Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera

Behind its elaborate costumes and make-up, its pantomime and acrobatics, Beijing opera is above all a world created in sound - so much so that attending a performance in China is referred to as "listening to theatre," and performing itself is termed "singing theatre", rather than "acting". This study takes the reader to the heart of the Chinese art form by showing how the elements of song, speech and musical composition are used to create a performance, and how that performance is understood by its audience. It begins with a discussion of the aesthetics of traditional Beijing opera, and then explores each facet of aural performance in turn - language, music, voice and orchestra. Numerous charts and musical transcriptions help to draw a vivid picture of the variety of "languages" at play in the opera - those with vocabularies of tones and sound patterns as well as those made up of words. The emphasis throughout is on the supremacy of the performer as both composer and interpreter of the sounds heard in traditional Beijing opera.