Chapter 30 music

Zhao Yuanren's mother is good at Kunqu opera, and his father is good at playing flute. At home, he often sings and sings with his husband.Zhao Yuanren has been well influenced by music since he was a child, and he is very talented in music.He once took music as an elective, and studied under the famous musicologist. He specialized in harmony and composition, and he taught music, music appreciation, Chinese music and other courses.He composed music for contemporary poets: Liu Bannong's "Teach Me How Not to Miss Her", Xu Zhimo's "Sea Rhyme", Liu Dabai's "Selling Cloth Ballad", Hu Shi's "He", Tao Xingzhi's "Little Mr. Song", Shi Yi's " "Western Landscape Song" and so on.

When Zhao Yuanren was young, he once blew morning glory off as a horn, and even tried to play music with it. Zhao Yuanren has an excellent sense of rhythm. When he was a child, he watched his grandfather go to court and beat criminals with a board, so he figured out the special method of counting by the yamen servants: some counted for one beat, some counted for half a beat, and some counted for omission... He So he listened carefully to see if the yamen servants cheated and counted things.After listening to it many times, he found that the yamen servants never made a mistake or missed a single time.When he told the grown-ups about it, the grown-ups always said, "What do you know as a child?"

When Zhao Yuanren was studying at Cornell University, his interest in music became more and more intense. He bought an old piano for 220 US dollars in installments (6 years), while his overseas study fee was only 60 US dollars per month.In order to buy cheap music tickets, he and his music-loving classmates got up in the middle of the night to queue up to buy tickets.Once, Zhao Yuanren got up at two o'clock in the morning to replace Zou Bingwen who was already queuing at the ticket office, and at half past six, other students came to replace him. Most of the lyrics of the songs written by Zhao Yuanren from the 1920s to the early 1930s were written by Liu Bannong. In 1933, when Liu Bannong passed away due to illness, Zhao Yuanren once presented an elegiac couplet affectionately: "Playing double reeds for ten years, it is difficult to make a song without words; if one is weaker than others, teach me how not to miss him!"

In 1920, Zhao Yuanren composed the song "Do Your Best to China", which adopted the tune sung by the monk when he put the flame mouth (a kind of Buddhist ritual), slightly adapted it, and added harmony. Zhao Yuanren often made musical instruments from small things around him.Once at a symphony meeting in Tsinghua University, Zhao Yuanren took more than ten teacups, and then tapped to listen to the tone. After the seven tones were correct, he played a piece of music with the teacups, and everyone was shocked.Another trip to the West Lake, in a wooden fish shop, Zhao Yuanren tapped on each wooden fish, and quickly selected a dozen small wooden fish, and assembled them into a set of musical instruments in half tones.With this set of "wooden fish piano", he can play all kinds of music.

Once, the Zhao family had a banquet. After the meal, Zhao Yuanren refused to take away the plates, chopsticks and bowls. He picked up a chopstick and knocked on them one by one, picking out the sounds of do, re, mi, fa, so... from the tableware. Come, but I searched and searched, but I couldn't find it by one sound.Zhao Yuanren looked up and saw the glass lampshade. He had an idea, took it off and tapped it. It happened to be a coincidence that the missing sound was filled in, and everyone was happy. Zhao Yuanren's children learned the English alphabet, Mandarin Roman characters, phonetic symbols, etc. Zhao Yuanren taught them to sing, and after learning the song, they also learned the alphabet and pinyin.Yang Ruoxian, Yang Buwei's niece, lived in the Zhao family when she was a child. She was the first to learn Roman characters in Mandarin, and Zhao Yuanren rewarded her with a hat.

Zhao Yuanren not only taught the children to sing the alphabet, but also composed the ninety-nine multiplication table, allowing the children to sing and recite it.He also called up texts from his daughters' textbooks, composed music, added harmony, and taught the children to sing. Zhao Yuanren is good at music and has created more than one hundred pieces of music in his life, including vocal music and instrumental music.He and his daughters got together when they had the opportunity to form a family choir to practice and sing his music works in separate parts. Among Zhao Yuanren's musical works, quite a few are created for his family. He often writes songs for his daughters and teaches them to sing.Even the time spent queuing up to send registered letters at the post office is not missed.He wrote many songs in a small staff book, carried them with him, and made revisions whenever he was inspired.His eldest daughter, Zhao Rulan, said: "Many of his music works were composed while he was shaving his beard."

In 1928, Zhao Yuanren published "New Poetry Collection". Xiao Youmei commented: "Among the musical works published in the past ten years, Mr. Zhao Yuanren's "New Poetry Collection" should be the most valuable." He studies music, but he has a genius for music, a fine mind, and a subtle sense of hearing. He can use his spare time to study physics and linguistics to write this Schubert-style Artsong, which will open a new chapter for the music industry in our country. A new era." Xiao also praised Zhao Yuanren as "China's Schubert". After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Zhao Yuanren's family moved south with the Institute of History and Language, running around, losing their piano, and having no electric lights at night, but their family choir sang more and more vigorously.As soon as it got dark, the Zhao family's choir began to sing.Zhao Yuanren's two youngest daughters are young and have sharp voices, so they sing soprano; Zhao Yuanren sings bass; the second daughter Zhao Xinna is mezzo-soprano;