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When you come out of Pingyao Old Town Station, you are facing a huge golden bronze bull with “Guan Yun Beef” written on the bottom. This famous cold food marinated beef is the best business in the county, with a high density of grocery stores along the road outside the station, plastered with signs in yellow letters on a red background, invariably reading “Guanyun Direct” and “Fen Wine in Bulk”.
The opening stage of the Pingyao International Film Festival stood in the center of this gray northern county, looking a bit abrupt, with the traditional rubble roof under the “Asia’s largest open-air 4K screen”, the architectural prototype of Jia Zhangke’s film “Platform”. Su Yang loved that movie, because it was like his early life of walking around in tractors and cattle carts, traveling through the counties of Henan, large and small, repeating the actions of dismantling and installing the stage, singing and performing.
Now, with his “Yellow River Now” project, Su Yang has been doing Northwest folk music for two years, meeting folk musicians who sing Hua’er, Shu Shu and Qin cadence, and making videos, animations and exhibitions of the results, all the way to New York, Columbia and Nashville. The documentary “Big River Singing”, which followed Su Yang’s journey to the northwest, was released in May 2019 and only returned two or three percent of its cost after three months. After running multiple roadshows in succession, the signing venues where he appeared in person could not be filled. The Pingyao screening concert on August 24 last year was the last stop for the promotion, and they hoped to get some more heat before the National Day.
During those two days, it didn’t stop raining in Pingyao. Every day, Su Yang came out as before, with his right index finger pointing to the sky, only wearing a black sweatshirt hat. A few male fans on stage had already sung “Xianliang” several times, and when they saw him coming they shouted, “Su Yang Niu X!” The band was still debugging, and Su Yang said back to the microphone, “Niu X later.”
Su Yang on stage in Pingyao (Source: documentary “The Big River Sings”) Su Yang on stage in Pingyao (Source: documentary “The Big River Sings”)
This was my first time seeing Su Yang live, and there are so few Northwest bands playing in the South. My parents are from the Northwest, and I grew up in Guangzhou as a second generation migrant, but was attracted to this rock band from Ningxia. But in a sense, Su Yang is also a stranger to the land of the Northwest. He came to Ningxia from Zhejiang at the age of 7 and a half and grew up in a factory and mining family compound on Concentric Road, where people from the north and south spoke Yinchuan with mixed accents, listening to their parents’ education and keeping a subtle distance from the local kids. Recalling his childhood, he once said, “I don’t fit in here, I’m not even used to eating their food.”
This time, Su Yang joined hands with Lao Wolf and found eight musicians from the Yellow River Basin to recreate the folk music of his hometown as the mother. The compilation entitled “Nine Songs” spans nine provinces through which the Yellow River flows, inspired by not only the flowers and folk songs of Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai, but also the nursery rhymes of Shanxi and Henan, and the small songs of Shandong and Sichuan. The initial idea of the compilation came from a chat with Old Wolf, and Su Yang came up with a tongue-twisting name for the idea: “Genetic Sound of the Times Stained”.
Over the past ten years, Su Yang has gradually polished the core of his musical desires – he believes that the songs from the mouths of the old people in the northwest are from the land, and therefore are also essential, with a commonality beyond language. What does music from the land mean to us today? He pondered this question moment by moment, and finally gave the answer in “Nine Songs”: “Every grain of sand belongs to itself, and this is the sound of the river.”
It all started with a teahouse performance in 2003, when Su Yang and his band rented an old people’s chess room and re-sang nursery rhymes and folk ditties that had been adapted to rock for the elderly.
Before that performance in 2007, Su Yang visited Ma Shenglin in Haiyuan (the old man had passed away two years before). On the seventh day of the New Year, Xihaigu writer Shi Shuqing rode a small motorcycle and took Su Yang to Sanjihe Zhuang, passing a humble mosque, a well in front of the Zhuang, and some decaying earth houses. The old man’s home was neat and clean, with farming tools leaning against the earthen wall and a vegetable patch gathering some green onions.
