In 2015, Su Yang performed at the Taiyuan Waiting Sky Music Festival. "I just used the rock music I had accepted, the folk songs I had accepted, and in the end it was the music of a Ningxia person, the music of a Chinese... Cosmopolitanization is not about turning all music into a kind of music, a rhythm, a timbre, but a cosmopolitanism should have a basic bloodline and way of expression, something that belongs to your blood, and then fuse it. Photo courtesy/Su Yang
Recently, Su Yang won the "2018 Beijing News Annual Cross-border Writing" award for his essay collection "The Sound of The Soil".
Su Yang is a musician known for his fusion of Northwest folk songs and modern rock music, he has crossed over multimedia art and is now a crossover writer. Suyang's music originated in the northwest, as if it had accumulated a thousand years of simple emotions, full of blood and impulses, vicissitudes and sentimentality. His writing is also simple, restrained and nostalgic.
Today, Shujun will share with you an article by Su Yang in "Authentic Wind Objects , Yinchuan", allowing us to feel his indissoluble love affair with music, Yinchuan, and the land.
And the closest expression of life, in order to reach the human heart
Written, courtesy of Su Yang Illustration 丨 Miao Younan
There are no long vegetables in the wheat fields
In 1976, when I was 7 and a half years old, I followed my mother from Zhejiang to Yinchuan, all the way by boat, car, train, back and forth. It was late at night, and my father was carrying me and my mother home from the train station on a "two-eight" bicycle. The next morning I opened the door and saw a scene completely different from what I had remembered before: an endless yellow earth, all yellow.
When I was a child, I lived in the family home of the nitrogen fertilizer factory, and my parents worked in the nitrogen fertilizer factory. Between the family home and the nitrogen fertilizer factory, there is a field, and I often hit there and pass by. The field was not very fertile, and in the hot summer it often emitted a smell of dung. At dusk, I could hear the people who farmed the land casually humming some small songs, although I was not deeply impressed, but I remembered that it must be a local song in Ningxia.
One day, I was passing by a field. A middle-aged man squatted next to an earthen house on the ground, holding a piece of steamed bun in his hand. He stopped me and said, "Child, do you have any pickles at home?" "At that time, I was a child of the factory and mine, and the people in the factory and mine did not have much contact with the local farmers. I was a little alert and took two quick steps. He looked at me, then at the field, and said, "We are so poor, I haven't eaten a dish in days, if you have pickles at home, give me some quietly." "I didn't answer him.
I was thinking: How can a farmer have no vegetables to eat? Later, the adults told me that they planted wheat, and there were no long vegetables in the wheat field. It's been a long time since it happened, and it's still fresh in my mind.
Closer to the expression of the land
Around 1996, I joined the Chinese rock band and formed a transparent band in Yinchuan, which at one point was quite lively. In early 2000, I went to Beijing, and my dream was to become a particularly good guitarist. Later, when I returned to Yinchuan to meet a friend who particularly liked music, he liked to listen to blues and jazz, and I asked him: "Is there more primitive music than blues?" "I watched an American TV series, Roots, which tells the story of black Americans, and when they are humiliated, they sing some hometown songs, and I want to hear similar songs.
"There are some field recordings, but I guess you don't like to listen to this kind of music," he said. "He found one for me, and I took it home and listened to it. I don't know why, when I heard the oratorio inside, I suddenly remembered the melody that the farmers occasionally heard when I was passing through the field when I was a child, why did they have such a similarity?
When I was a child, I basically can't remember the tune, but I only remember one sentence, because it has been sung and adapted countless times, and in Ningxia, both adults and children can hum it.
Ningxia Chuan, two-headed tip,
East of the Yellow River and west of Helan Mountain,
Jinchuan, Yinchuan, Rice River.
In just a few words, it tells the landform of Ningxia and the true wishes of Ningxia people.
