Music Study On Disaster Relief And Praying Ceremony In Longxing Town,Chongqing

Longxing Town,which located in the southeast of Yubei District in ChongQing,China,was a famous historical and cultural town.With strong traditional culture of Bayu and remarkable human landscape features,it still retains a variety of folk ceremonies today.This article takes the extensive disaster relief and praying rituals in Longxing Town as the research object,through interviewing the participants of the rituals on the spot,recording the ritual process from start to the end,then,analyzing the sound of the rituals,finally,trying to achieve the purpose of explaining and inheriting the culture contained in the ritual.The thesis involves five parts: the introduction part mainly gives detail presentation on the topic selection,research status,research theory and methods,and carries out descripting and demonstrating.Chapter 1 makes a more detailed introduction to the basic situation of the three parts which including disaster relief and prayer ceremony,geographical and cultural situation and the local folk beliefs so as to lay a foundation for the later study of the ritual content,ritual sound and ritual inheritance.Chapter 2 is the recording and sound analysis of the disaster-relief and prayer ceremony.The author has visited the ceremony participants for many times,including the ceremony audience and the "master" who presided over the ceremony,then,the preparation of the ceremony and the whole ceremony process was fully recorded.Later,On the basis of reorganizing these records,the author analyzes ritual musical form from three aspects: singing,rhythm and tuning.By recording a complete folk ritual,analyzing its musical form and musical style characteristics,we can understand the basic form of folk ritual music and its cultural connotation in this area.Chapter 3 focuses on the interpretation of the main cultures in the disaster relief ceremony,including musical instrument culture and gesture culture,so as to reveal its symbolic significance and cultural value and analyze the cultural connotations of the scriptures.Chapter 4 discusses the status quo of disaster relief and prayer rituals.It mainly studies the social identity of the ritual itself and how it spreads and develops locally in terms of its survival and inheritance status.At the same time,it initially explores the social value and function,the future developmentunder intangible environment and the cultural recognize.As a part of traditional culture,folk rituals need to be inherited and developed,the significance of this study lies in the following three parts: first,it is conducive to the display of the regional style of the Bayu folk ashram and the promotion the culture of Ba-Yu;second,it is helpful to reveal how the Buddhism and Taoism combine in folk music aspect;third,it is beneficial to uncover the educational function of folk religious music.In this paper,the research theories involved in the research process mainly include music ethnography and ritual sound theory,and the research methods which applied mainly includes field inspection method and music form analysis method.Three innovations are in this paper.First,there is a phenomenon of Buddhist and Taoist culture in the disaster-relief prayer ceremony in Longxing Town,Chongqing,and the local people use this ritual to pray for their families or themselves for disaster relief.Through the record and analysis of the disaster-relief and prayer ceremony,this paper explores the relationship between the music in the ceremony and the Buddhist Music in the Bayu region.Second,this paper adopts the method of field study to obtain a rich first-hand research data which record the whole ceremony completely.As a result,the written materials are available,and they have significant meaning on the verge of loss of disaster blessing ceremony music.Third,it uses the two-view analysis method of music ethnography,conducting interactive investigation and analysis on the research subject from objective and subjective views during the research processes.By this method,it helps to understand the influence from folk ritual ashram to the local people much deeper,and research the cultural inheritance behind the ritual.