Xianghe Song

Xianghe song is a Han form in which silk-and-bamboo accompaniment answers a lead singer who keeps the beat

Related

Xianghe SongQingyue (Qing Music)ShengPaiban (clappers)

Time and place

Xianghe song flourished in the Han, centred on the yuefu office and court banquets in Chang'an and Luoyang, roughly from the second century BCE to the third century CE. After the Wei and Jin, part of it passed into qingshang music and continued in the south. The surviving accounts come mainly through the Songshu music treatise and the Yuefu Shiji.

What happened

The Songshu says that xianghe is an old Han song genre, in which silk-and-bamboo instruments answer in turn while the singer keeps the beat. It grew from unaccompanied tu ge to dan ge, a lead with a crowd answering, and then to xianghe, where strings and winds alternate with the voice. The large xianghe dage inserted sections called jie, yan, qu and luan between sung passages. Its ping, qing and se modes later became the qingshang three modes.

Musical features

The heart of the genre is mutual answering between voice and instruments, not simple unison. A lead singer marks the beat on a jie drum while sheng, flute, qin, se and pipa follow the melody. The frame is mostly pentatonic and the phrases are short, so one tune can carry many texts. The jie is a sectional unit, and whether it involved instruments, dance or song remains debated.

What to listen for

Hear the Lishui boatmen's haozi, where lead and response are clear and the work is organised by call and answer. Then hear the Yellow River boatmen's haozi, its pace rising and falling with the current. Finally hear the Yunhe anchor haozi from another waterway. None is xianghe song; they lend only their answering pattern to an imagined Han ensemble.

Common misunderstandings

The usual mistake is to equate xianghe song with labour haozi. A haozi is a work song with a lead and a crowd; xianghe is a banquet genre in which instruments answer a singer, and the social settings differ. Others assume it was only call and response, ignoring the drummer, the silk-and-bamboo band and the jie sections. Xianghe dage is not Tang daqu either; scale and structure differ.

Sources

• 《宋书·乐志》— 相和歌与三调记载核对，未引用
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "China" — genre framework checked, not quoted

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