Yellow Plum Tune (Themiclesia)
Unless otherwise noted, all names of musical instruments refer to traditional Themiclesian instruments.
Yellow Plum Tune (黃梅調, ghwang-mo-tiuh) is a style of music emphasizing vocals, set to lyrics and supported by an orchestra, forming the backbone for corresponding genres in theatrical, cinematic, and musical performances. This style was first attested in Themiclesia during the 1700s, though its roots may be far older; theatre historians believe that the oldest melodies may have been dancing songs from rural communities, with elements of story-telling and additions from other schools of theatre at multiple points in time. After the Pan-Septentrion War, Yellow Plum Opera, diversified into cinema and pure musical performances, and all of its derivatives generally enjoyed much public patronage between 1947 and 1970, to the extent that some have considered it the dominant genre in performing arts during that period, or at least from 1957 to 1967.
Opera
Cast
The oldest opera demanded few characters and musical instruments, reflecting its origins in relatively impoverished, uneducated peasant communities. The primary roles were:
- Male—almost invariably a young scholar
- Female—usually a girl from an educated family
- Fool—a friend of either of the above, or a matchmaker
In very simple dramata, sometimes the fool was omitted as well. Unlike many other forms of theatre, Yellow Plum Opera does not require that characters conform to their stereotypes. The sheer adaptability of Yellow Plum Opera to perform a wide variety of plotlines, requiring divergent casts, has been cited as a crucial factor in its widespread acceptance. That being said, generally speaking, there is still a male lead and a female lead, if only because most traditional opera are romances. Yellow Plum Opera shares gender-irrespective casting practices with most other Themiclesian forms of opera; female actors regularly play both male and female parts, though the converse is markedly rarer. Transvestism being a common theme in many classic operatic works, it is not unusual to see a female actor playing a male character pretending to be female, or playing a female character pretending to be male.
Music
There is some evidence suggesting that the earliest music consisted solely of percussion, and the characters (or dancers) were responsible for providing melody. Yet as far as 1702, there is already a standard set of instruments widely employed to give the foundational melody according to written scores.
- Soprano fiddle
- Alto fiddle
- Wood block
- Wood clapper
Starting in the 19th Century, more instruments were added:
- Trumpet
- Gong
- Cymbals
- Flute
- Recorder
- Ocarina
- Hammered dulcimer
- Lute
- Bass fiddle
In the grandest ensembles, these voices may have several members varied in pitch or in tone colour; particularly, since the 1800s, using at least three fiddles for the alto range has been standard, perhaps under the influence of Casaterran orchestras. Extremely large ensembles are rarely encountered, as they tend to overpower the human voice. It has also become commonplace since the turn of the 20th Century to add a chorus voice, whose role is typically that of a dramatic narrator. This left the on-stage characters with fewer lines expressing information crucial to the audience but would seem unnatural or obvious to the characters themselves. The chorus voice typically consists of four to six singers, of both sexes in equal proportions. Not only does the orchestra provide melody, but sound effects too.
Cinema
While Yellow Plum Opera reached new heights in popularity, the Pan-Septentrion War broke out. Iconic arias were adopted by the armed forces as marches and leisure songs, and many of the musically-inclined in the ranks submitted their own compositions to the authorities for compilation. By the end of the war, Yellow Plum (strip of its theatrical elements) pervaded the military, and upon demobilization in 1947, the demand for Yellow Plum grew in every corner of the nation. As the art was passed down from master to apprentice, Yellow Plum companies were short in demand; the Triaw Bros. Films Co. capitalized on this market by hiring a company to produce a cinematic rendition of the time-honoured classic Encounterances of Two Phoenices. The company provided the cast and orchestra, while the film studio provided the set and direction.
The combination was an instant hit: in 1949, Matrimony by Three Smiles became the highest-grossing film in Themiclesian history. Early films shown between 1948 and 1950 had comparatively few truly "cinematic" techniques implemented, though "cinema Yellow Plum" matured as a genre by 1953, using larger and more naturalistic sets that eliminated the confinement of the "stage". The traditional format contained a large number of singing passages that would make the picture much more artificial than it already was and flow poorly. It should be noted that film studios, at least until the very end of the Yellow Plum trend in 1967, did not prioritize emulation of reality in directing films; the integration of vocals with on-screen action was not seamless, and on these grounds some commentators consider these movies "cinematic theatre" rather than true motion pictures.
