Folk songs of She nationality

Name of China's national intangible cultural heritage: folk songs of She nationality

Applicant: Jingning She Autonomous County, Zhejiang Province

Item No.: 38

Project No.: Ⅱ - 7

Time of publication: 2008 (second batch)

Category: Traditional Music

Region: Zhejiang Province

Type: Extension Project

Applicant: Jingning She Autonomous County, Zhejiang Province

Protection unit: Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center of Jingning She Autonomous County

Introduction to she folk songs:

Applicant: Jingning She Autonomous County, Zhejiang Province

Singing folk songs is an important way for she people to impart knowledge of history, culture, production and life, and to carry out cultural and recreational activities. Therefore, she folk songs have a long history, followed by the She people from generation to generation. The She people speak for and narrate with songs, forming the song customs of work antithesis, March 3 Song Festival, long night Pange, wedding songs, sacrificial songs, funeral songs and so on. Although the living environment of She nationality is characterized by "large dispersion and small settlement" and surrounded by Han villages, the tunes of She nationality's folk songs are quite different from those of the surrounding Han nationality's folk songs, which better retains the characteristics of her nationality's music.

Most of the She people living in Lishui and Wenzhou counties at the southern foot of Donggong mountain in Zhejiang Province migrated from eastern Fujian in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and some from southern Jiangxi. The folk songs of She nationality in Zhejiang Province are mainly distributed in the northern foot of Donggong mountain in the south of Zhejiang Province and the east of Fujian Province.

According to their distribution and popular regions, she folk songs in Zhejiang Province can be divided into Lishui tune, Jingning tune, Longquan tune, Wencheng tune, Pingyang tune, Taishun tune and so on. Each tune has parallel double sentences, four sentences and various irregular sentences. The words and sentences of the same she folk song are basically unchanged, only changing the rhymes twice, so that one becomes three, forming a unique "three changes" technique of "Repetition", which is unique in Chinese folk songs.

The singing of she folk songs can be divided into "high voice" (falsetto) and "low voice" (true voice). The singing forms include solo, duet and duet. The folk songs of She nationality in Zhejiang include narrative songs (including myths and legends songs and novel songs), miscellaneous songs (including love, working life, imparting knowledge, ethics, entertainment life, etc.), ritual songs (including wedding ceremony songs, ancestor worship songs, merit songs, etc.) and so on. Among them, Gao Huang Ge is an important representative of she folk songs, which describes the myth of the origin of She nationality and the historical facts of the great migration of She nationality.

Zhejiang she folk songs are rich in content, and their manuscripts have always been valued by experts and scholars in the field of folk music and literature in China. They are one of the representative works in the treasure house of folk literature in China. At present, the old artists who can sing she folk songs have died. The inheritance of she folk songs is facing a crisis and needs to be protected.