Yinchuan in Suyang's lens. Su Yang once sat on the bus for a month, photographing Yinchuan with a camera borrowed from a friend. The camera is of a station, a hurried pedestrian, and a crowd of dusty servants. Yinchuan and other cities pursue rapid change, only the elderly in this life, when the children travel away, they will shed tears, and the young people are talking and laughing between thousands of miles a day Photo / Suyang
Later, I went to more places, only to find that the song sang "Jinchuan, Yinchuan, Rice Grain River", only the Yinchuan Plain is a rich land, it accepted the Feeding of the Yellow River, and Helan Mountain helped it block the wind and sand of Inner Mongolia. China's best rice comes from the northeast, with the most oily rice growing from black soil, followed by Ningxia rice. Why is Ningxia's rice delicious? Because only one crop of rice is produced a year. At the age of 16, I left Yinchuan to go to school in Xi'an, where we ate brown rice, and we Ningxia dolls ate more and more one by one, but we didn't see fat. When I came home for the New Year, I only ate a bowl of rice for the first meal, which was very fragrant, and I didn't even use the next meal.
But in the north and south of Ningxia, more places are perennially arid, far more desolate than the fields I passed through as a child. Farmers in arid areas plant seeds in the spring and then wait for god to rain, and if it doesn't rain, they eat relief grain, almost as a habit.
In such a place, the place name is always related to the water, such as "big puddle", "shouting water", "grass mud puddle", every time I hear the name "shouting water", I feel particularly bitter. The lack of water has reached the point of "shouting", why is it still called "Jinchuan, Yinchuan, Rice Grain River"?
I think there should be an expression closer to the land, so as to more reflect the meaning of folk songs and be closer to the essence of folk songs. I made up another word along with its original word—
Millet yellow, shandan dan blossom,
The waters of the Yellow River are rich on both sides of the river.
I hope that the one who eats does not rely on heaven.
Later, the chorus was compiled, and the second and third paragraphs were compiled, which became a complete song. On my first album, the song was called "Ningxia Chuan."
Wild and beautiful
When I started writing these little pieces, I was a folk song about flowers **, which was spread in the three provinces of Gansu, Qing, and Ning in northwest China, and got its name from the metaphor of women as flowers in the lyrics. —Editor's Note) There's really no concept yet. The lyrics of the flower are particularly beautiful, it is very wild, but in fact it is all rhymes, and its rhetorical method is difficult to find in our language habits today—of course, it is very common in ancient poetry—fu, bi, and xing, the three main means of expression of the Book of Poetry.
(Oops) The sleeve is (oops, oops) clairvoyances (ah),
(Oh clairvoyant), distant mountains (down ah ah ah ah) illuminated into (one) near the mountain (ah);
(Oops) Brother is a peacock (Oops Oops) Whirling in the void (yah),
(Oh flower galian's hand), The sister is (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
"The sleeve is clairvoyant", this is a way to start, that is, to come to the energy, to the emotion, to make the preparation. "Brother is a peacock, hanging in the void", this is an analogy, but also a mutual comparison. The name of this flower is "Ga Lian Hand Order".
The language system we learn from childhood today, the language system we subconsciously use when singing and writing songs, is actually 18,000 miles away from folk songs. It's not that the folk song system is better, it's that it's different. Many musicians who collect flowers or other folk songs complain that they can't keep scores because they don't have beats. In fact, this is not the case, the beat left by the old ancestors is combined with the language of that time, and the beat we use now is a metronome, which is a quantification system that is common all over the world.
In order to learn more about the folk music around me, especially the true face of flowers, I walked around the county towns around Yinchuan, wanting to find more folk songs and visit more folk singers. I wanted to understand the relationship between these languages, this musical form and the space, and I wanted to understand how these folk artists sang, how they wrote the lyrics, how they completed these works, and what their lives were like.
The imprint of life
On Funing Street in Yinchuan City, there is a small tea house at the bend, singing Qin on the stage, and a bunch of old men and old ladies drink tea and play mahjong. In 2003, I was there. One day I had a sudden thought, can I perform here, what will be the effect? The owner of the tea house also agreed, just give him the venue fee. I don't know why, but I gave the show a name called "The Sound of the Earth.".
Around 2005, on the streets of Yanchi, Ningxia, without any premonition, Su Yang walked into the crowd and sang a few songs Photo / Hui Bing
On the night of the performance, the people I waited for did not come, but the residents and migrant workers three streets away all came, and the streets were crowded, and I could smell the smoke wafting in from outside on the stage. After listening to them, they didn't want to leave, so I sang two more songs, but I didn't have that many songs, so I sang seven or eight songs based on folk music.
