Yunnan Ancient Naxi Music - China Travel Tour Guide

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Ancient Naxi Music

The Performance of Ancient Naxi Music Instruments Playing is the music that spread widely from ancient times in the Yunnan minority - Naxi nationality. The ancient music is combined with poem, song and dance and had more than 400 years' history.

The Performance of Ancient Naxi Music Instruments Playing is the general designation of "Ancient Music of Lijiang" and "Ancient Music of Baisha" and grows from the cave music and imperial music of Han nationality. Legend said that it is the music of Song Dynasty (960 ~ 1279A.D.). Nowadays the preserved part origins from a part of the cave music.

The people of Han nationality in Central Plains companioned the scriptures with music and sang originally. After spread into Yunnan, the people of Naxi nationality who are good at music changed it into simple performance music and they used various types of instruments.

Owing to extensive performance of this set of music in Naxi district for a long time, it melted the style of Naxi nationality systematically. Some instruments were added hard jump decoration, glide, and shake with a big major interval during played. The delicate and elegant music style of Han nationality became the music of rough and strong with dense nationality colors.

However, hundreds of years later, many factors made the ancient music of Naxi changing continuously. Therefore, these made today's ancient Naxi music wide embracing. Some are solemn, stirring, some are gentle, lingering, some are distressed, and moving and some describe inherent feelings. So some music is used to today's funeral music by posterity and become custom music now.

Under the effort of the Chinese inland musicians' popularizing in recent years, and by various activities on international music exchange, they introduced the ancient Naxi instruments to Europe and America and made it a new vitality again.

There are many instruments in the Performance of Ancient Naxi Instruments Playing. The widely spread in popular are traverse flute, cleat, reed, zither, Chinese gong chimes, Chinese block, bell, drum, and so on. Many of them are hand-in from inland.

The cave music is a folk music. It has a long history and origins Buddhism of Han nationality and the music of Taoism. Legends say that it was hand-in into Yunnan from Sichuan in Ming Dynasty (1386 ~ 1644A.D.), after then it was spread widely and extended to the whole province. The instruments of the cave music of Han nationality were divides into two kinds - the literature and the military.

The band was very large and the style of the tunes was beautiful, simple, and elegant. Then it was hand-in into Naxi nationality, there were singing and playing originally, later only playing but not singing. The music had both unique of Han nationality and Naxi nationality. It was used to the folk marriage and funeral activities or the scholars' entertainment.