Opera and Ballad
Because China was an agricultural society for a long time before the founding of the People's Republic China, most village people did not get the chance to learn reading and writing, and therefore various music genres-including folk songs, operas, and ballads-took a vital role in handing down history, values, and lore to these ordinary people. Structures were specifically built to perform these musical genres, and some villages even had a purpose-built opera stage located in the central part of the settlement (Figure 4).
Although they have largely disappeared in recent decades, teahouses were traditional locations for musical performances. As relatively small indoor spaces, these places were more likely to hold small-scale performances, with sitting or standing performers rather than actors on a stage.
In much of China, such venues supported local ballad-singing and story-telling genres, the shop owner making money from selling tea and snacks to the customers who gathered to hear a lengthy tale.
Opera and ballad in China are regionally oriented music genres. The languages used in these narrative forms are usually based on the local dialect performed in a more dramatic way. Ballad, which mixes talking and singing, can be musically quite simple. Its focus is on the story-telling, with one or two performers, each of whom also plays an instrument. Opera features more performers-singers, actors, and acrobats-instrumental accompaniments, and off-stage workers whose contribution is also vital to the staging of the performance. There are now hundreds of distinct opera and ballad traditions across the nation. Jingju (Beijing Opera) alone has over a thousand stories (Yuan 2000: 212), although the most popular dramas are often widely emulated and distributed nationwide. The two genres we will discuss in this section illustrate traditions from Southern and Northern China respectively, which is historically how much Chinese music has been classified.
Hong Kong film stars Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan were classmates at the Beijing Opera School in Hong Kong.
