A General Music Experience in China

Abstract

In this article, the authors share their recent experiences with a fourth grade general music classroom in China as members of the People-to-People Ambassador Program. They provide a description of the types of musical activities they observed at Aiju Primary School in Shanghai in December 2009 by sharing the content of one specific lesson. The focus of the music lesson is Horse Racing, a programmatic piece based on a Mongolian folk melody. Horse Racing, composed in 1964 by Huang Haihuai, has become an immensely popular piece in contemporary Chinese culture. The piece was written for the erhu, a traditional Chinese instrument. The authors include historical and cultural information on Horse Racing and the erhu. Links to online resources, video performances of Horse Racing, and lesson ideas for use in American general music classrooms are also provided.

Analysis of the Correlation Between Folk Music Education and Chinese Traditional Culture

“…China is a multi-ethnic country, and various ethnic groups have produced distinctive folk music in the long history of development. So far, China's folk music of all ethnic groups contains hundreds of thousands of songs and hundreds of musical instruments (Whitcomb, Berger & Schmidt, 2011). Typical folk songs and instruments are shown in Table 1 and Table 2 At first, the development of folk music relied mainly on folk inheritance.…”