(Source: Beijing Municipal Government Information Office Official Weibo)
The name "Big Drum" is actually a musical art, which not only absorbs the Peking Opera singing style, but also integrates popular folk tunes to innovate, and the Beijing Rhyme Drum introduced today is also an intangible cultural heritage developed by the circulation of the canal.
Jingyun big drum is actually developed after the reform of the popular wooden plank drum in Cangzhou and Hejian in Hebei Province, the wooden plank drum is also called "timid big drum", and there are many new names in the reform process, such as "Beijing tune big drum", "small mouth big drum" and so on.
After the wooden drum was introduced to Beijing, the artist Liu Baoquan used the beijing voice tone to perform, absorbing some singing methods of horse head and Peking Opera to create a new tone. In 1946, the Quyi Guild was established in Beijing, and Liu Baoquan's performance form was uniformly named "Jingyun Big Drum".
Compared with the wooden drum, the accompaniment instrument of the Jingyun drum adds three strings, four hu and other instruments, and changes the Hejian dialect to the dialect of Beijing, using the four voices of the Beijing phonology to say Jingbai and sing Jingyun, and specially singing short repertoire. Jingyun Big Drum also borrows from the performance program of Peking Opera, using eyes, facial expressions, and the knife and gun frame style of raising hands and feet to form a set of performance figures.
In addition, the Beijing rhyme drum rap takes into account both, with the characteristics of half-talk and half-singing, the basic sentence form of the singing words is seven-word sentences, each singing word is about 1450 sentences, paying attention to the rhyme of the tone and the natural connection of the singing cavity.
The accompaniment of the Jingyun drum is also very learned, and it is divided into "over-the-board music" and "singing cavity accompaniment music". The former refers to the musical passage played by pure instruments, mostly used in the "over the board" sentence at the beginning of the singing segment and the sound of the paragraph; the latter, as the name suggests, is the accompaniment of the singing cavity, also known as the "basic accompaniment point", which is an extension of the singing cavity and the melody, and plays a role in setting off the atmosphere.
Works such as "Single Knife Society", "Battle Changsha", and "Bowangpo" are the earliest traditional repertoire representatives of jingyun drums. After liberation, jingyun big drum underwent a new round of changes, closer to life, and there were works that reflected modern life such as "Huang Jiguang" and "Glorious Voyage". If you want to cultivate your emotions and relax, you might as well listen to it when you have time.
In 2008, Jingyun Big Drum was selected into the second batch of national intangible cultural heritage list.