Peking Opera

Peking Opera Peking Opera is China’s national opera. Opera is so popular in China that they declared a “Peking Opera Month”. Peking Opera has been around for 200 years. “Its main melodies originated from Xipi and Erhuang in Anhui and Hubei respectively and, overtime, techniques from many other local operas were incorporated”. Peking Opera is said to have come to the front after 1790 when the famous four Anhui opera troupes came to Beijing. Peking Opera was developed quickly over the reign of Emperor Qianlong and the Empress Dowager Cixi under the imperial patron and became accessible to the common people.

Peking Opera was originally performed on outside stages such as a teahouse or temple courtyards. The singers developed a piercing style of singing that could be heard over the loud orchestra. “The costumes were a garish collection of sharply contrasting colors to stand out on the dim stage illuminated by oil lamps”. Peking Opera incorporates parts from “The Grand Opera, ballet and acrobatics, consisting of dance, dialogue, monologues, martial arts and mime”. The “Nueva Cancion” Song Tradition Nueva Cancion” is Spanish for new song. Nueva Cancion “is a movement and genre within Latin American and Iberian music of folk music, folk-inspired music and socially committed music”. Nueva Cancion is seen as playing a powerful role in the social upheavals in Portugal, Spain, and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Nueva Cancion started in Chile in the 1960s and was known as “The Chilean New Song”. Soon Nueva Cancion started to emerge in Spain and other areas of Latin America. Nueva Cancion renewed tradtitional Latin American folk music, and was soon associated with revolutionary movements, the Latin American New Left, Liberation Theology, hippie and human rights movements due to political lyrics”. Many Neuva Cancion musicians were often censored, exiled, forced to disappear and even tortured by “right-winged military dictatorships, as in Francoist Spain, Pinochet’s Chile and in Videla and Galtireri’s Argentina”. Neuva Cancion songs were so politically strong and because of this have been used in more recent “political campaigns, the Orange Revolution, which used Violeta Parra’s Gracias a la vida”.