They welcomed Ma Shenglin out of his bed, and the old man took his youngest grandson’s hand and sang in the courtyard, his voice dry and his eyes moist. It was a Hezhou flower song, “The Order of the White Peony”.
Ga sister peony ah garden long, the second brother is a phoenix in the air, hanging around without hope, hanging to the white peony tree.
More than a decade later, Su Yang explained to American folk singers that “flower” is a metaphor for male and female love in the spring when flowers bloom. It was born at the confluence of five major rivers in northwest China, and the song flows down the river and through the loess, covering eight ethnic groups in Gan, Ning and Qing. In the old days, the temple fair was a place of assembly and worship, and men and women who got together for the festival sang to each other on the hill, with the crowd of onlookers flocking to them and breaking out into laughter from time to time. These small songs of love, which are difficult to get into the hall of fame, were released in the vast hilltop streams to their heart’s content.
Later Su Yang’s song “Phoenix” came from that “White Peony Order”, which he also sang in the middle of the Pingyao performance, still repeating the poignant story. The restless crowd on stage quieted down, and some people sang along with the whole song without moving.
Near the end of the show, Su Yang called the curtain: “Chinese famous songs everyone sing!” Needless to say, it was “Xianliang”, which rock lovers can more or less hum.
At the end, I heard Su Yang thanking that local beef as well during the spoken word at the end of the show.
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Seventeen years ago, Su Yang and his band were still working at the Golden Ballroom in Yinchuan. At night, he played accompaniment for the guests who came to drink, and during the day, he wandered around the neighborhood and found a copy of “Selected Folk Songs of Xiji – The Next Book” at an old bookstore in front of the park.
Holding his guitar, Su Yang sang the score: “The pomegranate blossoms well leaf leaves yellow, the aunt well teach children virtuous.” He had listened to many different versions of “Female virtuous”, and felt that the version in hand was the best, so he made up along those two lines: “A study of that virtuous Wang Er sister ah ……”
A few months later, a friend in contemporary art asked them to do an “opening performance” for a bar that could accommodate thousands of people, and Su Yang seized the opportunity to sing the “new song”. After the performance, Su Yang sat down to rest, a friend came up and introduced him to Li Shifeng, then deputy director of the Xiji County Culture Museum.
Li Shifeng was older, and the lively atmosphere of the bar was quite incompatible, he insisted on introducing himself in an elder style tone, but still revealed his uncontrollable excitement.
In the 80s, Li Shifeng was young, riding a government-issued Big Two Eight, responding to the national call to collect and organize folk art materials, scouting door-to-door for folk music songs, and writing down the scores and lyrics. It was a boring and hard job, and he always thought it was just an errand to earn some money, until this night, he accidentally heard the “rock version” of “Female Xianliang” in a bar in Yinchuan.
A few days later, Li Shifeng went back to the Golden Ballroom and took out the “Selected Folk Songs of Xiji” with his name on it and gave it to Su Yang, finally completing the two volumes.
In 2004, at the Helan Mountain Music Festival organized by Huang Liaoyuan, Su Yang sang “Xianliang” for the first time, and a year later signed with the independent label “Thirteen Moon Records” and released an album of the same name. A year later, he signed with the independent label “Thirteen Moon Records” and released an album of the same name.
After another two years, by chance came to Xiji, Su Yang accidentally met Ma Shaoyun, at that time the secretary of the Xiji sour thorn village in Ningxia, is also officially recognized as the inheritor of the Ningxia Flower Children. The idea that had been buried in his heart popped up again, and Su Yang tried to hum two lines to him and asked, “Have you heard this melody?”
Ma Shaoyun of course heard, he sang “ten persuade the hearts of the people”, it is that on the drum beat sung countless times the melody, the rules and regulations to advise people to three from four virtues, filial piety parents, less ironic meaning, surprisingly feel some strange.
