2021 International Conference on Education, Humanity and Language, Art (EHLA 2021) ISBN: 978-1-60595-137-9

The Vigorous Singing through History—An Investigation Report of Rong County's Carrying Workers’ Chant Shan LI1 and Sheng-dong YUE1,a,* 1Music School, Chengdu Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China [email protected] *Corresponding author

Keywords: Rong County, Carrying Workers’ Chant, Carrying Workers’ Chant of Mourning, Characteristics of Music Ontology.

Abstract. Carrying workers’ chant in Rong County, a county in Zigong city of Sichuan province, has a long history. It is an ancient traditional music culture created and developed by working people in the process of long-term collaborative labor. The carrying workers’ chant on this piece of land is indispensable in people’s daily labor and maintains close contact with production and life. It organically combines folk music with strong physical labor, which has both musical beauty and labor beauty, and has a wealth of cultural connotation. Through long-term field investigations and visits, we start with the historical background, ontological characteristics, main artistic features, living space and other aspects of the carrying workers’ chant in Rong County, and dig out and interpret its cultural and spiritual connotations based on case analysis. Rong County is located in the southwest of Zigong City. The area is influenced by the salt industry culture and the content of folk music is rich and diverse. "Carrying workers’ chant" is a representative of local folk music, among which the chant of carrying stones and carrying workers’ chant of mourning are particularly famous. In 2016, "Salt Workers’ chanting" became the fifth batch of intangible cultural heritage in Zigong City. As the representative work of "Salt Workers’ chant in Zigong", "Carrying workers’ chant" is very necessary to be carried out through systematic investigation and research.

1. The Historical Evolution of Rong County 1.1. The Generation of Carrying Workers’ Chant Rong County’s chanting of work began in the reign of Emperor Zhangdi in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Due to the rugged terrain and traffic congestion, Rong County’s transportation vehicles were very backward and could only be maintained by manpower. According to the Records of Rong County, the carrying workers in Dongxing Town, Rong County usually carried by 4 people or 8 people according to the size of the objects they carried. According to the different objects, they were divided into funeral carrying workers and stone carrying workers. In the process of labor, Rong County's carrying workers’ chant is mainly to coordinate and unify the pace.[1] 1.2. The Development of Carrying Workers’ Chant The surrounding townships of Rong County are far away from the county town. Because of the high mountains, steep slopes, many bends, and narrow roads, people who want to build houses, carry heavy objects, hold funerals and carry coffins, etc., must cooperate with many people and use tools to lift the weight of the objects. It is assigned to everyone, and thus dedicated carrying workers are created. Years go back and forth, in the hard and arduous work, in order to achieve a tacit understanding and consistent pace, the workers yelled "Hey-oh, Hi-oh" and gradually developed into a chant. With the passage of time, the variety of tunes and content of the carrying workers’ chant has become more and more abundant, forming its own unique characteristics.[2] Historically, the carrying workers’ chant has been passed down by mouths-to-ears teaching, witnessing and presenting the production, life and joys, sorrows and joys of generations of

379 workmen. According to the oral introduction of a villager in Rong County, sometimes the carrying workers experience heavy rain soon after they go out. If it is all mountain roads or steep slopes, everyone has to kneel on their knees step by step to go up. "The mountains are high, the slopes are steep, the sky is raining and the skies are falling..." The workers at that moment yelled low and firm chants, and moved forward with difficulty. At this time, the chants brought them not only the coordination and unity of steps, but also great courage and strength. In the arduous and boring work of carrying workers, the chant played its different roles in various styles, fully expressing the emotions and feelings of carrying workers. In recent years, as the transportation facilities have been gradually improved and the transportation of goods has become more and more convenient, Rong County’s once-popular carrying workers’ chant has gradually withdrawn from the stage of history, facing the situation of lack of successors and endangered disappearance.

2. The Overall Composition of Carrying Workers’ Chant 2.1. Lyrics of Chanting To carry out the carrying work well, the workers must have a unified rhythm, and the coordinated movements must be completed in a uniform manner, which is the complement by the leader and others, one sings and others follow. The method of "One person leads, others follow” plays a "command role" instead of paying attention to the sense of musical melody. However, no matter whether it is a stone chant or a mourning chant in Rong County, there are corresponding chant music, and the common point is to emphasize the unity of rhythm. Carrying stone chants focus on the direct exertion of strength, which the chants are simple and direct, and the shouts in the stone chanting are "Hey-oh, Hi-oh", while mourning chants are more complicated and lyrical, focusing on the expression of emotions. The lyrics are usually sung in the Rong County’s dialect: from the pronunciation, the supplementary words are mainly supplementary words such as "Hi, Yeah, Yo", etc. These pronunciations are more straightforward than Mandarin and northern dialects, and there are a lot of monophonic words. For example, "嗬" is pronounced as "ho", not "he" in Mandarin. In addition, the local voice of Rong County has a more prominent feature compared to the speech voices in other regions, that is, the pronunciation of flat tongue sounds close to the pronunciation of Mandarin, for example, the distinction between "zi" and "zhi" is clearer. 2.2. The Melody and Music Function of Chanting 2.2.1. The Melody of Chanting Rong County’s chanting music can be divided into two categories: stone chanting and mourning chanting. The former emphasizes the direct exertion of strength, simple and direct. The main body can be said to be almost only rhythm and a few central word full of music, and mourning chants focus more on the expression of emotions. Through investigation, it is found that whether it is an older generation or a young singer, they only remember a general idea of the tune due to the particularity of oral transmission. From perspective of the structure, the music is mostly single-segment, generally 8-16 bars. From the perspective of the melody direction, two bars are used as a unit, and the ascending melody and descending melody are interlaced with small fluctuations. From the perspective of beat and rhythm, the beat is generally 2/4, which is full of the characteristics of trumpet music. The structure of the rhythm is simple, short but powerful, while the spoken language is quite mellow. 2.2.2. The Function of Carrying Workers’ Chant Southerners usually refer chanting as "calling chants". Gao Cheng’s The Sources of Book House, in Song Dynasty, mentioned: "Nowadays those who lift weights are one who leads the chant, and other people who unite the chant”, which explains that the main function of carrying workers’ chant is to coordinate the carrying workers, to keep the movements at one frequency. Therefore, it plays

