A typical funeral band in Shanxi Province has two suona players and and four percussionists. The music is heavy with percussion and is carried by the mournful melodies of the suona, a double-reed instrument. Traditional Chinese funeral bands often play through the night before an open-air bier in a courtyard full of mourners in white burlap. Perhaps the best place to see traditional Chinese music is at a funeral. Instrumental music is played on solo instruments or in small ensembles of plucked and bowed stringed instruments, flutes, and various cymbals, gongs, and drums. ![]() All traditional Chinese music is melodic rather than harmonic. Ĭhinese vocal music has traditionally been sung in a thin, nonresonant voice or in falsetto and is usually solo rather than choral. Traditional instruments include a two-stringed fiddle (erhu), a three-stringed flute (sanxuan), a vertical flute (dongxiao), a horizontal flute (dizi), and ceremonial gongs (daluo). In addition, there is no harmony in traditional Chinese music all the singers or instruments follow the melodic line. Unlike the Western scale, which has eight tones, the Chinese has only five. A retired shipbuilder who leads one such group in Shanghai told the New York Times, ‘singing keeps me healthy.” Children are "taught to like music with small intervals and subtly changing pitches.”Ĭhinese music sounds very different from Western music in part because the Chinese scale has fewer notes. Some retired people meet every morning in a local park to sing patriotic songs. ![]() Top music schools include the Shanghai College of Theater Arts, the Shanghai Conservatory, the Xian Conservatory, the Beijing Central Conservatory. Professional musicians work primarily through conservatories. The government has sent musicologists around the country to collect pieces for the “Anthology of Chinese Folk Music”. Some Buddhist and Taoist temples feature daily music-accompanied rituals. Impromptu traditional and regional music can be heard in local teahouses, parks and theaters.
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