With the gradual deepening of the northwest land, Su Yang began to get tired of rock, and his songs like the first “Xianliang” album in the kind of violent drumbeat can move the whole scene less and less, but his body of folk musician temperament is getting stronger. This change was first seen in 2010’s “Like Grass”, in which he directly adopted a lot of folk music singing and lyrics, including the eye-catching line “Aiya my brother, Aiya my sister” in “Waving Hands”, which comes from the northwestern folk song “Mr. Zhang pays his respects”.
The release of “Riverbed” in 2017 marked Su Yang’s growing certainty in the idea of “Yellow River Now”. The album is well-produced, with mature instrumental arrangements that make the musical scenes more ambitious. The “Black Mule”, adapted from a Turkish wine song, is a slow rhythm singing the image of an old man in the northwest who walks alone and is strong and patient.
Ning Er, a media personality and writer who is also obsessed with and promotes Northwest folk music, commented on “The Black Mule”, “When I first heard the small sample, my ears perked up and I could sing along the second time, the melody is so nice and catchy, as is often the case with compositions on top of the historical accumulation of folk songs.” Following that, he sighed a little: Su Yang is really tired.
Now, “Nine Songs” brings Su Yang’s efforts to promote northwest folk music to a climax, and he is no longer content to stifle his own compositions, but to make the entire Yellow River basin sound together. Zhang Shallow Qian from Qinghai, Ou Jiayuan from Sichuan, Zhang Nephew from Gansu, Huguegiletu from Inner Mongolia, Ma Fei from Shaanxi, Yan Zehuan from Shanxi, Liu Dongming from Shandong, Wang Yingtian from Henan and Su Yang from Ningxia, each with a song, expressing his understanding of the land in his own style.
Pingyao concert opening Su Yang sang “Pearl Curtain” (video source: “Big River Sing” documentary) (click to view video)
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Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult to hear songs from the land.
Those old people who hide a good voice and a head full of unrecorded wonderful singing words, some of them reluctantly cooperate with the recording collection of the local cultural department because of a little thin profit, and the collected information is buried and dusty because of the lack of marketable potential.
Ning Er, a native of Wuwei, Gansu province, became fascinated with Northwest folk music in college, and in 2004 he and his Internet friend Wen Zi, who shared similar interests, started the “Land and Song” forum, which now exists in the form of a public number.
Although Wenzi is from Sichuan, he is a true fan of Northwest folk music, and has naturally learned the dialects of various places by running the “Flower Club” year after year. He would stand in the middle of a group of peasants with a camera and talk to the famous “singers”, no one treated him as an outsider, and the old lady with a turban sitting by the candle fire would improvise for his camera: “Tonight I’ll give you the Buddha on Lotus Mountain, you can turn the camera over and over. .”
Su Yang has always been a regular guest of “Land and Song”, he finished recording “Xianliang”, passed it on, Ning Er listened to the rock adaptation is quite fresh, can not help but advise, “how to arrange this bass and erhu better”, the two met.
At that time, the Internet was still in its infancy, and folk music lovers from all over the world collected their hometown music, uploaded it to the forum and shared it with the netizens, and mailed the videos to each other by carving them into CDs. Ning Er often patronized the stall in front of the Jiayuguan Farmers’ Market, buying tapes from a couple in their 50s and 60s, one for 50 or so dollars.
One of them is a live recording of the famous “Lotus Hill Flower Festival” in 1992.
Every year, from the first to the sixth day of the sixth month of the lunar calendar, the Lotus Mountain in Kangle County, Gansu Province, is filled with people. Today, the best part of the hill is the government-organized performance stage, with all the sound equipment, and people singing modern local folk songs along with midi rhythms, leaving the original “singing is like talking” unique way of breath-change of the flower children gone. Even so, there are people with cell phones shooting snapshots, and some people press the WeChat voice in the group live.