That show touched me a lot. I found myself so close to the crowd for the first time, singing melodies that older people had long forgotten, but that day it entered their ears in a different form. Later some of them told me, "We heard all about it when we were younger. ”
So I began to think about what kind of sound could be close to our lives, to such people— people who really lived.
I always wondered if I could let them, these fathers and fellow countrymen, the people around me, all come alive to the song, and along this line of thought, I finished the song in "Virtuous". "Virtuous" and later albums and singles, neither talking about particularly big things, nor any slogans, basically talking about life in the city.
In 2004, Old Wolf introduced me to Beijing, where he later signed a company and released an album. Since then, Yinchuan and I have become more and more distant.
Yinchuan is actually a particularly young city, the geographical location is in the northwest, but the temperament is not northwest, but an oasis city, surrounded by mountains and rivers, small, with the temperament of Jiangnan. Yinchuan's diet is also very light, and the soup of ramen is very clear, not the turbidity of Lanzhou that pursues the original taste.
I am not a particularly enterprising person, and I was very uncomfortable in the years when I first left Yinchuan, and often ran back for various reasons. After a long time, I slowly got used to it. Now it is difficult for me to stay in Yinchuan, and every time I go back, I am in a hurry, performing, talking about things, and leaving in two or three days. But I am still attached to Yinchuan, not how deep it is, but the imprint of my life is there, my home, the most important people for me.
In September 2016, the Helan Mountain Music Festival was live. Su Yang came on, the whole audience began to sing a chorus, and the unique melody bred by the land under the Helan Mountain was echoed Photography / Wang Shihai
No matter where you go, at a certain moment you often think of Yinchuan and the days in Yinchuan. I have lived in Yinchuan for 20 years, and that is my past. This is no different from most people's feelings about their hometown. From the perspective of life paragraphs, the influence of your hometown on you cannot be washed away, which is your limitation and the value of your life. You're different because you're the one in that place. And I'm from Yinchuan.
I can't always be a singer who sings about Helan Mountain
The work illustrates the imprint of life. What have I created in the past decade is nothing more than – what is the real life we face today? How can you get closer to life today?
After leaving Yinchuan, I was able to jump out and look at the northwest. For a while I have been walking the cave, Gansu, Shaanxi... County by county, I walked all over the place. Northwest's nurturing of me, staying, I will constantly regurgitate my understanding of Northwest.
In addition to music, the visual design of Suyang album also uses many elements of Northwest culture
Wherever you go, you should sing about the life you see and feel. My emotion will always be Helan Mountain, but I can't always be a singer who sings the concentric road and sings About Helan Mountain. What I want to explore is the relationship and influence between people and the environment, and this interaction contains a lot of information — the past, the present, and the changes in people.
In 2016, I officially launched the "Yellow River Today" program. This is an art project rooted in the vast land of the Yellow River Basin in the northwest, and it is also a three-dimensional presentation of my observation, thinking and creation for more than ten years. At first, I will still start from music to express all aspects of the Yellow River's life today and now; in the future, there will be many three-dimensional works of art, which can be listened to with music, seen with vision, and described with words. What ends up being presented may be something with a comprehensive sense of form. The form itself has a sense of beauty, and it is not just my personal work, but also other artists who want to join in.
Su Yang personally designed and painted the poster of the "Yellow River Now Flow" art project
In 2015, I was invited to the United States to give a lecture on "The Yellow River Flows Today" at the Wall Street Exhibition. The poster I designed based on the rock paintings of Helan Mountain hangs on the outer wall of Wall Street, which is very different from the overall temperament of Wall Street, but it does not violate harmony and conflict, which may be "cosmopolitanization".
Cosmopolitanization is not to unify all music into a music, a rhythm, a timbre, but to have something and a way of expression in its own blood, and then to integrate it.
Whether it's music or other art forms, as long as it can be understood, understood, understood, and shared, it's a great thing. The starting point and task of my music creation is not to let more people know about the form of folk music such as flowers, but to let everyone feel good when they hear my songs, and sing them into their hearts. And it just so happens that I sing in a language that is interdependent with my life, and only the expression that is closest to life can reach the human heart.
#你的家乡是哪里, what kind of love do you have with it? #
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This article is from
"Authentic Wind Objects • Yinchuan"
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