The Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art

At Yan'an in 1942 the arts were told to serve workers, peasants and soldiers, and folk song became material.

Once the first question became whom the music was for, collecting folk song stopped being research and became a place composers were required to go.

Time and place

Yangjialing, Yan'an, May 1942. The forum on literature and art held three plenary sessions, and Mao Zedong spoke at the opening and the close; the talks were later published as the Yan'an Talks.

What happened

The Yan'an forum met in May 1942. Mao spoke on 2 and 23 May, arguing that art should serve workers, peasants and soldiers, discussing the relation between popularisation and raising standards, and asking writers to go among the people. Afterwards the Lu Xun Academy organised a yangge movement, folk-song collection and new yangge operas became central tasks, and in 1945 the opera The White-Haired Girl followed.

What changed

The test of music widened from whether a work was good to whom it was written for and who heard it. Composers began collecting folk songs systematically, notating, re-texting and arranging them for choruses and operas, and national style became the direction of professional writing. After 1949 the method entered state ensembles and conservatories and shaped a whole catalogue from choral works to ballets. Collecting also changed notation itself, as pentatonic scales and local inflections were written into textbooks and made analysable. The cost was that songs left their original occasions and became edited, attributed works.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the northern Shaanxi song A Bright Star in the East, which belongs to the same tune family as The East Is Red; hear how one melodic frame holds different words. Then Xintianyou, two phrases to a breath, its high register carrying across the valleys, the first thing a collector wrote down. Finally The Yellow River Rolls Eastward, where a personal high line is folded into group singing and volume and unison replace free lengthening. Together they show how serving the workers, peasants and soldiers changed the organisation of sound.

Related

This turn connects 音乐与政治, 民歌采集运动 and 中国音乐史分期.

Sources

• 《中国音乐词典》编辑部编，中国音乐词典（人民音乐出版社）— 延安时期条目核对，未引用
• Grove Music Online, entry "China, People's Republic of" — Yan'an period and folk-song collection checked, not quoted

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