Halfway up the mountain or by the stream, the “Flower Club” still retains the form of the old “mountain field”. The locals weave ropes with horse-lien grass, stopping passing vehicles and pedestrians, and must sing a line of flowers on the spot to “check the body” before they are let in. Then came the “Wave Mountain” and “Night Song”, where people held umbrellas of different colors and divided into camps, teasing and provoking each other with songs like a fight.
After getting this recording, Ning Er repeatedly listened to it many times and gradually moved to find these folk singers. Some of them had lost their voices and were working as ordinary janitors in high schools; there were also old ladies who were at home with their grandchildren and still had a good voice when they opened their mouths, but did not want to come out and sing. The expression of emotion in Hua’er is as sincere and passionate as the personalities of the Northwesterners, and there is no shortage of “meat songs” depicting love, thus contradicting the local religion and public order.
In the crowded “Flower Club”, anyone who wants to sing must first use a beautiful “hey-” voice to call the attention of the crowd, and some times, this starts with a rather difficult call. In some cases, this starts with a difficult sharp tone, which is what we call a falsetto. Ning Er and Su Yang agreed that a singer named Wang Dexian sang the best version of “The Order of the Eight Treasure Plateau” in a recording of the Lotus Mountain Flower Festival in 1992. They asked around, some said Wang De Xian moved to the Hexi Corridor, some said in Anxi County, and some said in Jiuquan.
One day in 2008, Su Yang accidentally saw Wang Dexian’s name in the “Ningxia Non-Generic Heritage List”. As part of the ecological migration policy, Wang Dexian moved from Dongxiang Tu Autonomous County in Gansu to Jinxiang in Helan County, which is close to Su Yang, and relied on the richness of the Loop Plain to sell a large watermelon with lots of water.
Carrying milk and fruits, Su Yang began to visit Wang Dexian frequently. In the video left at the time, Wang Dexian wearing a black leather jacket with a fur collar and light brown sunglasses, standing in front of his bungalow singing in full vigor, his voice sounded much more spiritual than on the tape, Ning Er said he was “back to his childhood”. Singing to the excitement, only to see him stretch out his right hand seems to grab something, and with the tone of voice slowly fall: “Ouch, good horse with a good saddle, the saddle on a good mattress, mattress riding is the tip of the human, raw rub ah fur of the gold edge of the sub ……”
When Wang Dexian sang the flower song “Eight Treasure Plateau Order” Wang Dexian sang the flower song “Eight Treasure Plateau Order
In 2010, Su Yang covered this song “Eight Treasure Plateau Order” as the last song of the album “Like Grass”, in which the far traveler who misses his lover, while rushing through the night, counts the green grass beach of his hometown with rich soil and water. Many people, because of this song, kind of heard the flower for the first time.
In those years, Su Yang ran a lot of music festivals, the scene audience sparsely yet to gather in front of the stage, the sound began, first a burst of wind, followed by a dog barking, and then a recording of Wang Dexian singing “Hezhou Da Ling” in the fields, the song is sad and moving, “go up the high mountains to look at the Pingchuan, ouch Pingchuan in a just open peony ……”, which is also the famous flower singer Zhu Zhonglu’s famous song.
Then, the drums only gradually enter the prelude of the rock song.
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For him, the flower child should not enter modern life, and “a lie on a hill, roaring toward the sky” is its unchangeable original face.
At the end of July 2019, in the hutongs of Beijing’s Dongsi, the DDC bar known to independent music lovers was, unlike usual, packed by 3pm. There were no young girls with different hair colors and no one to put a fluorescent stamp on the back of your hand when you entered. A middle-aged man who looked like a staff member found my name on a neatly printed A4 paper form.
