School Songs of 1904

In 1904 new schools carried group singing, numbered notation and Western major keys into Chinese classrooms.

Related

Voice

Putting singing on the timetable handed a whole set of listening habits to the next generation, along with the tunes.

Time and place

Beijing and Shanghai, 1904. The Qing government issued the regulations for new-style schools, and Shen Xingong, Zeng Zhimin and others moved between Shanghai and Tokyo, carrying back Japanese practice in school singing.

What happened

With the 1904 school regulations, new schools spread across the country and singing lessons followed them into classrooms. Shen Xingong had already compiled songs in Japan; back home he published the first collection of school songs in 1904, and Zeng Zhimin brought out his own in the same year. The method was uniform: take a foreign tune, fit Chinese words to it, notate it in numbered sight-singing notation, and have the class sing in unison with a harmonium or piano. Li Shutong's later Farewell used a foreign melody as well.

What changed

Singing became a shared experience for every pupil rather than a skill of actors or church singers. Numbered notation let people read music without knowing the old gongche system, and Western major keys, four-four time and functional harmony entered Chinese listening habits with it. Unison singing also brought a new bodily discipline, sitting straight, watching a conductor, breathing in time. Those pupils became the teachers, composition students and founders of conservatories of the next decades, which is why the school song is treated as the start of modern Chinese music education. It also left a question, since the words changed while the syntax of the melodies remained foreign.

Listen for the turn

Begin with Dreaming of Home and Mother, four square phrases in a major key closing on the tonic, the shape school songs borrowed most often. Then Jasmine Flower, pentatonic in uneven phrases and circling its tonic. Finally the northern song A Line Is the Yellow River seen from afar, wide in range and free in rhythm, held up by a high register. Heard together, they show that the school song did not grow out of local folk music; it chose a foreign melodic channel and fitted Chinese words into it.

Related

This turn connects 音乐教育史, 中国音乐史分期, 中国流行音乐的起点 and Voice.

Sources

• 《中国音乐词典》编辑部编，中国音乐词典（人民音乐出版社）— 乐歌条目与年代核对，未引用
• Grove Music Online, entry "China, People's Republic of, music education" — school song movement checked, not quoted

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