Yimeng Short Tunes

Short tunes of the Yimeng hills in southern Shandong, four square phrases with vocables, recast with new words in the 1940s.

Related

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

Time and place

The Yimeng hills lie in southern Shandong, centred on Fei, Yinan and Mengyin counties in Linyi. The songs are in local Central Plains Mandarin, with hard tones and endings that tend to fall. Short tunes are sung in villages, at markets, at spinning bees and on summer evenings, not shouted from mountainsides. The hills are low but heavily gullied, villages are close together, and the songs travel from person to person rather than across long distances.

What happened

In 1940 a cultural troupe of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University was working in the Yimeng base area. Ruan Ruoshan wrote the words and Li Lin set them to a local seasonal tune, producing The Yimeng Mountain Tune, aimed first at a local sect and at mobilising resistance. As the song spread, the old words faded and the new ones became the sound of Yimeng. After the 1950s the song was repeatedly edited and arranged, and it became the most quoted item of Shandong folk song.

Musical features

The tunes usually run in four-phrase stanzas in duple time, with square phrases and a clear statement, development, turn and close. Melody rests on a pentatonic frame, often zhi mode, moving mostly by step with an occasional fourth leap. Vocables such as "nage" and "ai" are inserted inside the line, stretching the seven-character verse and softening the delivery. Endings are held for two beats and cut cleanly. Without instruments, phrasing depends entirely on vocal weight.

What to listen for

Begin with the seasonal tune, whose month-by-month narration is common in this repertory, and notice how neatly one line is allotted to each month. Then take the flower-dialogue song, where question and answer meet at the final note of each phrase. Finally the embroidered-purse song, densest in vocables, shows how they separate the real words. Sing the Yimeng tune again and you can hear which phrase is local ground and which was written in 1940.

Common misunderstandings

A common mistake is to treat The Yimeng Mountain Tune as an ancient song passed down. Its tune has folk roots, but the words and the overall shape date from 1940 and belong to the new folk-song repertory. Nor is it the only song of the area: Yimeng short tunes form a genre with items for weddings, spinning and seeing off a lover. They also differ from mountain songs, being regular where mountain songs are free.

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）— 曲目与鲁南民歌核对，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.