Introduction to Drum Rhythm on Peking Opera Stage Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophische Fakultät der Universität zu Köln Vorgelegt von Lan Ying aus Gui Zhou, China Prüfer Prof. Dr. Stefan Kramer Prof. Dr.Peter W. Marx Prof. Dr. Frank Hentschel Prof. Dr.Uwe Seifert Prof. Dr. Felix Wemheuer Prof. Dr. Faderico Spineet Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 10.12.2014 Content 1 Introduction 1 Peking Opera and its drum rhythm………………………………………………...3 2 Time in drum rhythm on Peking Opera stage……………………………………...4 3 Drum rhythm on Peking Opera stage and its linguistic structure……………….....7 4 Drum rhythm, as communicative device, on Peking Opera stage………………..10 5 Theory and Method…………………………………………………………….....13 2 Time module in rhythm on the Peking Opera stage 2.1 A Brief overview of percussion instruments and their playing methods………..18 2.2 Time module in drum rhythm on Peking Opera stage…………………………..22 3 Drum rhythm and its linguistic structure 3.1 The Semantics of Drum rhythm…………………………………………………32 3.2 The Levels of meaning on drum rhythm………………………………………33 3.3 Metafunctional analysis of drum rhythm………………………………………..39 3.4 The Linguistics characteristics of drum rhythm………………………………...42 3.5 Drum rhythm signals and significations………………………………………...54 3.6 Drum rhythm on Peking Opera stage and metadiscourse in linguistics………58 3.6.1 Categorizations of metadiscourse in linguistics………………………....58 3.6.2 Categorizations of drum rhythm on Peking Opera stage………………..63 3.6.3 The Unique features of drum rhythm…………………………………....94 3.7 Summary and conclusions…………………………………………………...107 4 Drum rhythm and its performing genres 4.1 Drum rhythm and performing genres…………………………………………..105 4.2 External performing genres and internal performing genres…………………..105 4.2.1 External performing genres………………………………………….....105 4.2.2 Internal Performing Genres………………………………………….....106 4.2.3 Drum rhythm categories in Military opera……………………………..115 4.2.4 Drum rhythm complex……………………………………………….119 4.3 Summary and Conclusions…………………………………………………….137 5 Drum rhythm and its rhetoric Features 5.1 Rhetoric features and drum rhythm……………………………………………138 5.2 The Rhetoric elements of drum rhythm on Peking Opera stage……………….139 5.3 Rhetoric features in opera performing practice………………………………...147 5.4 Summary and conclusion………………………………………………………154 I Content 6 Drum rhythm as communicative device on Peking Stage 6.1 The External and internal relations of drum rhythm…………………………...155 6.2 The Category of communication in drum rhythm……………………………..158 6.3 Drum rhythm frames the communication on the stage………………………...159 6.4 Summary and conclusion………………………………………………………163 7 Drum rhythm and Peking opera performing practice 7.1 Some strategies in the use of drum rhythm…………………………………….165 7.1.1 Practice in drum rhythm………………………………………………..165 7.2 The Application of drum rhythm on the Peking Opera stage………………….165 7.2.1 The Usage of drum rhythm in opera performing processing…………..165 7.2.2 Create the Peking Opera performance…………………………………166 7.2.3 Peking Opera: Kong Cheng Ji (The Ruse of Empty City): studying case in performing practice…………………………………………………………….167 7.3 Summary and conclusions……………………………………………………..175 8 Drum rhythm and social and cultural effect 8.1 Drum rhythm and its social effect……………………………………………...177 8.1.1 Drum rhythm and the social-based relationship……………………….177 8.1.2 The Community of actors and audiences in Peking Opera……………178 8.1.3 The Relationship between actors and audiences in Peking Opera……..182 8.1.4 Three main advantages of drum rhythm to actors and audiences……...183 8.1.5 The Communicative target between actors and audiences…………….185 8.2 Drum rhythm and cultural effect……………………………………………….186 8.3 Further research………………………………………………………………...186 References…………………………………………………………………………...188 II Introduction 1. Peking Opera and its drum rhythm By the end of the 18th century, operatic performance in China had developed into several distinct systems. Popular local operas included gaoqiao (pitched singing), geyang (prevalent along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze), bangzi (mostly along the Yellow River valley) and liuzi (which originated in Shang Dong). But to scholars of that time, these operas were inferior to kunqu opera, which was considered more refined and serious. With much disdain, they called these local operas huabu.1 The popularity of huabu had to do with its appealing themes. Huabu plays mostly old historical stories, folk tales loved by the working people. The singing was lucid, lively and intense, and the recitations were easy to understand. These musical ugly ducklings became so popular that many huabu companies competed for turf even in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, the birthplace of kunqu opera. Despite its name, Peking opera was not born in Peking (Beijing). It has its origin in these huabu operas that were popular in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze in the mid-17th century. (Xu Chengbei 2010: 14-19) Music for Peking opera was not “composed” or created by a composer