"A long-lost academic-style concert!" After watching "The Music of the Silk Road, Tang Yun Echoes", an audience member said excitedly.
On January 5th, the "Music of the Silk Road , Tang Yun Echo" hosted by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music took the stage of the Music Opera House, and used an experimental concert to restore the Sheng Tang music and dance of 1200 years ago and show the sheng Tang qi rhyme, which made the audience addicted.
From the small band ensemble "Urgent Hu XiangQing" and "Water Drum", the big band ensemble "Guizi Music", to the music dance "Hu Teng Dance" and "Hu Xuan Dance"... A piece of music and a section of dance, like a piece of living ancient gong strokes, let the Sheng Tang Music Dance "come alive".
"The history of ancient Chinese music is a 'silent history', from general history to textbooks are from theory to theory, and people still don't know what ancient Chinese music is. So, didn't there be music or dance in ancient China? Of course not. Zhao Weiping, the planning and music director, hopes to try to get closer to the truth of Tang Dynasty music and dance through this textbook concert.
From silent to audible, restoring Tang Dynasty music
The Tang Dynasty was the heyday of the development of ancient Chinese music, whether it is Dunhuang murals or other Buddhist caves, there are still rich and colorful music and dance paintings of the Tang Dynasty. However, after thousands of years of fluidity, the form of these ancient instruments has changed, the ancient musical score has almost disappeared, and the sound is broken.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, an ancient pipa notation was discovered in the Dunhuang Tibetan Scripture Cave, which used the ancient notation method of pipa "Heavenly Book", unveiling the mystery of Tang Dynasty music. In addition, the 18 kinds of 75 complete Tang Dynasty musical instruments in the Collection of the Shokura Institute in Nara, Japan, also allow music archaeologists to see the hope of restoring Tang Dynasty music.
Since the 1980s, Scholars ye Dong, Chen Yingshi, He Changlin, Zhao Xiaosheng, Ying Youqin, and Zhao Weiping of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music have made great hardships and efforts for the study of Tang Dynasty music. The "China and East Asian Ancient Score Research Center" of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music has collected and sorted out hundreds of original musical scores lost overseas, accumulated nearly 20,000 pages of high-definition electronic literature on ancient music scores, and made detailed translations and problems for each ancient score, making breakthrough research progress.
As one of them, Zhao Weiping has also gone overseas many times to study ancient musical scores scattered abroad, digitally transfer them, and translate them into modern musical scores that modern people can understand, and find out the melody, rhythm and pitch on the musical scores.
In addition, he also referred to a large number of ancient documents, found a factory, and successively restored more than 30 musical instruments such as the four-stringed lute, the five-string straight pipa, the zhenzheng, the horizontal flute, and the karma drum.
"The process of restoring an instrument is very difficult! The material is very important and exquisite, and you must respect its laws. Zhao Weiping for example, the strings alone are very complex, modern musical instruments mostly use wire rope, the sound is also modern, and ancient Chinese musical instruments will use silk strings, he went to Kyoto to make silk strings factory interview, bought a batch back, for the production of guqin and pipa.
Years of research and efforts laid the foundation for this Tang Dynasty concert and was intensively presented.
From Tang makeup to Tang costumes, reproducing the aesthetics of Sheng Tang Dynasty
Painting Tang makeup, putting on Tang costumes, musicians lined up and sat on the floor... A piece of music and a section of dance, like a living ancient brush stroke, let the audience travel through time and see the performance scene of the Sheng Tang Music and Dance.
In order to let the audience experience the beauty of sheng tang music and dance in an all-round and immersive way, under the leadership of Dai Xiaorong, producer and visual director and professor of the School of Digital Media Arts of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the stage design of the scene is arranged according to ancient murals and other documents.
The stage design takes the murals such as "Mogao Grottoes No. 220 Cave Music and Dance Map" as a historical reference, restores the carpet and other furnishings in the painting, and demarcates the accompanying band and the dancers; the costumes are based on cultural relics such as the Tang Dynasty gilded bronze HuTeng dance figurines as a reference, restoring the design of their hu shirts and long belts, and artistically processing them; the stage is presented as if it were an ancient painting axis, with rice paper laying the bottom, cinnabar red hook edges, and the musicians performed on this freehand picture scroll; on the basis of the traditional hard scene, digital images were also used on the scene to assist in the presentation...
"The scene is like a living 'museum', and the audience can travel back in time to the past when they see the musicians' vivid performances." To be able to participate in such an academic and archaeological experimental concert, Dai Xiaorong is very excited.
In order to let the audience understand Tang Le more deeply and feel Tang Yun, precious documents such as "Dunhuang Pipa Score" and "Tianping Pipa Score" are also presented through multimedia, and with Zhao Weiping's explanation, the concert instantly becomes a master class full of dry goods.
"Why was the lute played horizontally a thousand years ago?" "The current pai zhen used to be called a hoop, and after the appearance of a separate hoop during the Ming Dynasty, it was changed to a row hoop." "There were in the Han Dynasty, and when the Tang Dynasty began to gradually leave the Chinese stage, and now there are still flutes in Japan, we listen to the sound of this instrument..." At the scene, Zhao Weiping also popularized the history of these ancient instruments one by one with a vivid explanation in a simple and simple way.
"I can't say that this is Tang Dynasty music, but I do my best to get close to the truth of history." With these efforts, future generations will gradually uncover more secrets and present the real Chinese Tang Dynasty music. Zhao Weiping looked forward to the future and said.