Most of the participants were middle-aged, and they blended quite naturally into the small performance venue that had been converted from an old courtyard. Under the patio, several middle-aged women were chatting happily, placing their thermoses on the stage, one of them wearing a red-backed, large-flowered burqa and smiling defensively at me when they met eyes.
It was Ning Er who organized this “Hutong Flower Party”, wearing glasses, medium-length hair, and a printed black T-shirt, and holding a DV when he wasn’t hosting the show, filming the flower singers and the audience on stage. He asked the Northwesterners in the audience to raise their hands, and 2/3 of them did, while the rest looked around with surprised faces.
There was no shortage of professional musicians, and Huang Zhiqing was one of the few amateurs. The audience was impressed by the man who worked for a car company and wore a green polo shirt, because he really sang for a long time. He sang one song when he thought of it, mostly not in the organizers’ pre-prepared lyrics file. The Qinghai dialect was a bit difficult to understand, and there was a blond American guy sitting on the side of the stage, holding a video camera all the time, and after Huang Zhiqing finished singing a song in Qinghai dialect, he turned his head and asked people, “Do you understand?”
I later asked him why he was singing alone for so long at that time, and he said, “The sound of that venue is much better than karaoke.”
July 24, 2019, Hutong Flower Party Live (click to view video)
Huang Zhiqing is from GuiDe, Qinghai, a county located in the northeast of Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, near the Yellow River, rich in water, can harvest crops twice a year, planting barley, wheat and rapeseed, food but still just enough to eat. Instead, the hills are lush and green, pasture shrubs grow well, sheep grazing has become a very good local livelihood.
Several families mix their sheep together and take turns, shearing once a year, three times a vaccination, a bath, and then hit with the paint used to distinguish. The three siblings smashed open the batteries in the yard and scrambled to put black spots on the sheep’s asses.
From the third grade, the summer and winter home Huang Zhiqing is responsible for herding sheep, until he graduated from Jilin University and began working only a short annual vacation, parents reluctantly sold more than 80 sheep at home. It was in those silent and unoccupied hills, when the sheep were grazing in the fertile pastures, that he lay down in the grass with no one around, and sang loudly about flowers to the faraway sky and the blinding sunlight, alone.
Sometimes the sheep are mixed with others, after a period of confusion, the two shepherds will sing for a while, if it happens to be a man and a woman, the words will naturally be ambiguous. Sometimes no one can be seen for days, but you can hear the people of the other hill responding to each other, the two people do not know each other, with a penetrating flower song, distant chat.
His favorite song is “Three Orders of Hezhou – Spicy Oil and Spicy Garlic” by Zhu Zhonglu, the “King of Flowers”, which has a subtle upward inflection at the end of each sentence, making it very comfortable to listen to but extremely difficult to imitate. This is a skill that cannot be found or learned in contemporary vocal training, a special gift from the fields.
“You can hear in the song that he is the one herding sheep in the mountains, or farming in the fields.”
Before the advent of threshing machines, farmers spread their wheat out in open fields and let livestock drag boulders in a circle to grind it. “The eight flint threshers rolled all over the field, and the Ga horses pulled out a sweat; when the work was busy, the work was done, and when the work was idle, the Ga sisters looked at them.” The word “Ga Mei” is a word that often appears in Hua’er to refer to a young girl, while the word “Thresher”, which seems to be quite out of the ordinary, refers to the stone for grinding grain, pronounced in Mandarin as “liu zhou It is pronounced “liu zhou” in Mandarin, but Guide’s pronunciation is close to “lu zhu”. After the mechanization of agriculture, farmers still find it hard to let go of the image of “eight fluted threshers rolling all over the field” – the grass crushed by the stone is softer and can be used as food for livestock.
Nowadays, most of the old people in Guide no longer work in agriculture, Huang Zhiqing’s parents occasionally grow vegetables in their own yard, and the eldest son and daughter-in-law who live together choose to work in the city, so they spend very little time at home.