Cast
While cinema Yellow Plum rarely ventured beyond the traditional selection of stories, later films generally were acted according to a script specifically written for the motion picture production. Larger number of characters (usually silent or had only a handful of chorus parts) also appeared to represent crowds and create scenes that would not have been possible in operatic renditions. Hence, it might be said that cinematic casting provides a more "realistic" or "natural" setting than its source; however, this end was not pursued without limitation. Prolonged two-character scenes are still common where more interaction would be expected in other motion pictures.
Music industry
Yellow Plum has great notoriety for its extension into vocal performance, independent from its theatrical or cinematic forms. That Themiclesian soldiers marched and passed time to these tunes may explain its later explosive application in every genre of performance arts. The development of Yellow Plum singing as a form of art in its own right followed a much less straightforward path than might be expected.
As opera is the primary form of theatre to which Yellow Plum was applied, and most cinematic Yellow Plum works utilized singing in lieu of speaking, songs therefore formed a powerful and indispensable part of the performance; arguably, theatrical portrayal takes second place to the quality of music and lyrics, as well as singing. Since the mid-50s, movie studios have sought to introduce big-name actors from other genres of film to the booming Yellow Plum scene; being unable to sing their parts, the existing cast borrowed from operatic companies were reduced to off-scene singing. While such an arrangement resulted in a very attractive combination of acting, music, and filming technique, operatic singers soon became weary of this predicament. Realizing that their voices had independent potential and value, many of the more noted companies soon began to perform concerts rather than opera. This transition occurred around 1957. Initially, these concerts were simple re-runs of songs that already featured in well-known opera or movies; soon, companies began to write songs for concerts only. Without the burden of a visual performance or a coherent plotline, lyricists soon produced a considerable catalogue of songs performed to audiences that took less interest in acting than in singing. These opera companies continued to evolve for the next half-decade or so, quietly adopting elements from other, emerging styles of singing, such as Rock and Roll. One of the fundamental features of concert Yellow Plum is a more pervasive and consistent percussion line, almost certainly adapted from contemporary Rock music.
In terms of instrumentation, the general trend is simplification from 1957 to 1967. From the commencement of that period to 1960, a concert performance typically included a full orchestra of instruments identical to those used in movies or opera. Such orchestras had up to thirty musicians, playing around 20 instruments. Starting from 1960, the saturated, bold voice of the full orchestra gave way, in the concert field, to a more streamlined, clearly-defined voice reminiscent of the orchestras used in the 1910s. By the same year, independent groups have also formed, performing the same type of music; these lesser-known acts experimented with foreign notions much more liberally, creating hybridized pieces along a spectrum of orthodox Yellow Plum to almost unrecognizable. Some of these influences would seep into and dominate the mainstream in the years approaching.
Instrumentation underwent further simplification after 1962, when a full group consisted of around 12—15 musicians, two vocalists, composer(s), and lyricist(s). In 1963, this number further shrunk to 10—12 musicians. The combination percussion platform, which placed the cymbal, wood block, wood clapper, and gong at the command of a single musician, accounted for the reduction. In general, streamlining of musical lines did not reduce the complexity of the music played, and complexity was one of several factors by which the public judged of a band’s ability. As a nod to their theatrical roots, the orchestra typically plays as the audience enters and leaves the auditorium.
The role of the composer and lyricist remained independent unto the dying days of Yellow Plum. The style imposed strict metrical and rhyming standards that tested a lyricists’ ability to write coherent lines in accordance to the form, as well as the composer’s ability to match the melody to the meter of the lyrics. This was a fairly labour-intensive task, and highly popular groups could employ a handful of either to produce new songs quickly. While Yellow Plum is known for the variety of melodies it encompasses, all music is fundamentally derived from a set of sequences, each a bar or two in length. Transpositions, variations, flourishes, episodes, asides, and even changes of key could all be added to a base sequence, to colour it with emotion and dramatic effect. This technique is responsible for the “novel yet familiar” feeling that listeners experience. It is a highly specialized skill not easily acquired in normal educational facilities. Traditional Yellow Plum songs, even those in concerts, were written around a limited set of plotlines. Today, the constraints of meter and rhyme have been identified as the root cause for this lack of creativity, since novel subjects penned in this format would be difficult to understand purely through listening. The introduction of television broadcasting of concerts and movies partly resolved this issue through subtitles added to the image. Rising bands also capitalized on the conspicuous want of contemporary subject matter, to varying degrees of success; generally, penning a song that is both easy to understand and poetically conforming was “a very daunting task”, as lyricists could not rely on common metaphors.
