Image source: Xinhua News Agency
Wearing a tiger's head coat and stepping on tiger's head shoes,
Children's voices sounded, and 44 lovely children from the depths of the Taihang Mountains sang the Greek Olympic song "Ode to the Olympics" with pure, ethereal sounds.
This moment at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics deeply touched people's hearts.
What is somewhat surprising is that these children all come from five rural primary schools in Nanzhuang Town, Fuping County, Baoding, Hebei Province, the old revolutionary area of Taihang Mountain, and are real "children in the mountains."
Fuping County, once a typical poor area, the per capita arable land is only 0.96 acres, "nine mountains, half water and half field" is the true portrayal of this mountainous county.
The distance between Chengnanzhuang and downtown Beijing is 300 kilometers, but this time to participate in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, many children are still coming to Beijing for the first time. This appearance at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics was also the first time in their lives that most of them had stepped onto the official performance stage.
In four months, how did these most simple and unpretentious children on Chinese soil come from the depths of the Taihang Mountains and ascend to the grand and sacred stage of the Olympic Games?
"I know how far away Fuping's children are from the opening ceremony"
2021 is the fifth year of Fu Baohuan, a retired music special teacher at Beijing Chongwen Primary School, who participated in the Ministry of Education's "Old Principal Goes to the Countryside" activity and volunteered to teach in Fuping County. For five years, she, along with several other retired principals and special teachers, traveled monthly between Fuping and Beijing. Subway, high-speed rail, coach... 300 kilometers away, they have to spend half a day to arrive each time.
One day in September 2021, Fu Baohuan received a call from the staff of the Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee. Knowing that Fu Baohuan was still teaching in Fuping, the other party proposed that he hoped to go to Fuping to see if the children there could undertake the task of singing the Olympic games at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics more than four months later.
"At that time, my first feeling was that I was happy for the children of Fuping, who had the opportunity to be examined if they could participate in such a major event. But I was also worried that I knew how far Fuping's children were from the concert songs at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. I really had a bit of a drum in my head. Fu Baohuan said.
Before Fu Baohuan came to the two rural primary schools of Shihou and Gujiazhuang in Nanzhuang Town, Fuping County, the children here had never taken music lessons. "They don't know how to sing, they can't open their mouths, and the sounds they sing are not on the tune, which bothered me at first." Fu Baohuan admits that after five years of volunteer teaching, the children's progress is also limited, "because of the lack of music environment after class." ”
Deng Xiaolan took a group photo with the children of the "Ma Lanhua Children's Voice Choir" backstage. Courtesy of respondents
One day to prepare and conquer the Organizing Committee of the Winter Olympics
Agreed with the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee, Fu Baohuan arrived in Chengnanzhuang a day in advance. That night, she hardly slept all night, thinking about how to make the children of Chengnanzhuang show their best in front of the representatives of the Beijing Winter Olympic Organizing Committee tomorrow.
The venue for the next day's meeting was selected at Malan Elementary School in Malan Village, Chengnanzhuang Town.
Malan Village, the site of jin-cha-ji daily, one of the predecessors of the People's Daily, has been here since 2004 when a retired Beijing elderly man named Deng Xiaolan devotes half of his time a year to teaching music lessons to children in the mountains. She hopes to use music to make children's childhood colorful.
Her father was Deng Tuo, who had been the head of two newspapers.
In 1943, Deng Xiaolan was born in Yijiazhuang Village, Fuping County, and after birth, he was fostered in a family of fellow villagers in Mapeng Village near Malan Village for 3 years. Today, nearly 80-year-old Deng Xiaolan, accompanied by the children of this small mountain village, has come to the front of the world.
The story of Deng Xiaolan's volunteer teaching in Malan Village also touched the Beijing Winter Olympic Organizing Committee.
More than ten years ago, Fuping County did not have a highway, deng Xiaolan every time he went to Malan Village, he had to take a long-distance bus and then change to a bus, bumping for more than 7 hours, just to give the children in the mountain village an authentic music lesson.
She was pleasantly surprised to find that these children, who had never been exposed to music, were actually very talented, and only taught a few times to sing a song in its entirety. After teaching one song after another, watching the children learn faster and faster and sing better and better, Deng Xiaolan was happy in his heart.
Since then, she has moved violins, electronic keyboards, accordions, flutes, trumpets and other instruments from Beijing, and has spent more than half of her time here every year to accompany the children to grow up, and it has been nearly 18 years.
