natural and smooth without revealing splicing traces,You might as well listen to the background of this article**。
It was unexpectedly difficult to start teaching songs, not because of the problem of reading music. Mo said that everyone is familiar with the melody of the well-known "Old Fisherman", and I took the initiative to lead the singer of "Old Scholar", which is the turn of the high and low song, and the key difficulty is to reflect the charm of the language.
In the past, I had to correct the inaccurate pronunciation of Mandarin among the singers, but now I have to correct the inaccurate pronunciation of their Yangzhou dialect. Because Yangzhou Qingqu is sung in dialects, the pronunciation of certain words in authentic Yangzhou dialect is very different from that of Mandarin. For example, the word "oblique" in the lyrics of "Banqiao Daoqing", Yangzhou dialect reads like "cha";For example, the word "teach" is pronounced like "high", the word "street" is pronounced like "the", and the word "lane" is pronounced like "rammed". As for ancient phonetic words such as "clip", "house", and "mo", the pronunciation of Mandarin is far from the same. Mixing and matching to make a "Yanpu" sounds very unauthentic.
It's a pity that no matter how "Zhengyin" I am, it won't help, someone took out a certain famous actor to sing the Taoist and spit out the words individually, which is an example of "Yanpu". In the end, I couldn't force it, so I had to increase my voice when I encountered a keyword when leading the singing, guiding and even suppressing the voice of the backing singer.
In fact, the dialect is like a living fossil, the Yangzhou dialect was the official dialect of Jianghuai in the Qing Dynasty where Zheng Banqiao lived and created.
I explained the situation of Banqiao to my colleagues in the choir.
I asked an actor to lead the first song "Old Fisherman", I led the second song "Old Scholar", and finally the two of them led the third song "Old Woodcutter". In order to make the image of the two lead singers a little contrasting, I plan to change into a retro look.
So what did the ancients of the Qing Dynasty look like?I searched for Zheng Banqiao's ** on the Internet, and found that whether it was a painting or a statue, he always had a goatee on his chin and a big braid on his back, so I decided to adopt this look.
And to buy an outfit, you have to buy a lot of utensils such as costumes, props, braids, beards, etc. Although I didn't have a professional team and didn't have sufficient funds, I still decided to go for the sake of simplicity and start the local law.
Thanks to the almighty **, I'm afraid you can't think of it, don't worry that you can't buy it. Take fake braids as an example, theatrical supplies ** will display a variety of styles for purchase, the color alone is black, white, flower white, and the texture is divided into straight rod wire, curved rod wire, and the structure is also divided into head coverings and no head coverings. Considering the age of the character and the difficulty of dressing up, I chose a "horseshoe cap" with a white straight rod silk half-hood.
In order to highlight the long braid, I occasionally deliberately turned to the side of the stage, and swayed back and forth on the stage to make the braid hanging behind my back swing out, otherwise the audience would be "blind" if they couldn't see it.
Long braids allow the old naughty boy to travel back to the era of the little brother.
Wearing a fake braid is quite easy to do, because it has a gauze woven hood at one end, and after wearing it, press and tighten the tie with a hat, and the movement is not large, so it will not fall off easily.
It is a bit difficult to put on a fake beard, because it is all glued to the face. It is also divided into two pieces, and it is necessary to trim it appropriately according to the shape of the face. Because I didn't hire a makeup artist, I was worried that the paste would be crooked or unnatural. And when singing, the lips keep opening and closing to make a sound, and if you don't fall down in the middle of the performance, you can wear it!
So I came up with the idea of growing a beard on my upper lip, so that I could only stick to the beard and reduce the risk by half. So for about two months, I shaved every morning, shaved my chin, and left my upper lip and beard to grow. Until the eve of the performance, a sparse and mottled stubble was finally harvested.
In order to make the real beard on the upper lip similar to the fake beard on the chin, and similar to the color of the fake braid on my head, I also bought a black hair dye that looks like lipstick and a bottle of white hair dye called "grandma gray" online, and applied the local modification as appropriate.
Try the process of combining real beard with fake beard.
As mentioned earlier, fishing drums and simple boards should be used as accompaniment instruments to sing Taoism.
The fishing drum is also known as the road tube and the bamboo qin, which is made of a hollowed-out bamboo tube about three feet long and made of skin at one end, and hit it with two fingers. It is said that fish maw was used as the skin at the earliest, so it was called the fishing drum, and later the pig and sheep leather were mostly used. Jianban, also known as Jianzi, is made of two pieces of bamboo board relative to each other into a clamp shape, with two pieces of joint strike.
In the legend, one of the eight immortals, Zhang Guolao is regarded as the ancestor of Taoism, as can be seen in the picture below, Zhang Guolao rides a donkey upside down, and the magic weapon in his arms is the fishing drum, and the simple board is inserted in the fishing drum.
In order to make the fishing drum and the simple board and the bamboo hat harmonious, I chose an unpretentious fishing drum in the primary color. However, in order to blend in with the festive atmosphere of the Spring Festival, I used bright red tape, butterflies tied with red silk, tassels with Chinese knots, and stickers with bronzing blessing characters, etc., to decorate them carefully and deliberately make them more gaudy.
Because the fishing drum and the simple board are only used to beat the rhythm and harmonize with the song, I tried a few times in circles in the conference room alone, and I didn't pay attention to the "one board and three eyes" when percussion, and I found a feeling and waited for the scene to play.
