Chinese Cultural Exchange

On Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 8:30 a.m., students in the Student Art Troupe of the University of International Business and Economy from China met with our class of UTD students to have a discussion of our different musical cultures.

We began by asking the UIBE students more about their music. They showed us some of their folk music with some personal on-the-spot performances and also a couple songs from the computer. When a couple singers sang a common folk song for us, their pitch varied greatly, but not in the same way as we are accustomed to. The pitch varied within the same word, having very short increments of pitches. They sang from the top of their range to the bottom of their range very quickly, and it was very different from that of the West, or at least in my opinion. However, other songs sounded as if they could be popular here as well. One man played a song on his guitar and it sounded very similar to our culture’s style of music.

When we asked them to tell us about some of their popular music, they gave us a few names and songs. One that I looked up and really enjoyed was Liuhuan’s “You and Me” that was actually used during the Olympics. This is only one example of the popular music they suggested to us. It is common in their style of music to sing using their nose or singing through their nose and another student showed us briefly how it was done. In this video, when the woman begins to sing around the minute and a half mark, it is apparent that she isn’t singing the way most Americans would.



However, when we tried to tell them more about popular music here in the U.S., we focused more upon how diverse our people are and how it varies from one person to another. In my opinion, we never gave them clear examples of our popular music, though one of their students asked about Lady Gaga.

Overall, though our music cultures were very different, they were still more alike than I had originally thought. We seemed to have the same idea of Blues and many of the music sounded similar, with the exception of the language. This discussion with actual Chinese musicians gave me a better idea of what their music is like.