Music Unlimited II: “Creeping Grass in the Wilds” (野有蔓草)

Included in “Chinese Choral Music Anthology: Music Unlimited II.”

About the Work

The text is taken from the “Odes of Zheng” in the Book of Songs (詩經), and portrays a free love in which a man and a woman meet, fall in love at first sight and go on to share their lives together. Accordingly, the music focuses on depicting emotion: the admiration of the man (men’s voices), the restrained inner response of the woman (women’s voices), and finally their union.

The piece opens with the tenor section singing the first stanza alone to a pentatonic melody, one note per syllable, imagining the way the Book of Songs was chanted in ancient times; this forms the foundation of the whole work. The basses then lead the second stanza, while the women’s voices take a descriptive or background role. In the middle section, the sopranos carry the main melody while the other voices form chords. Although they still sing the text, the words are separated one by one, lines from both stanzas are interwoven, and there is no shaping of speech rhythm; they serve as a backdrop to the sopranos, like the beating of the woman’s heart. Finally, the tenors return to the opening melody and text, now somewhat varied, while the soprano melody is derived from it in counterpoint, layering in the text of the second stanza. The two lower voices sing no text here, providing a harmonic background.