Comparison of props before and after the decoration of the fishing drum board.
In the front styling**, my outfit has already appeared. I chose a light gray cotton and linen gown, plus a dark black dark flower waistcoat, thinking that the person who sang the sermon would not wear it too luxuriously. Another leading actor, I chose a dark green ** style Chinese kaftan with the same style as star Lu Yi for him, which was stained with a little fashion atmosphere.
As for the members of the singing team, there should also be a difference between male and female costumes. **The style introduction on it is long and complicated, and it is dazzling to see. In the end, the actor chose the "Black Men's Stand-up Collar, Tang Costume Wedding Host, Singer, Master of Ceremonies, Stage Choir, Art Examination, Nightclub Erhu Performance Costume", and the actress chose "Xiaoxunhu Chinese Wedding Ceremony, Female Sisters, Bridesmaids, Captain Dress**May Fourth Guzheng Performance Costume".
Among them, ** was also changed once, and at first the merchant sent a slim version. Although our grandmother-level actresses still have a girlish heart, if they are asked to put on a girl's skirt with a small waist, the concubine really can't do it!
Banqiao Taoist actor four kinds of costume purchase samples.
In addition to the costumes, consider accessories such as the leader's folding fan, scarf, play boots, belt, etc. A sheepskin fan drum printed with a peony pattern was also specially purchased for the actress, together with a pair of big red drumsticks with tassels, which can not only match the beat of the fishing drum, but also enrich the dance posture, making the singing team more bright and smart.
In addition to buying a hat and a gourd according to the needs of the plot, I also bought a bronze medal of Jiugong Bagua online, and wore a rope to hang on my waist. Although it is not as big as a slap and looks inconspicuous, just such a special small object can highlight the innate Taoist elements of Taoism.
Hats, gourds, fans, pendants, scarves, play boots and other accessories.
The stage scenery of the Spring Festival Gala is usually a bright red background, which is extremely incongruous for singing Yangzhou Qingqu "Banqiao Daoqing". So I decided to make a private custom by myself, trying to transform the poetry of "The Old Fisherman" into a painting.
I first searched for a Chinese ink painting by the mountains and rivers as the base map, and used PS to move the boat in the lake to the shore in the original picture, reflecting the realm of "leaning against the mountain cliff, near the water bay, and the flat boat coming and going without ties".
Then the figure sitting on the boat in the original picture was erased, and then the image of "old fisherman, a fishing rod" was cut out from the ** of other painting styles close to the **, and placed on the shore of the mountain cliff lake. Then, the same technique was used to add the shots of "sand gulls dotting light waves far away" and "raising the moon and the east mountain".
Finally, in the lower right corner of the set, a spare stamp of "Where is there a fairyland in the world" was stamped, as well as a private seal carved by a friend for me, which not only added white but also implanted his own labor mark.
Panorama of the Spring Festival Gala Banqiao Daoqing Singing Stage.
On January 20, 2020, this court borrowed the Art Museum of Xinhua Middle School next door to hold a Spring Festival party, which was actually an amateur literary and artistic performance of the grassroots courts in various counties and cities.
In the early stage of planning, I once revealed the idea of dressing up in ancient costumes to the teacher who was invited by the unit to tutor, and when I saw that he didn't think so, I stopped saying it and insisted on it secretly. I don't know where the obsession and self-confidence come from, and the imaginary success scene always comes to mind.
Because I had the silent mode turned on, even the other members of the rehearsal every day couldn't guess what I was going to look like when I went on stage.
When I came out, it was like opening a blind box. glanced at the audience's surprised expressions and understood that the performance had achieved the expected effect. Suddenly felt that the hard work was not in vain, and the corners of his mouth couldn't help but show a smug smile and bow slightly.
The author leads one of the stills of Banqiao Daoqing's old scholars.
Shortly after the Spring Festival party, the first wave of the new crown epidemic suddenly hit, and social activities were immediately suspended, and the majority of residents were trapped at home.
On the fifth day of the first lunar month of that year, I modified one of my stills with PS, turning it into a Taoist wearing a fisherman's hat, a protective mask on his face, a fishing drum in his arms, a gossip pendant on his waist, a pill gourd on his back, and a plague-repellent talisman in his hand.
I also combined the singing scene of "Banqiao Taoism", and drafted a couplet in the WeChat picture: "Dedicate a small song to eliminate sorrow and relieve depression, and give Taoist immortal talismans to drive away the epidemic and ward off evil spirits", which may not be peaceful, but it is a good wish.
At that time, I seemed to have a hunch that there would be no Spring Festival celebrations in the next few years. Therefore, I cherish this performance and keep a lot of relevant information. Of course, what I look forward to even more is that through the image display, the younger generation will also love Banqiao Daoqing and Yangzhou Qingqu, and inherit the precious cultural heritage of the motherland.
Exactly: singing a song of the sunset evening, the aftermath is endless.
Taoism means spring and autumn pen, Banqiao rhyme ancient and modern.
The Year of the Dragon, the Lantern Festival, the snow and the pen.
During the new crown epidemic, I simulated Taoist New Year's greetings.
This article is original: Wang Zheng Drafting: Wang Zheng Editor: Ji Shuqing.
*Please obtain author's permission.