in the conventional sense, that is, with new melodies invented especially just for a given opera. The “composition” in Peking opera instead consisted of setting standard, commonly used tunes into new contexts, with words written to fit these traditional tunes. The music score was notated with Chinese characters rather than with special symbols. A Peking opera orchestra is divided into two parts. One is called wen chang, (civil opera) whose main function is to accompany the singing of songs. Playing orchestral music, this section is dominated by a stringed instrument called the Jinghu (the opera fiddle) and is supplemented by plucked instruments such as the Yueqin (a moon-shaped mandolin) and the Pipa (a four stringed lute). The other part of the orchestra is called wu chang (military opera). This is the percussion section; it features drums, wooden clappers, gongs and cymbals. The drummer heads the wu chang section of musicians and is also the conductor of the entire orchestra, but he generally is not as well known as the fiddle player. In fact, the percussion section in Peking opera does more than just accompany the singing of songs. The percussion instruments can serve one moment as director, another moment as narrator, or as conductor, or as actor, or even as interpreter for the audiences, so as to push the development and flow of the performance on. The percussion instruments consist of a small wooden drum, a small gong, a large gong, a pair of cymbals and a pair of clappers. The rhythm played by these percussion instruments is called as “Luo Gu Jing” (drum rhythm). The term of drum rhythm therefore is not confined to the single instrument drum, but a series of percussion instruments (As shown in figures 2.1). Opera performance is often accompanied by the “deafening sound of gongs and cymbals”. People who are not well acquainted with Peking opera as an art form may find it too “noisy” and “esoteric” (Richard Fusen Yang 2009: 2). The role of the percussion section indeed is to help construct a communicating space on Peking Opera stage, that is, some setting on which the orchestral music can then ride atop. Only those who are familiar with opera performing conventions can truly succeed in communicating in this specialized way within opera performing framework. Highly systematic yet little understood: drum rhythm in Peking opera presents us with a method to study and examine the communication and interaction in detail. Drum rhythm in Peking Opera stage is not 1 Huabu, “Hua” in Huabu implies a variety of local operas. 1 Introduction only an independent beat and meter but a rhythm sequence and /or pattern, which is also a rhythm keeping (or rhythm processing). Studying on drum rhythm indeed is not rare, especially on rhythm in African music. Many West African musical cultures employ very dense polyrhythmic structures or syncopations and cross-rhythms that are produced by asymmetrical accent patterns shifting across different, simultaneous rhythmic event lines, a form of rhythmic development that one may call complex rhythmic polyphony (M. H.Thaut 2008:12). Moreover, many researches on drum rhythm endeavor to explain the rhythm in systemically analysis. On drum set and drumming in West African cultural contexts, Pacere (1991) claims that the importance of music is manifest in its message, not melody. And Pacere also argues that the role of drum is the vital in communication. His concept of “bendrology” is very similar to the theory of Niangoran-Bouah’s “drummology” (1981), which focus on the importance of drum as communicative device. York R. A (1999: 17) yet in rhythm analysis still admits that “the integration of these [techniques] is not rigorous; it may be that future researchers will find a more systematic frame of study”. York then challenges future researchers will find more methodical approaches to analyze rhythm in frame and in system. Drum rhythm first is a music phenomenon. It is overtly admited that music communicates as a form of communication and also music can be regarded as a language-form. Although its sounds do not carry designative meaning, as speech sounds, speech and music do share many similarities (e.g., pitch, duration, timbre, intensity, accents and inflection). M. H.Thaut believes that music can be studied in analogy to phonological analyses of single speech sounds, because that music and speech both are built on syntactical systems that organize sound patterns into rule-based structures (2008: 2). Bernstein (1976) and Sloboda (1985) have once compared Noam Chomsky’s linguistic structure with structural analysis in music. Dowling and Harwood (1986) have proposed a system that comprehensively summarizes the different ways in which music is thought to communicate meaning and believes the core of musical communication is symbolic. Nonetheless, they still failed to display an explicit semantic or referential meaning of music and conclude that in music field, music sounds or sounds patterns can intrinsically denote or refer to extramusical events, objects, concepts, or cognitions (M.H Thaut 2008: 5).