The time of the meeting is four o'clock in the afternoon. Early in the morning, more than 200 children from four primary schools in Seongnamzhuang gathered in Malan Village, of which only more than 50 were taught by Fu Baohuan. Grinding the gun, knowing that the only songs that children can sing are "National Anthem" and "School Song", Fu Baohuan divided more than 200 children into two groups, mainly based on the basic singing methods of pitch, biting words, and breathing, and took two big lessons, and finally selected 100 children.
100 children sang "School Song" and Fu Baohuan's Czech folk song "White Dove" to the representatives of the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee, and children from different schools sang the school songs of their respective schools.
"After Singing, I was very surprised. The Organizing Committee of the Winter Olympics immediately made a decision and decided that the children of Nanzhuang in Fuping City would undertake the task of singing the Olympic games at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. I felt that the preparation for the day was not in vain, and the representatives of Fuping County and Baoding City who were present were particularly excited. Fu Baohuan said.
"Zero Foundation" + "Zero Stage Experience"
Fuping's children conquered the Beijing Winter Olympic Organizing Committee in one day and gained the opportunity to appear on the stage of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. On February 4, 2022, they will sing the solemn and sacred Olympic Hymn in Greek with the purest voice from the depths of the Taihang Mountains.
The 100 recognized children are not yet a choir. Immediately afterward, Fu Baohuan and the staff of the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee began the formal selection process at five primary schools in Chengnanzhuang Town. She told reporters that considering that "Olympic Anthem" is a song with a complex melody and great difficulty, there is only one criterion for choosing a child, that is, pitch. "What it looks like, male, female, tall, fat and thin, I don't even look at it." The criterion I chose was to sing accurately. ”
At The Stone Monkey Primary School, which has been teaching for a long time in Fu Baohuan, five children were finally selected, including five-year-old Xiao Doudou. Xiao Doudou attended music classes and activity classes with the first-grade children, and his smart and cute appearance was taken by the staff of the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee. "What would you do if your aunt took you to Beijing?" Will you miss Mom? You may be long, you may not see your mother for a month. "I can." The five-year-old showed determination beyond her age and eventually became the only preschooler among the 44 children attending the opening ceremony.
After the selection, there are more than 70 shortlisted children, in addition to Xiao Doudou, all of whom are students from the second to fifth grades of bayi school, Jinggou Primary School, Stone Monkey Primary School, Malan Primary School and Da'andi Primary School in Nanzhuang Town, Fuping County. Liu Kai, principal of Xiazhuang Township Central School in Nanzhuang Town, Fuping County, told the Beijing Daily client reporter that in order to let the children's singing level be most effectively improved in a short period of time, Fuping County has equipped this newly formed choir with a number of life teachers, everyone eats, lives, trains together, goes home once a week, and begins semi-closed centralized training from late October 2021.
Ma Mengnan, a 27-year-old teacher of choral conducting at Baoding College, is a well-known choral training teacher who once went to Beijing to give choral guidance to state organs. She told reporters that this is the most difficult and challenging choral training she has ever experienced, for the simple reason that these children in the mountains are almost "zero foundation" in choral singing. "They don't have any stage experience, and the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics will be the first time that most of them will officially perform on stage."
Zhang Yimou: "That's great! I was such a red-faced child! ”
Ma Mengnan and colleagues led the children to start a high-intensity choral training for 5 hours a day. At the beginning, what made them feel pressure was not the "blank" of these children's music, but a natural barrier to the outside world caused by the barrier of the mountains.
"The children are very afraid of life, many of them can't speak Mandarin, and it is difficult to communicate. We were often rehearsing when we saw a kid in the corner suddenly crying. Asked what was wrong with him, he said he was homesick. They have not lived this kind of collective life, so semi-closed training is very necessary. Ma Mengnan said.
During the long training process, the children also showed the unique focus and resilience of the children in the mountains. After arriving in Beijing in early January, during the first rehearsal at the Bird's Nest, the youngest little beanie had a severe allergic reaction to the tape on the head of the headset. As soon as he played, Xiao Doudou's eyes could not see, and his head was full of rashes. The teachers were frightened and used other methods to help her fix the headphones afterwards, but the strong little beanie never complained or said that she was homesick and behaved better than many older children.
During the training, the children also learned about the glorious red history of their hometown fuping and Seongnamzhuang and the knowledge of the Winter Olympics through special learning.