In 2005, Huang moved to Beijing to develop his career, and Volkswagen was his sixth job. He is satisfied with working on time and sometimes traveling. He still has a video of his daughter singing Flower when she was four or five years old in his cell phone, and laments with regret that she no longer wants to sing when she grows up. Two years ago back home, he is still in the hills to herd sheep hair gave him a sheep whip, a long whip rope knotted into several strands, firmly wrapped around a stone, swinging up can be swept from the sheep just right. He took the whip to a park near his home in Beijing and flung it a few times to get over it, and recorded a video of it.
His wife, influenced by him, learned to sing some flowers, and sang with him in the WeChat group by voice with his cell phone. He smiled a little embarrassed and said, “Husband and wife duet.”
There are many other groups like this, where Qinghai villagers sing flowers online to relieve their homesickness. The group’s owner is Zhang Cunxiu – the son of a well-known local flower singer who runs two public numbers for Tibetan songs and flower sharing – and it was he who privately chatted with groupmate Huang Zhiqing, asking him if he wanted to join the DDC bar’s “Hutong Flower Children’s Club”.
Huang Zhiqing wanted to create the atmosphere that a flower club should have and encouraged the audience on stage to sing in duet, to which very few responded. A girl with bangs and a black dress stood up and asked him: so many beautiful girls on stage, did he see any of them?
He understood that the girl wanted him to answer with a song about flowers. But it was not easy to improvise, as the duets at the “Flower Club” had either been rehearsed beforehand or had memorized a lot of the lyrics in advance. He was searching for a response when one of the older brothers on stage suddenly plucked up courage and said, “I’ll sing two songs!”
He felt rather sorry for not picking up the duet again. He could have replied to the girl: “The cat’s-eye grass on the rocky cliff, the sickle is old and not cut, come I’ll look at you early, the shy face is big and not said.”
5
Because there are “flower fundamentalists” like Huang Zhiqing, “philosophy” is also important in the face of Northwest folk music.
Whenever it comes to explaining his musical philosophy, Su Yang tells this story: one sultry afternoon years ago, he heard an African field recording at the home of a friend who liked painting and jazz. The song did not paint an image of working people on another continent; instead, the lush green fields of the Yinchuan Plain came to his mind, along with the childhood song, “Ningxia Chuan, two heads pointed, east by the Yellow River and west by the Well Helan Mountains ……”
The Yinchuan Plain is located on the western side of the Loop Plain, and the ill-fated fate of the Northwest is due to the fact that the Yellow River flows through this land in a “few” shape, but the net is open. The two-headed Ningxia River, east by the Yellow River to moisten the land, west by the Heilan to block the wind and sand, the Yellow River water winding through the fields, the Yinchuan Plain will be divided into different shades of green fields, flush with the high wheat to feed generations.
Later Su Yang made up a chorus to the nursery rhyme, added instrumental music and tried to find a folk venue to perform it.
The teahouse of the Qin cadence troupe can be found everywhere in the northwestern city, mostly in the small stores of the senior center, standing at the door can also listen, but pay to enter the face, the audience drink too sweet cover bowl “three bubble table” to listen to the opera, a small bet on the mahjong table, or go outside the door to play billiards. A small table below the stage holds a pile of “hanging red”, folded into a handkerchief-shaped red quilt surface written 20 yuan, 50 yuan, 100 yuan, up to 1000 yuan, these similar to the amount of public reward options, is the main source of income for the Qin cavity class.
The coal development fever at the beginning of the 21st century made the teahouse flourish. The east side of the Ningxia plain is a vast land containing nearly 140 billion tons of coal resources, the construction of the energy chemical base sent a large number of workers, they have money in their pockets, but it is difficult to integrate into the city of Yinchuan entertainment, these do not love to go to the dance hall nightclubs small bosses love to listen to the Qin cadence, a night reward of two to three thousand. The documentary “Big River Singing” in the Qin cavity opera leader Zhang came in to catch this ride, has not come down, the film was filmed to him, the golden age of folk performance has passed, the camera lens, he was in the dim backstage point counting the hundred yuan bills in his hand, as if determined to pull out two or three, to give the young boy who will leave the troupe.
