East China Sea Fishermen's Songs

Fishing songs and hauling calls from the Zhoushan islands, with far-carrying cries at sea and clipped pulls at the nets.

Related

Shange (Mountain Songs)VoiceGong, Shang, Jue, Zhi, Yu

Time and place

The repertory centres on the Zhoushan archipelago in Zhejiang, where villages on Shengsi, Daishan and Putuo sailed out for the spring and autumn runs. It is sung in the Zhoushan variety of Wu, with a hard delivery and endings that tend to press downward. Fujian and Guangdong have their own fishing songs, and the fishermen's calls of Hengsha Island at the mouth of the Yangtze, also in Wu-speaking country, offer a useful comparison. The fishing grounds lie beyond the river mouth, where wind and swell are strong and a voice has to carry.

What happened

Fishermen worked wooden sailing boats, raising sail, weighing anchor, rowing, hauling nets and stowing the catch by hand. Ashore there were songs for mending nets, selling fish and waiting for wind. Fishing songs were mostly solo or antiphonal; the hauling calls were led by one and answered by many. From the 1950s collectors went out to Zhoushan and assembled volumes such as Songs of the East China Sea. Motorised junks and trawlers later took over, the calls left the work, and the songs survived mainly on stage and in recordings.

Musical features

Fishing songs have free rhythm, a high opening, a long ornamented ending and a wide range, usually in zhi or yu mode. The work calls do the opposite: short phrases, hard accents, almost no gap between call and answer. Vocables carry much of the text, and real words are stretched into single syllables. At sea there is no instrument; wind, water and engines supply the background. The same song takes a different tempo running before the wind and beating into it.

What to listen for

Start with Going to Sea and its opening, which must cross open water, so the first note is already high. Then take the Hengsha Island calls and hear how they tighten section by section as the net comes in. Follow the long phrases of the Nan'ao song and compare the southern coast with the east. End with The Fisherman's Bitterness, where the narrative side appears and the lines name concrete hardships.

Common misunderstandings

A common mistake is to treat Song of the Fisherman, the 1934 film theme by Ren Guang, as a folk fishing song. It is a composed song. Nor are fishing songs the same as hauling calls: one lyricises and narrates, the other gives the signal to pull. "East China Sea fishing song" is not a single title either, but a cover term for many tunes across one stretch of coast.

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）— 曲目与渔场核对，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.