Hierarchy of the arts.
Father and I don't agree on a lot of things - his worldview is essentially patriarchal and Confucian; mine is feminist and Daoist - which makes it difficult sometimes to have a conversation that doesn't devolve into an argument. (This is compounded by the fact that his native language is Chinese, and mine is English.) But one subject that we both have a deep interest in and always enjoy discussing is the arts, and its culturally-specific aspects:
"In Chinese" - my father said, just over a week ago, as I was playing Western classical music from the iPad in the car; we were on our way to attending a wedding dinner - "'music' is distinguised from 'song'."
I got him to elaborate. What he meant by that, I learned, was that 'songs' (歌曲) are not considered a subgenre or a subgroup under 'music' (音乐) in Chinese culture; the two are quite distinct and separate in category. Anything that contains words is a ge (歌), and therefore not strictly 'music'. Everytime that I called pop songs 'music', he said, I was displaying my ignorance of Chinese.
In terms of the relative status of the different arts in Chinese and Western cultures, this made a lot of sense. Poetry has for thousands of years been the most prestigious and respected of the arts in China; the earliest published 'songs' were poems set to music - odes or ballads, in Western terms. 'Songs', in Chinese culture, are seen as primarily belonging to the art of poetry, rather than to the art of musical composition. Unlike in Western opera, where the music is always considered more important than the libretto, in Chinese varieties of opera the accompanying music is often very simplistic, played by only a small ensemble of instruments; instead the lyrics, and how they are sung, are the key elements of the craft.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/897448.html and has
comments.
"In Chinese" - my father said, just over a week ago, as I was playing Western classical music from the iPad in the car; we were on our way to attending a wedding dinner - "'music' is distinguised from 'song'."
I got him to elaborate. What he meant by that, I learned, was that 'songs' (歌曲) are not considered a subgenre or a subgroup under 'music' (音乐) in Chinese culture; the two are quite distinct and separate in category. Anything that contains words is a ge (歌), and therefore not strictly 'music'. Everytime that I called pop songs 'music', he said, I was displaying my ignorance of Chinese.
In terms of the relative status of the different arts in Chinese and Western cultures, this made a lot of sense. Poetry has for thousands of years been the most prestigious and respected of the arts in China; the earliest published 'songs' were poems set to music - odes or ballads, in Western terms. 'Songs', in Chinese culture, are seen as primarily belonging to the art of poetry, rather than to the art of musical composition. Unlike in Western opera, where the music is always considered more important than the libretto, in Chinese varieties of opera the accompanying music is often very simplistic, played by only a small ensemble of instruments; instead the lyrics, and how they are sung, are the key elements of the craft.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/897448.html and has
comments.