Speaking of Su Yang, everyone's first reaction is his song "Xianliang". Many people ask online, "What exactly does Su Yang's "Xianliang" sing?" "What is the meaning of Su Yang's "Xianliang"? Why is it so addictive to listen? In the face of these problems, Su Yang himself laughed: "In fact, "Xianliang" is like a portrayal of life, a voice from the land and life. It's like everyday chatting, it's like the murmur of life. ”
On July 25th, on the stage of ideological turbulence, Su Yang not only brought his own music, but also introduced his multimedia cross-border creation plan "Yellow River Today". This is the first time that Su Yang has shared this journey of poetry and song with the public since returning from the Medellín International Poetry Festival. On July 14, Su Yang, as the first Chinese musician invited to attend, made the global debut of the new song "Chest" at the opening ceremony of the 28th Medellín International Poetry Festival, and more than 100 poets from all over the world and thousands of Medellín audiences witnessed this moment together – songs from the banks of the Yellow River, rooted in the yellow soil, sung in the South American continent.
The story begins with a $20 guitar
People have always thought that Su Yang was born in Yinchuan, Ningxia, where he lived and became famous, but in fact he came from the water town of Jiangnan. In 1969, Su Yang was born in Wenling, Zhejiang Province, and when he was 7 and a half years old, he traveled thousands of miles with his mother to Yinchuan, the city where his father worked. Su yang spent his childhood in this yellow land in the northwest. He grew up living in a family home in the factory area, and the builders from all over the world were busy working, and this living environment did not have many opportunities for him to be exposed to music. Only when he happened to pass by the farmland next to the family home, Su Yang would deliberately slow down and listen to the farmers working in the farmland singing some Ningxia minor tunes and some intermittent folk songs.
At the age of fifteen or sixteen, Su Yang came to Xi'an to study, where he felt music for the first time. He recalls, "I had a guitar for a brother on the front bunk, and he was sitting on the bed playing the Spanish Matador. When I listened to that music, I never thought there was such a good concert. It was that kind of string, that kind of string that was particularly real, which very roughly emitted a particularly real kind of note like a Martian sub-vibrating on me. I was so excited. Soon after, Su Yang sold his meal tickets for 20 yuan, bought a guitar, and started his own music path.
At that time, the conditions were very difficult, and there was no place to learn the piano, all of which were explored by themselves. Su Yang himself held the piano and practiced "13, 53, 23, 43", humming a vague melody every day. In the early 1990s, Su Yang returned to Yinchuan and formed his first band, called Transparency Band. The stage style and musical style were heavily influenced by Western rock music of the time, with "heavy metal" and "contrivance" being its key words. Although the band was popular, Su Yang began to think quietly after passing through the impulse of making music in the bud. "Transparency has been hovering in the shadow of several mainstream European and American bands, there is no progress, and disbanding it may be a better progress."
The sound from the land is the original power of music
In the late 1990s, Su Yang once chatted with a friend, and he felt that blues and black spirit songs were the most primitive music. Instead of speaking, his friend gave him a CD with footage of African music and some field recordings.
When he heard these sounds, Su Yang suddenly had a direction, "I don't think I know why, I just remember the songs I heard in the field when I was a child, those melodies that were intermittent. I suddenly felt that was the original music I should be looking for. From that time on, Su Yang added folk songs to his musical elements.
The first folk song adapted by Su Yang was "Ningxia Chuan". "Ningxia River, two heads of the tip, east of the Yellow River and west of Helan Mountain." When the lyrics were played on stage with the sound of the three strings and the rhythm of the blues, and the audience began to hum along instead of the brainless fabrications of the previous hard rock era and shook their heads in tune with the rhythm, Su Yang felt that this was the music he wanted to make.
"The original music is very 'physical' to yourself, what the music teacher can't teach, is a particularly primitive force, it makes you feel yourself, and at the same time closes the distance between you and others." Su Yang explained the feelings that folk songs brought to himself.
From the first song adapted, "Ningxia Chuan", to the release of "Xianliang", which makes people familiar with Su Yang, there was a gap of two or three years. During this time, Su Yang visited many old folk singers in the northwest, asked them for advice on "Flowers" and "Qin Cavity", went deep into their lives, listened to their humming after drinking, and recorded the few songs they had spoken when they encountered trouble. All this made Su Yang feel more and more strongly that a person cannot be disconnected from the land. The confidence of the song comes from its dependence, and this dependence is the connection with the land and life.
