Thoughtful introduction of Chinese choral repertoire, the Long March cantata is contemporarily highly recognized music heritage of large-scale choral work of 10 movements last century in China. The cantata is composed to commemorate 30th anniversary of Long March. The journey of the Long March covered 11 provinces over 4,000 miles and crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges for over 370 days. The libretto is a set of narrative poetry by General Hua Xiao in Sept, 1964. "Long March Cantata" is conceptually composed based on "Where to go and where to say, when you hear the melody, the audiences will realize that it’s Guizhou, Yunnan, North Shaanxi ... Wherever the music is performed, it should restore the imaging of local feeling". This article mainly discusses its absorption of Chinese folk music based on Chinese pentatonic scales in music composition. Among them, movement one "Farewell (Leave the Base Area)" uses Jiangxi folk tunes, and the movement three "The Zunyi Conference, the Brilliance" use Guizhou tunes according to composers. For examples, in the movement four " Raid of Four times Cross Red Water ", Yunnan tunes are used, and in the movement seven "Arrive Wuqi Town", the northern Shaanxi tunes are used. In movement eight “Cheers" and movement nine "Annunciation", the tune of Changsha in Hunan and Northeast Jiangxi were selected to salute the southeast soldiers respectively. With the instrumental accompaniment of the full western orchestra, bel canto and national folk style signing (non-classical voicing) are well balanced. In order to match folk tune and regional congruency, Chinese traditional musical instruments, erhu (二胡), pipa (三弦), zhudi (bamboo flute, 笛子), suona (Chinese trumpet唢呐), kuaiban (bamboo castanets, 快板) as well as other Chinese percussion etc. were used with the western symphony orchestra according to historical context.
Chinese Narrative Poetry: The Late Han through T'ang Dynasties
