After more than ten years of efforts, Professor Cao Liang of the School of Music and Dance of Hainan University's musicology monograph, Li Nationality Music Annals, was officially published and released by the Southern Publishing House recently, and won the Hainan Provincial Excellent Spiritual Products Award ("Five One Projects") from 2020 to 2022 by the Propaganda Department of the Provincial Party Committee.

The book takes music archaeology as the starting point. In addition to combing the development of Li music in a longitudinal way, it also systematically introduces the evolution of Li music in Hainan Island from ancient to modern times through horizontal comparative research, using song music, dance music and representative instruments of Li nationality as the carrier.

"When is the evening, the midstream of the state. When is the day today, I have to go boating with the prince. I am ashamed to be good, and I am not scolded. I am worried and never stop, and I know the prince. There are trees in the mountains, and trees in the trees, and I don't know if I am happy with you." This is an ancient poem recorded in "Shuoyuan", in which "there are trees in the mountains, and trees in the trees, and I don't know if I am happy with you" is a famous sentence for men and women to express their love.

On the morning of February 12, at the "Sanheyuan" reading conference in Haidian Island, Haikou City, Professor Cao Liang, Deputy Dean of the School of Music and Dance of Hainan University, started with a popular "Yue Ren Song", and talked about his achievements and insights in studying Li music in front of the book friends who heard about it.

Lingdong plays

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Back to the Spring and Autumn Period

"Yue People's Song" was originally a love song sung by a Yue singer for the prince of Chu during the Spring and Autumn Period. However, the prince of Chu could not understand the Vietnamese language, and the man who died was translated into Chu language, which is the poem we see now.

So is this song of the ancient Yue nationality related to the Li nationality? The answer is yes.

Modern linguistics has shown that Li language belongs to the Zhuang and Dong language family of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The comparison between Li language and other Zhuang, Dai, Dong and Shui languages belonging to this language family further confirms the homology of these ancient nationalities. The origin of the Li nationality in Hainan is Luoyue, a branch of the ancient Yue nationality. Some linguists compared the upper and middle ancient sounds of Chinese characters recorded in "Yue Ren Ge" with the words of some Zhuang and Dong language families, and were surprised to find that the pronunciation of these vocabularies is closely related to the languages of all ethnic groups in southern China, and many of them have the same pronunciation! From the linguistic point of view, it can be concluded that the Li nationality has a close relationship with the ancient Yue nationality.

The late Mr. Lin Huixiang (1901-1958), director of the Department of History of Xiamen University, is a famous anthropologist, archaeologist, folklorist, and folk art theorist in China. He said: "The more the name of a hundred, the more the number of ethnic groups, such as Yuyue in the Spring and Autumn Period, Yangyue in the Warring States Period, Ouyue, Minyue, Nanyue, Luoyue in the Han Dynasty, and Shanyue in the Three Kingdoms fashion, living in the mountains of Jiujun, which proves that the number of hundred and more before the Han Dynasty is not false."

Book shadow of Li Nationality Music Records

The term "Baiyue" is derived from pre-Qin literature and is a general term for non-Chinese people in the southeast coast of China and the Indo-China Peninsula.

Professor Cao Liang pointed out in the Li Music Annals that from the beginning of the Neolithic Age, the ancient Vietnamese ancestors from the mainland began to migrate and flow to the Indo-China Peninsula, the Malay Peninsula and the entire Nanyang Islands, with their footprints throughout the Western Pacific region. This view has been confirmed in many fields such as archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, linguistics and so on.

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Cultural connotation of representative musical instruments

Cao Liang divided the Li musical instruments into two categories: one is mainly accompanied by the work and collective life of the Li people, and is mostly used in parties and banquets, festivals and celebrations, customs and rituals and labor processes, such as the playing of musical instruments such as the trumpet, the horn horn horn, and the percussion instruments such as the Ding Dong, the gong, etc. These instruments have a loud voice and strong penetration, and are suitable for playing at collective gatherings; The other type is small in volume and euphemistic and delicate in timbre, such as nose flute, mouth string, burning bar, etc., which is mainly used for personal expression, or when men and women express their love. The former can appear in the form of "ensemble", while the latter is mostly solo.

The History of Li Music divides Li musical instruments into air, body, string and membrane. Qiming instruments include the nose flute, the hole flute, the burning bar, the bamboo flute, the bamboo flute, the bleeder, the horn horn, and so on; Musical instruments include harmonica, Dingdong, bronze drum, gong, brass bell, money bell, ox bell, pestle, etc; The membranous musical instruments include single wood drum, etc; The stringed instruments include Langduoi and Lingdong.

Beep

The book also introduces the Li musical instruments summarized by the late Li cultural expert Wang Wenhua according to the traditional "blow, play, play and pull" method of Chinese national musical instruments. Cao Liang said, "The Collection of Li Musical Instruments compiled by Wang Wenhua is the only monograph on Li musical instruments so far. It contains more than 40 kinds of Li musical instruments, and is the most comprehensive work of Li musical instruments. He clearly pointed out in the book that today we see three categories of Li musical instruments: original, improved and newly created."

