Cantonese Opera 粵劇

Cantonese opera, being an indigenous art form, has been recognized in the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on the Representative List” of UNESCO since 2009. The four refined operatic techniques of Cantonese opera are, namely, “singing” [chang 唱], “dialogues” / “monologues” [nian 唸], “gestures” [zuo 做] and “actions” [da 打], with “singing” serving as the pioneering component – singing styles are inevitably put in the limelight. Varieties of Cantonese opera singing styles were analyzed and examined from different perspectives by various scholars and practitioners in the industry. For instance, some studies focused on the aesthetic features of the performers' singing styles (on tonal and rhythmic characteristics) (Ho, 2007); some others put the assessment judgement to aria in vocal music arrangements, techniques in lyric projections and thus the expression of sentiments (Wong, 2007); while scholars like Ching remarks that it is convenient for the “slow rhythms” of Cantonese opera to eventually produce artistic sensitivities in banghuang 梆黃 (“music in the modes of Bong zi 梆子 [bangzi] and Ji wong 二黃 [erhuang], an aria type music)” (Chan, 1991) in her volume Law Ka-po, a Well-known Performer from the Commons (2011). Any performer should “aim at perfection in his/her aria and adjusting his/her progressive rates in order to adapt to the 'content' of the opera scripts” (ibid.). Although all three of the above perspectives are feasible, researchers still have to dig more into how practitioners learn the differentiation between the nine speaking tones in the Cantonese dialect, how they enhance their singing techniques by permeating their specific voices into the vocal music setting, and how they should acquire the skills from famous actors to act an impromptu performance.

Now, many scholars state that Cantonese opera reformation is experiencing a bottleneck (Leung, 2015), where the renewals of the scripts and the vocal music have been stagnated. All this explains the importance of recording and analyzing the distinctive features of the famous opera performers' arias and the transformation of such. This research is to be done in an oral history recording and in different deliverables such as research seminars, a book volume concerning the oral history collected, and an electronic archive. It focuses on revealing the singing styles of different schools from the 1930s to the 1970s; performance practices in various eras; ways of memorizing lyrics and scripts under certain systems; and impacts on criticizing and judging the art from the audience's and the practitioners' angles upon the popularity of Cantonese opera recordings.

In terms of theoretical framework, the Theory of Creativity will be adopted for analysis in this project, which helps in understanding how the above factors affect the initiation and thus heritage of the new singing styles. The theory is usually applied in the domain of creative teaching and learning, which means many scholars and teachers tend to believe that students' creativities should not be limited to their inborn natures, but should also be revealed and continuously developed from the process of learning and socialization (Xu and Liu, 2003). The same logic should also be applied to singing styles of Cantonese opera, which is not yet popular though. Leung (2017) once analyzed the creative and developmental aspects of Sit Kok-sin's opera, and this project will further scrutinize the new development of creative operatic singing styles, in order to upgrade the value of oral history and related studies.