Beijing Opera

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxvgZtsuow --- Woman singing


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knqe-asAcKw --- opera (men)

Nicole posted awhile back about the opera and I wanted to compare it to my experience visiting the Beijing Opera.  Opera is one of the things Beijing is most famous for, so I was pretty excited to get a chance to go, and I’ve never been to one before, so that in itself was neat.  I always have the image in my head of big ladies in Viking suits singing really high and people watching with fancy little binoculars.  Lol I know it’s not really like that, but it’s a fun little image that pops into my head.  It definitely was not what I expected though.  It was pretty interesting.  Wow, Chinese female singers can reach notes that I don’t think the Viking ladies even could.  Pretty impressive.  I was surprised that it was actually several short, unconnected skits.  I thought that they would all be connected, but they weren’t at all.  Because of that, there was more variety.  The last couple ones were neat, because they involved sword and stick fighting and some acrobatics.  That was pretty great.  Anyways, I think that this will be valuable when I’m teaching, because comparing art forms in different countries will be great for Social Studies.  I will probably get them to watch a bunch of clips from operas in different languages to pick out cultural differences.  I will definitely tell them to pay attention to the musical style.  It sometimes sounds a little chaotic to me, like a bunch of noise strung together (sounds like Nicole’s opinion of rap!), but in a grade six music lesson I sat in on when I was down there (international school), the teacher said that was because they use a different scale other than the “do re mi” scale, so our ears aren’t used to it.  I think that’s fantastically interesting.  I brought back several Chinese cds, so I have tons of examples of different styles, but this one was in a lot of the opera skits I saw.  I have really been enjoying listening to a lot of the music I brought back, especially the songs with violin.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, someone from the local opera taught my friends and I how to sing a local folk song (which they made us sing in front of 5000 people and broadcasted it on the news, as part of a folk festival).... but that's another story.

I couldn’t figure out how to attach my own video without first loading it to youtube, which I don’t want to do, so I just found a couple examples already on youtube.  One is of a girl singing in a traditional style, with the kind of music I heard in the opera.  The other is of an opera, so that you can see a bit of the acting.