Xiansuo String Ensembles

Introduction

Northern ensembles of plucked and bowed strings, without gongs or winds

Xiansuo music is the northern string ensemble of plucked instruments such as the zheng, pipa, sanxian and yangqin joined by bowed huqin fiddles, with no gongs, drums, sheng or wind pipes. In Nanyang, Henan, the bantou pieces began as instrumental preludes played before the singing of Henan quzi, recorded in the towns by the Chongzhen reign of the late Ming and mostly in a 68-beat form. In Heze, Shandong, ten classic suites are each built from the parent tune Baban, whose variants for each instrument fit together, so the practice is called 'pengbaban'. In Beijing the 'suite plucking' repertoire was written down in gongche notation by the Mongol nobleman Rong Zhai in his Xiansuo beikao of 1814, later edited as the Thirteen Suites for Strings.

Timeline

1. 1630OriginBy record, in the Chongzhen reign the bantou pieces appeared in the towns with Henan quzi, and by the early Qing they were popular in Nanyang, Biyang, Dengxian, Xuchang and Kaifeng.
2. 1814EvolutionIn 1814 the Mongol nobleman Rong Zhai (Mingyi) notated the 'suite plucking' repertoire he and other princes had learned from blind musicians as the Xiansuo beikao, with separate parts for each instrument.
3. 1955EvolutionUnder Yang Yinliu, Cao Anhe and Jian Qihua transcribed the Xiansuo beikao as the Thirteen Suites for Strings, published in volumes in 1955 and 1962.
4. 2011ImpactBantou music was listed in the first national batch in 2006 (II-46), and Heze xiansuo music in the third batch in 2011 as xiansuo music (II-151).

Heritage Listings

1. 2006National List of Representative Items of Intangible Cultural Heritage1st batch · II-46 Bantou music · no. 77 · nominated by Nanyang · Henan · safeguarding body Nanyang Mass Art Centre
2. 2011National List of Representative Items of Intangible Cultural Heritage3rd batch · II-151 Xiansuo music (Heze xiansuo music) · no. 1081 · nominated by Heze · Shandong