Manchu Folk Songs
Manchu ritual and everyday songs, chanted in Manchu over drumming, from the Back-Lamp rite to lullabies.
Related
Time and place
The Manchu live mainly in Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang and northern Hebei. Ula Street and Yitong in Jilin, and Xinbin and Xiuyan in Liaoning, preserve a good deal of shamanic song. Manchu belongs to the Tungusic branch of the Altaic family, but everyday use shifted to Chinese after the Qing, and few can now sing a full ritual song in Manchu. Ritual songs belong to shamanic sacrifice; everyday songs accompany hunting, child-rearing, weddings and festivals.
What happened
Traditional Manchu religion is shamanic. Household rites include the dance of the spirits, the back-lamp rite, calling the spirits and sending them off, each with fixed songs and drum patterns. The back-lamp rite takes place after the lamps are put out, and its words invoke the spirits in the most secret part of the ceremony. There are also hunting songs, the yo-yo lullaby, love songs and narrative songs. From the later twentieth century, researchers recorded Manchu villages in Jilin and Liaoning and transcribed the words in phonetic script, preserving both sound and text.
Musical features
Ritual songs are mostly chant-like, narrow in range, circling two or three notes in short phrases marked off by the drum. Manchu stress and phrasing govern the rhythm, and the effect is close to pitched recitation. The drum is the only instrument; once the frame drum or the taiping drum sounds, the song has a skeleton. Everyday songs come closer to northeastern short tunes, with regular phrases, a clear pentatonic frame and mostly Chinese words. Both use one voice, but one turns inward and the other outward.
What to listen for
Begin with Calling the Spirits: the drum starts first and the voice follows, so listen for how they lock. Then take the back-lamp tune, chanted low after the lights go out, with almost no ornament at the close. Sending the Spirits Off shows tempo and manner settling together. Finally, in the song named for a spirit, the name recurs in Manchu, and you can hear which syllable takes the stress.
Common misunderstandings
A common mistake is to treat all Manchu song as Chinese northeastern short tunes. The Manchu ritual songs form a separate body, chant-like and unlike Han tune structure. Nor are they stage performances: they belong to a rite, where getting the sequence wrong matters more than getting a pitch wrong. And the repertory is not only ritual; lullabies, hunting songs and love songs deserve equal attention.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
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）— 曲目与满语记音核对，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.