Text/Yangcheng Evening News all-media reporter Chen Xiaonan photo/photo provided by interviewee
The recent exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art "The Sound of the Waves is Still – Chen Xiaoqi's Solo Art Exhibition" brought the famous songwriter back into the public's eye.
Chen Xiaoqi was born in Puning, Guangdong in 1954. He began composing pop music in 1983 and has published nearly 2,000 works, of which about 200 have won the Golden Bell Award, the Golden Eagle Award, and China's Top Ten Golden Melody Awards.
In 1991, "The Sound of the Waves", composed by Chen Xiaoqi, caused a thousand waves with one stone and became a classic work in the pop music scene. His representative works also include "How are you big brother", "Daughter Red", "I don't want to say", "Plateau Red", "Cheer for Our Today", "Baqiao Willow" and so on.
Chen Xiaoqi was an important promoter behind many singers in the 90s of the 20th century. In 1992, he took the lead in establishing the planning department of the Guangzhou branch of China Record Corporation, signed Gan Ping, Li Chunbo, Chen Ming and others, and became popular with this new generation of singers. He is also a leading figure in Chinese pop music, so much so that Hong Kong lyricist Huang Xiao once said before his death: There is Chen Xiaoqi in the mainland, so there is no need to go to Hong Kong.
40 years later, what does Chen Xiaoqi look like when he brings songs, calligraphy and paintings to the exhibition? What does he think of pop music at the moment? Recently, he was interviewed by a reporter from Yangcheng Evening News——
Chen Xiaoqi
The cultural nourishment of Guangdong Chaoji and the three places
Yangcheng Evening News: How did you get into the field of pop music creation?
Xiaoqi Chen: I've been making pop music for 40 years. In 1982, I worked as a opera editor at the Guangzhou branch of China Record Corporation. The following year, a music editor at the record company approached me to help fill in the lyrics for the song. At first I was shirking because I didn't fill in the lyrics. The other party said, you know music, you have also filled in classical poetry, and you have written modern poetry, it should be fine.
The first song I filled in was "My Guitar", based on the words of the famous Spanish ballad "Romance of Love", and the response to the song was good after its release, and a music documentary on CCTV at that time used the song as the theme song. After the first song was played, the lyrics became logical, and finally became my "main business" of amateur creation.
Yangcheng Evening News: Why are you organizing a solo art exhibition now?
Chen Xiaoqi: This year marks the 45th anniversary of China's reform and opening up, the 45th anniversary of the birth of Guangdong pop music, and the 40th anniversary of my pop music creation. In the past two years, I would like to review and summarize my creative journey in this life.
So, this year, I did two things, one was to publish my anthology by Sun Yat-sen University Press, which collected all kinds of works created over the past few decades, a total of 5 volumes, including lyrics, songs, poetry, commentaries, and paintings and books. Another thing is this art exhibition, I have held more than a dozen solo concerts before, but the art exhibition has never been tried.
Yangcheng Evening News: What has your aesthetic vision and aesthetic taste been mainly nourished? What is the source of creative inspiration?
Chen Xiaoqi: I have lived in Guangdong all my life, and I have lived in three places in Guangdong for more than 10 years. I was born in Puning, belongs to the Chaoshan area, and lived in Chaoshan until I was 11 years old; Later, I followed my parents to the Hakka area and stayed in Meixian for a total of 13 years, and I actually spent my teenage years in the Hakka area; At the age of 24, the college entrance examination resumed, and I was admitted to the Chinese Department of Sun Yat-sen University as a Meizhou candidate, so I came to Guangzhou and lived here for 45 years.
The cultures of all three places have a great influence on me, including the "elegant" things in Chaoshan culture, such as Teochew music; Rustic things in Hakka culture, such as Hakka mountain songs; And these traditional and relatively foreign things in Canton culture have greatly influenced my cultural aesthetics.
In addition, when I was a child, I began to teach myself musical instruments, mainly national musical instruments, and I have a good understanding of folk music and opera. In middle school, I fell in love with classical grammatical poetry, and I filled out hundreds of them at that time, and I played around by myself.
These nourishments eventually form my overall aesthetic concept and creative style, which is closely related to personal temperament and personality, because style is not learned, but something that is formed spontaneously.
Chen Xiaoqi in his youth
I want to write some songs for children
Yangcheng Evening News: What is your main direction of music creation now?
Chen Xiaoqi: The 80s and 90s were an era of the record industry, and I mainly wrote lyrics for pop song records; In the 90s, he began to compose lyrics and music by himself, during which he also composed some art songs of national singing and bel canto singing, including some choral songs.
After 2000, my creative focus shifted to travel songs, urban songs, and corporate songs; In recent years, I have mainly been creating original children's pop songs, and the whole change is probably in this vein.
Five years ago, I set up a children's music training institution called Qidao Music, and I wanted to write some songs for children. After all, there are not many good original children's songs in China now, and there are very few songs tailored specifically for children, so I want to make some attempts in this regard.
