Beijing Short Songs

Urban short songs of Beijing's lanes and temple fairs, square and narrative, with erhua and patter phrases, often shared with qupai tunes.

Related

QupaiGong, Shang, Jue, Zhi, YuVoice

Time and place

Beijing short songs belong to the lanes of the inner and outer city, to Tianqiao, temple fairs and teahouses. They are sung in Beijing Mandarin, heavy with erhua, the retroflex ending, and with phrases that curl at the close. As the imperial capital in the Ming and Qing, Beijing drew southern shidiao and short tunes along trade and official routes, and these mixed with local yangge, children's songs and street cries. Townspeople heard them at festivals, fairs and private gatherings; in the countryside they joined yangge and pounding songs. The same tune is neater inside the walls and rougher outside.

What happened

Once southern tunes settled in Beijing, some continued as folk songs while others were absorbed into narrative singing. The banner-drum clubs used qupai such as Jian Dian Hua and Die Duan Qiao, which share roots with the short songs; single-string narrative drew on this material, while drum ballad took the banqiang road. With records and radio in the twentieth century, the songs moved from lanes to broadcasts: fewer sang them, more heard them. After 1949 collectors recorded the older singers still alive in the lanes, giving the repertory a documented sound.

Musical features

Most items are four-phrase stanzas in duple time, square in shape and strongly narrative. Melody rests on a pentatonic frame, often zhi or gong mode, moving by step with clean endings. Patter phrases are characteristic: many syllables, little tune, a run of short words packed into one beat, like speech accelerating. Erhua changes the rhyme and the length of the line. Vocables are few but fixed in place, usually at the final cadence.

What to listen for

Begin with Meng Jiangnu Seeking Her Husband, a long narrative on the Meng Jiangnu tune, and follow how each four-phrase stanza pushes the story forward. Then take Calling the Five Watches, one stanza per watch, where the change of scene marks the passage of time. The Twelve Months of Flowers shows the even tread of enumeration. Finally the embroidered-purse song keeps erhua and the closing curl in its details.

Common misunderstandings

A common mistake is to confuse Beijing short songs with Peking opera. The opera is a banqiang drama; these are folk songs, different in delivery, structure and setting. Nor are they all home-grown in the lanes: many tunes came from Jiangnan shidiao and merely changed accent and words in Beijing. They are not simply children's songs either; that is only one category within the repertory.

Sources

• 中国民间歌曲集成全国编辑委员会编，中国民间歌曲集成（中国 ISBN 中心）— 曲目与城区核对，未引用
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "China" — framework and dates checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.