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.