Sunlight streams through tall windows into a wood-floored hall, where a woman in a floral qipao sings with open arms beside a grand piano played by a man in a suit. An audience on cane chairs listens, holding printed sheets.
Songs of the Shijing and Chu
Work Chants (Haozi)
Yuefu Songs
Tang–Song Sung Lyrics
Mountain Songs (Shan'ge)
Songs of Tibet and the Northwest Peoples
Songs of the Southern Peoples
Qin Songs and Chanting
Mongolian and Northern Peoples' Songs
Ditties and Popular Tunes (Xiaodiao)
Hua'er
Grand Song of the Dong
Chinese Art SongChinese Art Song
Poems set to song, with the piano alongside
Introduction
From school songs to piano-accompanied settings of poetry
Chinese art song is the solo song that a composer sets to a poem, usually with piano accompaniment. Its forerunner, the school song, arose in the new-style schools of the late Qing, when Shen Xingong, Zeng Zhimin and Li Shutong wrote Chinese words to Japanese, European and American tunes; Zeng Zhimin compiled the Educational Songbook in 1904, and Li Shutong's Farewell is still sung today. In 1920 Qing Zhu set Su Shi's 'Remembering the Red Cliff' in Berlin as The Great River Flows East, and in 1926 Yuen Ren Chao set Liu Bannong's poem How Can I Help Thinking of Her; in the 1930s Huang Zi, teaching at the National Conservatory, wrote Three Wishes of the Rose, Spring Longing and Homesickness.
Timeline
- 1904OriginIn 1904 Zeng Zhimin's Educational Songbook, with 26 school songs, was published in Tokyo, one of the earliest Chinese music textbooks; before it Shen Xingong had written Gymnastics (later Boys' First Aim Is High) in Tokyo in 1902, and Zeng had published six school songs in the magazine Jiangsu in 1903.
- 1920EvolutionIn 1920 Qing Zhu (Liao Shangguo) wrote The Great River Flows East in Berlin to Su Shi's 'Remembering the Red Cliff', a work called the first Chinese art song; it was published in Shanghai in 1928.
Literature › Nian Nu Jiao · Memories of the Red Cliffs - 1926EvolutionIn 1926 Yuen Ren Chao set Liu Bannong's 1920 poem How Can I Help Thinking of Her; it appeared in 1928 in his New Poetry Songbook of 14 songs from the Commercial Press.
- 1935EvolutionIn 1927 Xiao Youmei founded the National Conservatory of Music with Cai Yuanpei's support; Huang Zi, its professor of theory and composition from 1930, wrote Three Wishes of the Rose and Hua fei hua in 1935 and was the most influential art-song composer of the 1930s.