During the Fuping training camp, videos of children singing were initially transmitted to the opening ceremony directors group in Beijing once a week, and later increased to twice a week. Ma Mengnan said that in the more than two months of training, the children's changes are both subtle and reborn. There was a boy named Yin Tianqi, who had undergone choral training, and had to become clean and focused from the appearance of runny nose and dirt at the beginning, as if he had changed into a different person.
At a video presentation at the end of December 2021, the children's performance won a round of applause. Many people watching the report in Beijing had tears in their eyes, and Zhang Yimou, the general director of the opening ceremony, took the lead in applauding and saying: "It's so good! I was such a red-faced child! The kids sang so well, it was so good! ”
The evaluation of the general director was transmitted back to Fuping, and the stone in the hearts of Ma Mengnan and his colleagues finally fell to the ground.
The first experience of teaching "post-00s" Greek teachers
The Olympiad was first sung at the opening ceremony of the first modern Summer Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, with lyrics and music personally selected by the Greek Vikelaus, the first president of the International Olympic Committee, and the songwriters were also Greeks. But it wasn't until 1958 that it was designated as the Olympic anthem. The Olympic Anthem was first played as an anthem at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Valley, USA, in February 1960.
The Olympic Hymn is sung in Greek. For the children of Fuping, learning to sing the Olympic Hymn is carried out simultaneously in two lines from the beginning, one is to learn the song itself, and the other is to learn the lyrics of Greek. Complete singing and training must be premised on learning Greek lyrics.
Before receiving the task, Lin Jiahao, a 2019 undergraduate student majoring in Greek at Beijing Foreign Chinese University, who was "post-00", had never heard "Olympic Hymn", let alone taught Greek to others. "When I was tasked, the first thing I did was learn the song myself."
Lin Jiahao is a native of Quanzhou, Fujian Province, and spent most of his time in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, before going to university. Forming a Greek teaching team with one of his teachers, Lin Jiahao threw himself into the first, and perhaps most important and special, Greek teaching in his life as soon as he arrived in Fuping.
Unlike other European languages, Greek has a unique writing system. Lin Jiahao used the method of English phonics and Hanyu pinyin to teach the lyrics of the Olympic Hymn in Fuping so that the children could learn and remember. In addition to the children, he also has choral training teachers such as Ma Mengnan; in addition to teaching recitation, he also wants everyone to understand the meaning of the lyrics.
The effect of teaching surprised Lin Jiahao. The children learn very quickly, and in Lin Jiahao's own words, from the first day of the class, the children continue to surprise him.
In the hearts of children, plant the seeds of knowledge
"In fact, all the lyrics boil down to one sentence, 'The ancient spirit is immortal'; at the beginning it was quite difficult, the more I learned, the simpler it became, and some of the pronunciation of Greek was a bit like Chinese..." Speaking to reporters about the process of learning Greek, Di Junbo, a fifth-grade student at Bayi School, seemed rather understated.
In fact, according to Lin Jiahao, this chubby little boy was once the focus of the teachers' correction because of the poor memory of the lyrics. But when Lin Jiahao came to Chengnanzhuang from Beijing again to start the second stage of teaching, he was indeed pleasantly surprised to find that Di Junbo had already memorized all the lyrics.
Greek was a direct development from ancient Greek, and the culture and language of ancient Greece had a profound influence on Western civilization. Especially in the academic field, the influence of the Greek language is still very obvious today, such as the familiar English words philosophy and psychology.
In the "Olympic Hymn" that the children of Seongnamzhuang have memorized backwards, many similar traces can also be found. For example, in the first sentence, "The ancient spirit is immortal", the Greek "ancient (αρχαο)" is the source of archaeology in English; the sentence "This tall temple", the Greek "big, tall (μ?γα?)" is the source of the English megaphone; the English sea power (thalassocracy) comes from the sea (θ?λασσε?) in Greek.
"Children may not realize it now, but in the future, when they are exposed to some academic knowledge in higher education, they are likely to find that some of the content is something they learned when they learned to sing olympic songs when they were young." They will also remember the beautiful and profound meaning of the lyrics. This short Greek learning experience may have a subtle impact on children, and I am proud and relieved every time I think about it. Lin Jiahao said.
Editor: Gu Jun
Comprehensive: Beijing Daily client, Governor of Chang'an Avenue, People's Network, etc