Chinese choral music is a meeting point of regional, national, and international forms interacting over the course of the twentieth century. The choral repertoire has developed along three main styles: 1) Chinese folk tunes set to Western Classical-Romantic musical language; 2) works with heightened emphasis on Chinese folk styles and Western/Soviet Romantic influences; and 3) expanded regional, vocal and musical styles. These styles generally correspond to major points in modern Chinese history.
Before 1949, composers typically set Chinese folk or composed tunes as accompanied works with Chinese texts to Western tonal harmony with moderate chromaticism in the manner of Classical-Romantic music. From the late 1940s, folk materials became central: triads were built of melodic pitches from the pentatonic scale, but they did not as strictly adhere to functional patterns. Folksongs remained a major foundation, but vocal lines were more reflective of regional traditions, and more unaccompanied works appeared. Still, many compositions tended toward later Romantic harmonies and employed texts with strengthened nationalistic elements capturing an imaginary Chinese ‘essence’ from the countryside or history. From the late 1970s, works have been more frequently performed in regional dialects or minority styles, employ greater varieties of Chinese-Western, folk-classical-popular and traditional-experimental languages.
The recent, rapid growth of Chinese choral activity is marked by hybridized Chinese-Western vocal delivery. Many Mainland Chinese choirs perform folk arrangements with a heavily ‘nasalized’ tone or local timbre, using scores with numbered notation instead of Western staff notation. But Chinese choirs everywhere increasingly embrace the bel canto aesthetic, with only an imaginary sense of older Chinese folk or regional timbres.
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