The instruments of the Li nationality are ancient in shape and have primitive cultural traces. The instrument production of the Li people is not based on the development of the instrument itself. There is no special instrument production industry. Most instruments used by the folk are made by the performer himself, and are made from local materials, and taught by the old artists or passed on to each other.

According to Cao Liang, there were 19 bronze drums found in Hainan by the time the book was written. According to its type characteristics, most of them were Beiliu type, followed by Lingshan type, and the other two were Shizhaishan type. According to the unearthed sites of the bronze drums, they are mainly distributed in the coastal zone of Hainan Island, extending from the northern part of Hainan to the east and west, and the southernmost part is not more than Lingshui and Dongfang. The bronze drum is the heritage of the ancient bronze culture of the Pu and Yue nationalities in the south of China. Such a large bronze musical instrument appears in Hainan Island, which is particularly important in the ancient society of Hainan Island, which is "edified but not refined".

Historically, the scope of influence of the bronze drum has almost spread to the provinces of southwest and south China, as well as the whole Southeast Asia outside the Philippines.

In addition, the ancients began to pay attention to the peculiar folk cultural phenomena among the ethnic groups in South China very early. Cao Liang sorted out the situation of the use of chords by different ethnic groups in ancient documents. For example, Zhang Qingchang's "Li Qi Chronicle" records that "unmarried men and women gather in the wilderness at the turn of spring and summer, and men play the lute, women play the flute, and sing Li songs together." Another example is the situation of the Yi people recorded in Yang Shen's "Nanzhao Chronicle": "Marriage, men play the lute, women play the harmonica, and sing and tune." Another example is the Taiwan ethnic minorities recorded in Huang Shuyi's "The Record of the Taiwanese Sea Messenger": "Men and women play the lute in the mountains, and sing in harmony."

Although the authors of these documents are different, and the places they visited and the objects they observed are also different, in summary, it is not difficult to see the cultural links among them. For example, the harmonica, which is a common instrument of the ethnic minorities in the above regions, shows amazing consistency in folk music activities.

Lingdong

In addition, Cao Liang also studied the use of the nose flute, and believed that the Li people had no special gender requirements for the nose flute, which could be used by men, women, old and young regardless of the occasion and the track. The situation of Taiwan's ethnic minorities is different. There are also some taboos in the use of the nasal flute. It is forbidden to play the nasal flute in celebrations or wedding banquets, and it can be played at funerals or condolences to express pain and missing.

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The main distribution areas of the nasal flute also include some ethnic groups of the Zhuang and Dong languages in southern China, Southeast Asia and some South Island languages in the Pacific Ocean, such as the Kalinga ethnic group in Luzon Island in the north of the Philippines, the Daya ethnic group in Sarawak in the northwest of Borneo, Malaysia, the Fiji ethnic group in the Fiji Islands, the Maori indigenous people of New Zealand and the indigenous people of Hawaii. This phenomenon of music and culture has confirmed that the indigenous peoples' cultures in South China, Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific Islands share common characteristics, and the "cross-border" phenomenon of their cultural transmission has occurred in ancient times.

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The Characteristics of Li Nationality Instrumental Music

According to the Li Music Annals, the Li instrumental music is divided into two categories: solo music and ensemble music. The biggest feature is to play bamboo and wood instruments. Strictly speaking, Li's instrumental music does not have its own unique ensemble form, and the traditional instrumental music is mainly solo. Music has a definite function in the life of Li people. In most cases, playing is related to "finding partners". In a sense, this is a relatively private folk custom. The mouth bow, nose flute and other instruments preferred by the Li people are extremely weak and can only be heard at close quarters. Therefore, these instruments are not suitable for ensemble music.

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Cao Liang believed that a set of instrumental music culture system formed by the Li nationality in thousands of years is a concrete manifestation of the music culture of Hainan's aborigines, which is quite different from the continental culture. From a historical perspective only, the origin of Hainan Island's indigenous culture is more closely related to the southern marine culture represented by the "Baiyue South Island" family, and maintains a high degree of unity with the marine indigenous culture in Southeast Asia, while the difference between Hainan Island and the agricultural mainland culture is more obvious.

bronze drum

This is not only reflected in the material composition of instrument culture, but also in the style characteristics of instrumental music. For example, four tones and five tones, the melody features composed of progressive melodic factors, free rhythm forms, percussion instrument ensemble, as well as customs, taboos and gender concepts embodied in music culture, are almost the common characteristics of the music culture of all ancient ethnic groups in the "cultural circle".

bell

The "cross-border" musical and cultural phenomena reflected in musical instruments such as the bronze drum, the harmonica and the nasal flute have obvious overlapping relations in South China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. The music in the Li nationality region is not only a "local" cultural phenomenon, but also has not been intermittently mixed since ancient times, showing a variety of connections.

"Hainan Island is one of the important links in the expansion of the ancient culture of the East Asian continent to the Southeast Asian maritime zone. As the main link between the Baiyue culture and the culture of the South China Sea region, its evidence is not only reflected in the cultural factors from the South China mainland in the prehistoric culture of Hainan Island, but also reflected in the marine cultural connotation of the convergence of various ancient ethnic groups in the island arc region around China." Cao Liang said.