Yellow Plum concerts attracted an equally large, if not greater, audience than Yellow Plum movies. By the mid-60s, most Themiclesian households possessed television and radio sets, in addition to phonographs. In exactly the same way that television provided an avenue for a theatrical performance to reach a much more numerous audience, radio sets and phonographs enabled the spread of Yellow Plum music on music stations and through records. In many examples, a franchise extended onto the screen, the radio, and vinyl records, and success in one contributed to the other.
Decline
Yellow Plum arts began to show signs of fatigue in 1967. Then, the popularity of the format produced a myriad of lesser bands that pilfered from each other’s work, from which they performed songs that widely were lambasted as substandard or exposed as dishonest. This public distaste reflected in the industry as a campaign to improve the quality of their products and stay focused on what has been proven to work. Though this strategy arguably allowed the (clearly) dated style to survive well into the 70s, it also stifled innovation in the genre, ultimately occasioning its own gradual demise by 1977 or so.
Two immediate causes to the waning popularity of Yellow Plum have been identified. Firstly, the genre of Shinasthana Rock (Rock written in Shinasthana), having been in development since the late 50s, entered full bloom by 1965, partly assisted by the Tyrannian Invasion. This did not directly rob Yellow Plum of its market presence, since it was the post-war generation that initially flocked to it. The two styles started to mix in 1967, one cause that encouraged smaller bands to attempt Yellow Plum and also one that caused public backlash at a “musical monstrosity that was neither Yellow Plum nor Rock and Roll.” Eventually, these groups mostly pursued Rock and Roll as their primary styles, though not without occasional incorporations of Yellow Plum themes.
The second cause for its decline is the rise of youth culture in the 70s, particular in the immigrant communities of Dayashinese and Menghean Themiclesians. Many of them feeling alien, angry, or wholly disillusioned, turned to the rising format of Punk Rock, then engulfing New Tyran. Though Yellow Plum was ostensibly a very “popular” form of entertainment, it gradually became a common penchant of all classes. As the level of education rose within the general public, so did the literary element in theatre. Immigrant children have historically experienced difficulty in achieving the same literary proficiency as native Themiclesians, and Yellow Plum consequently became a reminder of their backwardness. Punk Rock featured lyrics often in Menghean or Dayashinese, set to short, hooky tunes, combined with a vociferous, exclamatory voice; these “rougher” elements, perhaps more so its contrast with Yellow Plum and the dominant trend in Rock and Roll, appealed to socially disenfranchised youths. In as much the trendy, sharp 60s Rock gave way to the mellow, poignant 70s Rock, the proliferation of Punk Rock, beyond its radical rejection of Yellow Plum, has also been interpreted as a reaction to the (in some perspectives, undue or undesirable) softening of mainstream Rock.
Some complaints from consumers of Punk Rock in the late 70s regarding Yellow Plum are for “lack of percussion”, which statistically was demonstrated to be untrue. In fact, with cymbals, wood blocks, wood clappers, and gongs, percussion lines were more elaborate than before at the time. Yet to prevent percussion (non-melodic) from interfering with melody, percussionists have indeed taken to play instruments more softly. Additionally, the time signature of Yellow Plum (usually – but not always – 6/4) differed from most popular music styles (4/4). The presence of polyphonic percussion lines may also have contributed to the lack of a consistent “beat” prima facie, though upon closer study, listeners are intended to discern the complex percussion beats, peeling one layer of the onion after the previous. Indeed, this attitude towards mainstream music – a desire for intricacy and complexity, in both lyrical and musical aspects – may be cited as the primary cause for the rise of Punk Rock in general.