Dec. 5th, 2005 11:01 pm
random thought
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toastykittenThe 12 Girls Band is good Chinese New Year's music.
My sister burned me a few VCDs of their concerts, and I listened to it at work. I was really happy that no one sang, because if they sang, it would be friggin opera, which I can't stand in Chinese.
It reminded me of The Great Wall Youth Orchestra, a local group that "plays Chinese musical instruments and performs a variety of music". It is also most famous for Tyler Thompson, an African-American kid with an aptitude for Chinese operatic singing. I have two distant relatives in the group - they're the sweetest kids I ever baby-sat, and after watching one of their concerts, really talented, too.
In this one concert, one of the performances was a very famous scene in a Cantonese opera. (It's actually one of the few songs I like.) As I was watching, I was of two thoughts - "Oh my god, that's so cute!" and "Oh my god, that's so wrong!" You see, this scene that these two kids perform is this marriage ceremony in which the bride and groom commit suicide by drinking cyanide. The bride is a princess who's been forced against her will to marry someone else, so she's committing suicide as an act of rebellion, and to send a message to her subjects to keep fighting. I think.
Anyway, it was really, really cute seeing the kids all dressed up in the elaborate costumes and makeup, and I'm pretty sure they didn't know what they were singing about.
The KQED show about it was very entertaining. One of the kids interviewed cracked us up. She said something along the lines of "My dad had a flute in China, but then he had to chop it up for firewood." I bet her parents totally made that up. It's such a Chinese thing to say.
My sister burned me a few VCDs of their concerts, and I listened to it at work. I was really happy that no one sang, because if they sang, it would be friggin opera, which I can't stand in Chinese.
It reminded me of The Great Wall Youth Orchestra, a local group that "plays Chinese musical instruments and performs a variety of music". It is also most famous for Tyler Thompson, an African-American kid with an aptitude for Chinese operatic singing. I have two distant relatives in the group - they're the sweetest kids I ever baby-sat, and after watching one of their concerts, really talented, too.
In this one concert, one of the performances was a very famous scene in a Cantonese opera. (It's actually one of the few songs I like.) As I was watching, I was of two thoughts - "Oh my god, that's so cute!" and "Oh my god, that's so wrong!" You see, this scene that these two kids perform is this marriage ceremony in which the bride and groom commit suicide by drinking cyanide. The bride is a princess who's been forced against her will to marry someone else, so she's committing suicide as an act of rebellion, and to send a message to her subjects to keep fighting. I think.
Anyway, it was really, really cute seeing the kids all dressed up in the elaborate costumes and makeup, and I'm pretty sure they didn't know what they were singing about.
The KQED show about it was very entertaining. One of the kids interviewed cracked us up. She said something along the lines of "My dad had a flute in China, but then he had to chop it up for firewood." I bet her parents totally made that up. It's such a Chinese thing to say.