Yangcheng Evening News: Some music fans said that listening to your song "has the feeling of landscape painting", in addition to music, you also like calligraphy and painting, and this exhibition shows some of your calligraphy and painting works. What can visual expression bring to music?
Chen Xiaoqi: In fact, vision is only a complementary thing, and it is impossible to become a part of music in itself. Because my lyrics have a lot of image, connotation and meaning, which can be translated into a visual language, I was based on this idea. I wanted to add a visual impact to the music listeners.
Because music itself is an auditory art, all that remains is auditory memory. If the lyrics are converted into calligraphy and painting, it can give the listener a visual impact, which helps to strengthen their understanding or impression of the song, and can obtain another kind of aesthetic enjoyment.
"Morning Clouds and Twilight Rain" (Chinese painting) □ Chen Xiaoqi
Yangcheng Evening News: What are the new creative plans and cooperation plans in the near future or in the future?
Xiaoqi Chen: There is no plan. My creation is very random, I may encounter a certain theme, feel it, and start creating. The other is propositional composition, such as songs of cities, tourism, and enterprises, which should be conceived and created according to the requirements of the place or company expressed, including understanding its historical background.
I won't focus on any one area alone. This art exhibition selects more than 20 works, which themselves cover Chinese style, urban style, ethnic minority style, tourism songs, sports songs, corporate songs, children's songs, Cantonese, Chaoshan dialect, Hakka dialect and other categories... As for cooperation, it is also a step-by-step approach.
Catering to listeners is not conducive to boutique production
Yangcheng Evening News: What is the influence of online platforms on your music creation?
Chen Xiaoqi: Now there are many divine comedy and Internet celebrity songs. We also want to write this kind of divine comedy, but we really can't write it, and we feel awkward when we write it. I dare not take this path, I can only create according to my own aesthetic taste and aesthetic standards, as for whether the stream is popular or not, I will not think too much.
I think the classic works are like mountains, it stands in that place, and people can still remember it decades later. Many of the current Internet Divine Comedy, in fact, it is not called a mountain peak, it is called "wave peak". It will rise very high at once, even above the peak, but it will soon fall. The Divine Comedy is actually such a concept, wave after wave of new Divine Comedy emerges, but basically it is set off a wave and then never seen again.
Online music is the pursuit of this amount and speed, to be able to create a song in the shortest time, to meet the current aesthetic needs of this society, and then push it out to cater to the changing preferences of the audience, but this is not conducive to the production of fine products and the accumulation of culture.
Yangcheng Evening News: Then what do you think of the recent popular AI songwriting and "AI Sun Yanzi", including the virtual singer that has already appeared?
Chen Xiaoqi: AI is an unstoppable trend, and it will definitely have a subversive impact on the entire artistic creation, which is inevitable, and the same is true for music. But at present, I think it is still difficult to achieve AI completely replacing humans in artistic creation within at least 10 years.
The best thing to do is to make AI an aid to human creation, and I'm just getting started because it's not easy for me to fully master this new technology at my age.
Original manuscript from that year
There are no regional differences in online music
Yangcheng Evening News: What is the development of Guangdong music today? How is it different from the last century?
Chen Xiaoqi: There are very few concepts of local pop music now, and they have all merged. In the late last century, we can clearly see that the music created in Guangdong is very different from that created in the north, but it is basically invisible now. Especially when we enter the era of online music, there are no regional differences.
There are many singers and songwriters in Guangdong in the current online music, but if we do not specifically check and only look at the song itself, it is difficult for us to judge where it comes from, which is also the final result of cultural integration and aesthetic integration.
Yangcheng Evening News: What are the current dialogues and exchanges between Guangdong and the Hong Kong pop music industry?
Chen Xiaoqi: The Guangdong Pop Music Association has some exchanges with Hong Kong, but not much, because the association mainly serves local musicians in Guangdong. We are planning to hold an international children's pop song contest in Hong Kong this year, probably in October. The participants include children from the mainland, Hong Kong and abroad, hoping that through this kind of activity, children from all over the world can communicate and exchange with each other, which is also a cultural integration.
Yangcheng Evening News: What is your vision for the development of pop music in the Greater Bay Area?
Chen Xiaoqi: I haven't thought too much about it yet. Guangdong pop music and other art forms have always had a blood relationship with Hong Kong and Macao, and communication has never stopped, so it may not matter whether it is called the pop music of the Greater Bay Area. I think it is more important for the people to communicate and exchange independently, including the mutual learning of the authors. (For more news, please pay attention to Yangcheng Pai pai.ycwb.com)
The original article can be found in the A700 edition of "Yangcheng Evening News" on June 4, 2023
Source | Yangcheng Evening News Yangcheng Pie
Responsible Editor | Wu Xiaopan
Proofreading | Zhu Aiting