Pekinese (chinese) Opera

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I just finished listening to 'revolutionary pekinese opera' by ground zero and wondered whether anyone has heard any chinese opera.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Sunday, 8 August 2004 10:50 (twenty-one years ago)

I've heard a small amount -- when sung by someone who knows what they are doing, it's beautiful stuff. But I know little of the best composers or singers in the field.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 8 August 2004 13:18 (twenty-one years ago)

The Revolutionary Opera stuff was created during the fucking Cultural Revolution and is horrible propaganda crap. (Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, btw, was the name of one of the operas.) It sounds like Broadway-ized Chinese music, I guess.

Anyway, it has little to do with trad. Beijing (or "Peking") opera.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Sunday, 8 August 2004 14:16 (twenty-one years ago)

yes, on the one hand you have the peking opera, out of which came numerous tropes from hong kong films.

on the other, you have maoist spectacles like:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~dmitchc/p4p/posters/p19.jpeg

― ||amateur!st|| (amateurist), Sunday, 8 August 2004 17:28 (twenty-one years ago)

My father listens to (and now watches on VCD) alot of Chinese Opera. I even recently discovered that he can play the entire erhu parts for several of them! It doesn't bother me (I actually enjoy the music and it's quite entertaining with subtitles), but I will say that very few non-Chinese can deal with hearing it for more than several minutes (my mother, for instance).

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Monday, 9 August 2004 05:21 (twenty-one years ago)

The female singing parts are amazingly shrill. Apparently, this comes from the fact that the female roles were originally done by men and when females were actually allowed to perform, they imitated the sound of the men imitating women?

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Monday, 9 August 2004 06:38 (twenty-one years ago)

i really would like to learn more about this.

(p.s. peking opera blues is one of the greatest movies i've ever seen, though it doesn't have all that much to do with peking opera.)

― |||| (amateurist), Monday, 9 August 2004 06:45 (twenty-one years ago)

henry kissinger didn't like it when he came to china in '72

― jake b. (cerybut), Monday, 9 August 2004 14:34 (twenty-one years ago)

four months pass...

revive!

spencer - any records that you could recommend?

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Sunday, 26 December 2004 11:55 (twenty-one years ago)

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