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Chinese Culture Influence On American Culture

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Music has always been an important factor throughout my life, it helps me when I’m feeling down and gives me some type of relief. Because of this, it leaded me to take this course which ventured into different cultures and the music within them. I chose to go with the Brazilian and Chinese ensembles because they were the two cultures I was least familiar with. Growing up my family had friends who were born in brazil and would tell me stories of what it was like to live there, which has always had me interested in their culture. Also, while I was in high school I had a Chinese foreign exchange student live with me for an entire semester of school and she taught me things about her culture I would have never known if I hadn’t met her. Growing …show more content…

The capital of China is called Beijing. With a lot of people comes a lot of musical cultural. Chinese opera is very big throughout china and has been a strong to their culture for many generations. Some characteristic traits of a Chinese opera singer would be that they performed dressed in costumes and wear makeup while on stage. Opera singers are good at all the following: speaking, singing, dancing, miming, acting, and acrobatics. In these performances, there were usually a male, female, painted-face male, and a clown. Females were not usually used in the performances so males would play their roles. The instruments used in these plays were a small, two-string fiddle with a piercing timbre called the jinghu as well as another chordophone instrument called the pipa. Other instruments are including in the percussion section like the gongs, cymbals, and wooden clappers. The leaders of the performance use a drum called the a danpi gu. Another type of music in the Chinese culture would be the solo zheng style. The conservatory solo zheng style was predated and influenced by several important regional styles of solo sheng music in the 19th century. The zheng is related to other Asian board zither chordophones, which include the Japanese koto, the Korean kayagum, the Mongolian jatag, and the Vietnamese dan tranh. The oldest forms of the zheng were consisted of five silk strings attached on a bamboo body, and over time the zheng transformed into many modern forms. These new forms consisted of a wooden body that had sixteen strings attached instead of the original

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