Su Yang knows a teahouse with a daily rental of 200 yuan, close to the Furnishing Street where they often go to drink. He thought to himself that 10 tickets would pay for themselves, but the result was that 1 ticket did not sell – the speaker instruments pulled into the cramped activity room, the volume shook down the mahjong tiles underneath, the grumpy old man called the police, the police who received complaints and the neighbors attracted by the noise, listened at the door. The band sang seven or eight adaptations of old songs, all of which were familiar melodies to the old people. The crowd quieted down, the smell of Mohe smoke came from the door, an old woman in her 50s stood on tiptoe and put her ear to the window to listen, and at the end someone shouted inside, “No more singing? Sing some more!”
After this performance, Su Yang began to be attracted to one thing: to absorb the music from the land and then return it to the land. He spotted Yinchuan’s Ximen Qiaotou morning market, which was jammed with women from the surrounding towns at 6 a.m. every morning. He wanted to sing to the citizens in this chaotic and dense crowd.
Why, exactly, did the music return to the land? Su Yang explained for a long time – about music being a common language, about people looking for nourishment from their roots if they want to move forward.
Once again, he talked about the previous picking of folk singer Zhang Dejiang in Yongning County. It was an old man in his 60s and 70s, cheerful, not very literate, but very able to sing. Watching him singing in the fields of Ningxia, Su Yang suddenly felt like he was back in the afternoon listening to African field recordings at his friend’s house.
“A very primitive feeling, I can’t tell.”
“You would think the land is all pretty much the same. The relationship between people and the land is nothing more than birth, old age, sickness and death.”
After leaving Yinchuan, Su Yang became busier and busier, never returning to the bridge to finish his fantasy show, but making several trips to the United States. The “Yellow River Now” project was a multi-media art exhibition on Wall Street, and he was on the streets of New York looking for a bowl of beef noodles – the food he had trouble adapting to as a child. The first time he found himself missing the food he once hated, he says, “I think I’ve been yellowed by that river.”
There are times when memories of food can reach more directly to those emotions beyond words. When answering the question “What is the culture of the Yellow River?” in the interview, Su Yang mentioned that the beef noodles in Yinchuan are lighter than the soup base in Lanzhou, just like the rich “South of the Seas” plains of Ningxia, which are more beautiful than other parts of the Yellow River basin.
This is a sensual description of his understanding of his homeland, expressed without thinking about food. I suddenly figured out what exactly Su Yang was pursuing in his music: an inescapable, metaphorical yearning. In those abstractions floating above music, words and places, there is a certain commonality that he is seeking. From the plains of Ningxia to Beijing, New York, or the fields of Africa, people who share the same feeling find a common language in the unnamable power of music.
In a conversation at Columbia University, the American scholar Anthony and Su Yang discussed the difference between “forward and backward beats” – the English language habit of singing the first note of a song at the beginning is often half a beat slower than the Chinese song, the so-called “backward beat entry”, while the majority of Chinese songs begin on the first forward beat – will this lead to a gap in understanding?
In fact, one thing that both Anthony and Su Yang are well aware of is that the chorus of “Xianliang”, “You’re a strange woman in the world ……”, happens to be an exception that enters on the opposite beat. But whether on stage at the Medellin International Poetry Festival in Colombia or at the Pingyao Film Palace, the crowd is always inspired by some common emotion and jumps off the ground at the moment the chorus enters.
In a sense, it is Su Yang’s sense of alienation as a stranger in the northwest that pushes him ever further away from the Yellow River. Beyond the shortest focusing distance of aesthetics, he is able to pursue a commonality that is closer to the essence, and also completes a more spiritual self in the knowledge of the other.
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