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Wedding Oath – A Lusheng Love Song

Jun 27, 2010

Wedding Oath was written by famous composer Lei Zhengbang as an interlude for movie Lusheng Love Song produced by Changchun Film Studio in 1957.

Lusheng Love Song (1957)

Lusheng Love Song (1957)

In the early years after establishment of New China (1949), many movies were produced based on stories  of certain minority ethnic groups. Although these movies had different themes, depicted different figures, presented different times, they all spontaneously showed the simplicity of the folk customs, beautiful minds, and unique ethnic tradition of singing and dancing of these minorities to broader Chinese audience.

Lusheng Love Song is a movie with a Lahu ethnic minority background; so it is a matter of course that its interlude Wedding Oath took the melody from Lahu folk song.  Chinese people loved it not only because it shows the beauty of ethnic minority music, but also because it contains a sweet, sincere feelings of love.

Wedding Oath was again written by Composer Lei Zhengbang. I have shown a series of his important ethnic works, such as Why are the flowers so red? and By the Butterfly Spring. Lei is also a minority from Northeastern China — Manchu. Learned Peking Opera in his childhood, he realized the uniqueness of ethnic music when he grew up.

image

Lusheng instrument | by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/deepchi/3402621321/}deepchi1{/link}

Lusheng Ethnic Instrument

Then he started to collect lots of music materials from various ethnic minorities. This accumulation made him a “universal” ethnic musician. He could not only write Tajik style Why are the flowers so red?, but also write Bai style By the Butterfly Spring. He was also able to skillfully use Zhuang style ethnic music, which was successfully implicated in the movie Liu San Jie.

Before, ethnic/folk music, songs, operas and other music forms were dispersed in China. It is through his modern western compositional techniques and integration of a large number of ethnic music elements, ethnic music was able to combine with western modern music theory and spread in modern communications.

In the process of modernization and globalization of Chinese ethnic music, Lei Zhenbang is another great musician after Wang Luobin.

Vocal version with movie clips:

A harmonica version.

youtube link.

Another vocal version, modern remake:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5q3Psvk8BM



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