Numbered Musical Notation of the Songs I am Learning

Fig.1 The Red Bean Poem

Fig.2 The River Runs Red

This experience enhanced my learning process of the the Numbered Musical Notation, and because I was listening to the performances over and over again, so I get really familiar with the melody; when I finally move onto playing the songs, the notes were pretty accurate right away. Another thing I realized was this notation system is easier than staff music for sight-reading. I think this is because I encountered numbers far before I started reading Western art music, so numbers are easier to be "processed" than staff music in my brain.

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Side experiment: all you readers out there, try to read these Numbered Musical Notation on an instrument that you're not familiar with, and comment below how you did, and whether you find it easier to sight-read than staff music or not.

Listening to the Tunes I am Learning to Play - Man Jiang Hong

滿江紅 The River Runs Red

Same as The Red Bean Poem, I am going to revise the music I got to make sure it is how it supposed to sound like.

Listening to the Tunes I am Learning to Play - Hong Dou Ci

紅豆詞 The Red Bean Poem

I have noticed that all the videos I found on YouTube sounds the same and that the written music I got for the song is slightly off, so I am going to attempt to re-notate the song from what I hear and post it here when I'm done.

The Songs I am Thinking About Learning by April 2nd (my final presentation day)

Fig.1 Score for The Red Bean Poem

The name of the song is called The Red Bean Poem (紅豆詞 - Hong Dou Ci), red bean in Chinese literature had always symbolized lovesickness. The lyrics were extracted from a novel written in the Qing Dynasty (清朝) by the famous novelist Cao XueQin (曹雪芹) called Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢 - Hong Lou Meng). It is meant to be a poem that one of the female character from the novel "wrote" about the misfortune in her relationship with her arranged fiance who never married her.

More details about the song and lyrics translation can be found here.

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Fig.2 Score for The River Runs Red

This song is called The River Runs Red (滿江紅 - Man Jiang Hong) was written by a famous General in the Song Dynasty (宋朝), named Yue Fei (岳飛). He was very honorable and loyal to the Song Dynasty. When he wrote this poem, he was on the boarder of China defending the country from Mongolian intruders; however, he got summoned back to the capital city by the Emperor who believed the false accusation made towards him by a corrupted official who framed Yue Fei for treason. He ended up being executed for a crime that he did not commit. He wrote this poem to express his anger towards the corruption in the government and the fact he could not continue to serve his country because of the corruption.

Translation of the poem can be found here.

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Note that these two scores also have the more well-known staff notation used in Western art music; however, I am still going to learn the pieces by the Numbered Musical Notation, and the aid of online video resources, as traditional Chinese music were supposed to be pass down through observation, and the Numbered Musical Notation is what they use for traditional musical instruments nowadays.

These musics were not specifically written for the Xun, in fact there really wasn't many music written for any specific instrument in Chinese traditional musical world; therefore, performers will have to make their own judgement call as to which set of fingering should they use. In this case, the two pieces I chose range from one-lower-dot 5 to one-higher-dot 1 or 2, so I would adapt the following set of fingerings:

Fig.3 Fingering I am using for the two pieces I chose

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The reason I chose these two songs was that they both mainly consists of 12356 (do-re-me-sol-la), now anyone with basic music theory training would know that these are the notes in a pentatonic scale, which is one of the main characteristics of Chinese traditional music. Also these two songs are actually written before any Western culture got into China, so it is more traditional than a lot of other "traditional" music written by modern Chinese composers.