The Complete Eight-Beat Sitting Suite

Introduction

A large sitting suite of Xi'an drum music, published in four modes from the Dongcang tradition in 2009

The Complete Eight-Beat Sitting Suite is one of the large sitting suites of Xi'an drum music. In sitting music the players are grouped by instrument and sit in turn around a square table, indoors or in a courtyard, with the drummer leading; walking music, by contrast, is played standing or on the move and uses only wind instruments. Xi'an drum suites are long, and a single suite can last two hours, with single pieces often running past twenty minutes. From 2003 Ma Xiping of Xi'an Jiaotong University went each week to learn the suite by ear from Zhao Gengchen, an elder master of the Dongcang drum music society. In 2009 Xi'an Jiaotong University Press published the result as a collection of the eight-beat sitting suites in four modes, credited to Zhao as bearer of the old scores and to Ma as transcriber. Xi'an drum music entered the first national list of intangible heritage in 2006 and the UNESCO Representative List in 2009.