For decades, he has grafted, improved and deconstructed Northwest folk music "Flowers" and traditional music forms such as "Qin Cavity" with contemporary music, and created a new musical language through the theories and techniques of Western modern music. In the process of continuous exploration, his music incorporates more and more elements: oh na, box qin, big drum, electric music, yang song, etc., which you can find in the empty rhythm of Suyang's unique northwest folk songs.
What I'm looking for is a process of expression that moves people
Talking about the multimedia cross-border art project of "Yellow River And Present Flow" that has been promoted in the past two years, Su Yang admits that this idea has existed for more than a decade. "Many scholars who study flowers call it a contemporary book of poetry, because you can find a lot of use of 'Bixing' in flowers." Su Yang hopes to expand the things he wants to express in the lyrics of the music to the visual, expand to the sense of touch, and expand to more ways that people can feel the traditional art of flower folk songs.
If you look closely, you can find that the elements in the opening scene of the "Yellow River And Present Stream" since 2016 have been adapted from the rock paintings of Helan Mountain, which is a visual adaptation. In the folk song music sung, there are electronic elements, blues elements, and rock elements, which is an aural adaptation. These intertwined processes that are fused together are a potential metaphor and "Bixing", which can make the whole stage expression richer and more touching.
At this time, someone will ask Su Yang, "Do you want to protect folk songs and continue this tradition?" Surprisingly, Su Yang gave a negative answer.
He believes that as an artist, his value lies more in continuing the spirit of folk songs. Suyang strives to change its form and inherit the spirit of folk songs. If there is no change, it is not called inheritance. All the inheritance of tradition is the understanding and learning of this art, not that you copied it. Reproduction is an archival value, and archival value should not be done by artists. The artist's task should be to understand it, to learn it, to know it. These things are a learning nutrient for the creator, but if you keep it completely, Su Yang feels that there is not much need.
Su Yang hopes that through the "Yellow River Now Flow" plan, the formal boundaries between music and art, text and video, including poetry and song, will be broken, and a more comprehensive artistic vocabulary will be used to speak for today's China in the context of globalization. In September 2016, "The Yellow River Flows" held its first exhibition at the Cloud Gallery in manhattan center, New York, usa, and Su Yang became the first Chinese musician to do a comprehensive multimedia exhibition in the United States. In October of the same year, the "Yellow River Now Flow" art exhibition was held in Huajiadi Store, One-Way Space, Beijing, and folk artists such as Wei Zongfu, Ma Fengshan, Liu Shikai were invited to perform huanxian shadow puppetry, northern Shaanxi storytelling and flowers on the spot, and traditional and contemporary folk art styles were intertwined in the exhibition. Following the Brazil station in March 2018 and the Colombia station in July, the global exhibition of "Yellow River Flow" is still in progress, and Su Yang hopes to attract more contemporary artists from different fields to participate and produce more diverse works.
"I hope that all my expressions should be related to the land behind us, to our old music, such as the Guan Ju era, like the era of our Xintianyou existence, which can touch people's hearts." 」 He said.
Dialogue with Su Yang
q1: How do you balance folk song and rock when creating?
a: In fact, don't think too much about rock and roll, or emphasize folk songs. It's really about pursuing the integrity of the music. In that melody, sometimes it's the melody that carries me. When you hear a melody every time, every time you get a touch, you will slowly form a complete thing, and that thing is what to pursue, without emphasis.
Q2: At a concert, do you sing a folk song?
a: Depends. Although I can't sing well, I make a living. For a while, I would sing a folk song in front of me, and I would sing it. When the lights were dark, I took the microphone and sang a cappella, and after singing, I took the piano to the stage, pursuing a contrast.
Q3: Every album has been waiting for a long time. Everyone is looking forward to your new album. Are you a chronic person in life, or are you slow to write songs?
a: I'm actually an acute person. But the inspiration thing has not been able to come out, such as "Virtuous", I was just about to enter the shed, only to determine the lyrics. Each time you sing differently before determining the lyrics. I'm not the kind of talented artist who writes a song when twenty minutes of inspiration comes.
q4: Are you still working in the process of "the yellow river is flowing now"?
a: Actually, the music is going on in a different way. I believe that my music is a constant process of change and that music is a habit of mine.