380 the function of coordinating and directing labor. Moreover, there are additional functions like relieving fatigue, inspiring labor enthusiasm, and expressing emotions.

3. The Artistic Characteristics of Rong County's Chanting 3.1 The Way of Singing In the early years, due to inconvenient transportation and cultural habits such as language and customs, it was difficult to communicate with the outside world. Local chants in Rong County were used to singing in original voice and dialect. Although this way of singing is hard to say that it has a scientific basis, it is not inferior in the handling of words, breath, emotion, etc. After a day of work, experienced workers will not feel uncomfortable in their throats. Moreover, this "pure natural" singing method is consistent with the life and language habits of the local villagers, which can quite arouse the emotional resonance of the audience. In the form of singing, the singing method of carrying workers’ chant is mainly "leading and unite" style, that is, one person leads and everyone joins, or everyone leads and everyone joins.[3] In the lyrics, the parts sung by the chant leader and the carrying people have their own division of work. The chant leader sings the thematic part of the lyrics and there is no clear regulation on the lyrics, while the part that the carrying people uses has not changed. If the lyrics of every two clauses are taken as a small unit, then the structural characteristics can be summarized as: main sentence A + vocal accompaniment a + main sentence B + vocal accompaniment b... Usually the chanting is composed of such small units cyclically. After singing one song, you can sing the next song directly. This kind of singing method has great flexibility. The singer can sing chant which they have learned according to the length of the carrying time, while the carrying people only needs to remember the chants he sings. 3.2. Impromptu Handling of Carrying Workers’ Chant In the process of chanting, many times the chants sung by the leaders are not sung according to existing routines. There are many outstanding vocalists in the village who have the ability to improvise and compose lyrics. The scenes are the source of their improvisational lyrics. [4]For example, when they feel tired when carrying a stone, they sing "Yu gong (an old man, who move the mountains to show courage and the determination to win victory) moves mountain, hey, which spreads everywhere, and hey, where the sky is sunny again, and hey, where there are clouds, and hey, as long as people are united, hey, hey, hey." This kind of comprehensive creation requires the singer's super creative thinking and language ability, and the most important thing is that the singer has a heart that loves the art of chanting. In the course of the investigation, it is not difficult to find that such vocalists have gradually decreased in Rong County. Dongxing Township that the author investigated on the spot has only a few of the two or three family can sing a little about the chant which is about to die out.

4. Case Analysis 4.1. Field Investigation on Carrying Workers’ Chant in Dongxing Town During the writing process, the author collected and sorted out a large number of music documents of chanting, and completed three fieldwork surveys during this period. The first interview was held in Dongxing Town in mid-August 2018, and the subjects were the villagers in the town. The purpose of this interview is mainly to understand the overall state of carrying workers’ chant in Rong County, and whether there is a "live state". The second interview took place on November 15, 2018, and the locations were Zaoziba Village in Dongxing Town and Gengzi Village in Dongxing Town. The subjects were villagers in the two villages. The main purpose of this interview is to understand the main artistic characteristics of the music of these two villages, and to perform notation and to learn singing. The third interview took place on January 28, 2019. The locations were Zaoziba Village and Gengzi Village, Dongxing Town, and the subjects were all villagers in

