So in this post, I’ll first take you through how it’s different to Western opera. Next time when you travel in China, go to a theatre for an authentic show! There’s a repertoire of over 1400 operas, based on things like Chinese history, Chinese folklore and life in modern China.Īs it’s such an important part of Mandarin Chinese culture and history, I thought it would be interesting to take a detailed look at Peking Opera. Beijing Opera (AKA Peking Opera) is a 200-year old art form, now considered Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Conclusions and discussions ĭemonstration of main concepts of jingju music and perfomance of one scene from 《四郎探母》 Fourth Son visits his mother by members of the Taiwanese 國光劇團 National Guo-Guang Opera during the ISMIR/WOCMAT 2014 Concert (Taipei's Grand Hotel, October 29, 2014).In this tutorial we give an overview of Jingju music, of the relevant problems that can be studied from an MIR perspective and of the use of specific computational tools for its analysis. The lyrics and scores cannot be taken as authoritative sources, but as transcriptions of particular performances. The role of the performer as a core agent of the music creativity gives jingju music a notable space for improvisation. Being Chinese a tonal language, the intelligibility of the text would require the expression of tonal categories in the melody, what offers an appealing scenario for the research of lyrics-melody relationship. Also the overall rhythmic organization into pre-defined metrical patterns known as banshi makes tempo tracking and rhythmic analysis a challenging problem.

The melodic conventions that form jingju modal systems, known as shengqiang, and the percussion patterns that signal important structural points in the performance offer interesting research questions. Their singing is accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble, within which a high pitched fiddle, the jinghu, is the most prominent instrument within the characteristic heterophonic texture. The singing/acting characters in jingju are classified into predefined role-type categories with characteristic singing styles. From an MIR perspective, jingju music offers interesting research topics that challenge current MIR tools.

Jingju (also known as Peking or Beijing opera) is one of the most representative genres of Chinese traditional music.

Peking opera introduction