On The Northern Shaanxi Folk Songs And Singing Style

The Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi is the most representative artistic form ofthe Loess Culture. It consists of four main types: Work Songs (sung to synchronizemovements), Folk Songs (sung in the fields or in the mountain areas during or afterwork), Tunes, and Children c Songs. Based on the five-note mode, the general tunestructures are chiefly of the main mode note and go up and down within five notes.The typical melody centers on the main note and goes up or down within theneighboring notes, for instance: 2-5-1, 5-1-2-5 etc. This structure is one of theimportant elements contributing to the style of the Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi.And it is the folk songs of this structure that most appropriately describes theopenness and boundlessness of the natural geographical environment of Loess Plateau,and the feeling of the ordinary people living in this environment. The melodiccharacteristics of the Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi are displayed in their brevityand liveliness, the air of spaciousness, roughness and sonorousness, easy and freeIperformances. The causes of the formation of Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi aremany-sided. In the first part, the paper analyses the causes of its formation from thehistorical and geographical aspects, and from cultural and dialectal characteristics aswell.The second .part of the paper discusses the classification as well as the stylisticfeatures of Work Songs, Folk Songs and Tunes respectively. The Work Songs inNorthern Shaanxi consists of the Yellow River Boatmen Work Songs, the RammingWork Songs and the Coal-Hoisting Work Songs. The stylistic features of Work Songsin Northern Shaanxi are slow in speed, little in variations, easy to sing and nice to theears. The Folk Songs are made up of Xintianyou and Folk Songs sung in mountainareas. Xintianyou is the most representative type of songs in the Folk Songs ofNorthern Shaanxi. There are over one hundred basic types of tunes for it. It is neat instructure. Big leaps are frequently demonstrated in its melodies. The tempos aretypical in syncopation. Normally seven-word couplets are its sentence structures thatare characterized with reduplicated words and reiterative sentences. Of the tunes inNorthern Shaanxi, they are of four kinds: Ordinary Tunes, Silk-string tunes,Traditional Festivity Tunes and Custom Tunes. The styles of the tunes in NorthernShaanxi are diversified. Some have the styles of Northern Shaanxi, others have thestyles of the South of Yangtze River. And moreover some are a combination of thetwo in styles. In short, the tunes of Northern Shaanxi share the features of beingsmooth in melody, lyric in description and delicate in expression. Some are withstrongly accented rhythms, while others are with ease and grace.2The third part of the paper is about the singing techniques of the Folk Songs ofNorthern Shaanxi. The most commonly used ones are: the even-tune singing method,the stretched-tune singing method, the gliding-tune singing method, thetrembling-tune singing method, the broken-phrase singing method, 447 singingmethod and the method of word-insertion and tune-insertion and so on. Learning tomaster the singing techniques of the above-mentioned ones is the key in the singing ofthe Folk Songs of Northern Shaanxi well.The stylistic features and singing techniques of the Folk Songs of NorthernShaanxi are rooted deeply in Northern Shaanxi's long-standing and glorious historicalbackground; the special geographical conditions; and the people's intrepid, honest,bold and uninhibited personalities, willingness in offering help, the spirit of hardstruggle and straight forwardness in revealing personal emotions. As the saying goes"Xintianyou. never stopping; if stopped, the poor people would have no other way inrelieving...