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Dongxing Town. This survey covers the development status of the promotion of work in the entire area of Dongxing Town. Through the survey outline, questionnaire, survey report and the final analysis and summary, the development status of the promotion of work in Dongxing Town is presented. 4.2. Analysis of Investigation Through three fieldwork surveys, the author found that there is a direct connection between the production and life of the villagers in Dongxing Town. The thoughts and concepts of the workers will be reflected in their behavior and music to varying degrees. Who are engaged in the activities of carrying stone chants and mourning chants at the moment? In order to solve this problem, the author conducted a survey on the gender, age, occupation, culture and other aspects of carrying workers in Dongxing Town by means of questionnaires and interviews in January 2019. From the perspective of gender, all those joined in carrying workers are men, not women. In addition to the heavy work itself, it is picky about the gender of the practitioners. In the meantime, the survey also found that the traditional Chinese concept of male superiority and female inferiority is very common in the local rural areas, and women are basically prohibited from participating in activities that have a sense of "ritual". The age range of the workers participating in carrying workers is very wide. The middle-aged and elderly people account for a relatively large proportion, and the carrying people is old generally. According to statistics, 39 of the 100 workers are over the age of 56 and 34 are between the age of 46 and the age of 55, which shows that the current aging population of the inheritors of carrying workers in Rong County is a relatively serious problem. At present, most of the people engaged in this activity are local agricultural workers and a small number of workers, as Rong County were originally an area supported by the agricultural economy. Because of the underdeveloped economy and low-income people, most people pay for their families by carrying stones and mourning chant. However, through inquiring local villagers, it was found that in recent years, fewer and fewer people have stayed in their hometowns, and many people have already gone out to work, which has also led to the problem of insufficient human resources for the inheritance of the chant. In this survey, the proportion of high school education or above is 7%, and the rest of the education is very low. Sometimes there seems to be a positive relationship between the level of education and the ability to better inherit the culture. At present, due to the low educational level of practitioners, the inheritance of excellent regional culture is also restricted to a certain extent. Here we may be curious about how these workers who are not well-educated or even illiterate learn carrying workers’ chant? This is also enough to show that the inheritance of this "craft" is still learned through oral and heart-to-heart teaching, and the way of passing from master to disciple. How effective is the oral transmission method? How are the villagers in Dongxing Town passing on carrying workers’ chant, and to what extent do people know about it? In January 2019, according to a questionnaire on the level of mastery of the five categories of : "Able to sing a chant completely", "Able to hum a chant and vocal accompaniment, but not familiar with the lyrics", "Able to only sing vocal accompaniment but not lyrics", "Able to only hum the moody of vocal accompaniment”, “Able to nothing”, the author conducted a survey among 100 villagers.

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Table 1. Survey data on January 28, 2019. Degree of Able to Able to hum a Able to only Able to only hum Able to In total familiarity sing a chant and vocal sing vocal the moody of nothing chant accompaniment, accompaniment vocal completely but not familiar but not lyrics accompaniment with the lyrics Number of 9 7 63 13 8 100 people Propotion 9 7 63 13 8 100 (%) The table shows that among the 100 villagers who participated in the survey, only 9% of them could sing a song of chanting music completely, and the highest proportion could only sing vocal accompaniment. It can be seen that the inheritance and communication of Dongxing Town’s chant has been facing the dilemma of being lost. From the above, it is not difficult to find that with the impact of multiculturalism brought about by the changes of the times, and people’s aesthetic tendency has undergone a great transformation because their awareness of traditional culture has become lower and lower, and their enthusiasm for this kind of art has become gradually decreases. In addition, many young people in Rong County go out to make a living, and most of them do not live in their hometowns for long periods of time, which leads to the situation that there is no successor in the inheritance. There is also the problem of the use of language elements. Due to the limitation of cultural level, local villagers often use native dialects as their usual oral language, but they lack the ability to use them in mass artistic creation. This status quo has caused the development of high-level of carrying workers’ chanting to face the dilemma of lack of audiences. Regarding the inheritance and dissemination of the chant, there is a view that we should follow the natural law of natural selection and survival of the fittest, and let it fend for itself. However, the author believes that in today's society, facing the impact of multiculturalism, people may accidentally lose the cultural memories that have been passed down from generation to generation and have been integrated into our blood. In order to avoid such regrets, it is a question worthy of further consideration for us to carry out effective protection and exploration of these traditional cultures whose inheritance function has been severely degraded.

Acknowledgements University Student Innovation Training Program of Sichuan " An Investigation Report of Rong County's Carrying Workers’ Chant" (S201914389194); research project of teaching reform in Chengdu Normal University “Research on the construction of musicology applied demonstration major” (2020JG05); Chengdu Normal University's first-class undergraduate course "Ethnomusicology" (XJYLKC2007); Chengdu Normal University "Curriculum Ideology" demonstration course "Ethnic Musicology" (XJKCSZKC2008); this research achievement is supported by the scientific research fund from "Shu (Sichuan) Area Music Research Institute" of Chengdu Normal University.

References [1] Compiled by the Rong County Chronicles Compilation Committee of Sichuan Province. Rong County Chronicles [M]. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 1993.05. [2] Zhu Yeli. On the Artistic Connotation and Life Consciousness of Folk Culture—A Textual Research on the "Salt Workers’ chant" in Southern Sichuan [J]. Seeking, 2011(12). [3] Gong Xiujian. The social and artistic value of "Salt Workers’ chant" in Southern Sichuan [J]. Journal of Sichuan University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition), 2010, 25(01). [4] Huang Zhiyong. The artistic charm and regional cultural characteristics of Zigong "Salt Workers’ chant" [J]. Music Creation, 2014(11).

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