Commentary

Qian Rong's translation offers a new perspective to Western scholars on singing in tone languages because her article was not originally composed for an English-language audience, but addresses Mandarin text-setting for a Mandarin-speaking audience.Most English-language scholarship on text-setting in tone languages must introduce and explain the language and the music within the same text.As English is not a tone language, the concerns seem peculiar, even exotic, and the authors' perspectives often have a colonial slant-people of European descent addressing cultures of colonized lands, including central and northern America and southern and western Africa.Meanwhile, most English-language literature on text-setting in a Sinitic (Chinese) language has been on Cantonese music.This is unsurprising because Hong Kong was a British Colony from 1841 to 1997.The literature on Cantonese vocal music has covered both traditional (pre-colonial) and popular (post-colonial) styles.[2] Yuen-ren Chao was the first to write about Mandarin text-setting in English (to my knowledge) and has, therefore, had a profound influence on global scholarly thought on the subject.Chao noted that speech-like genres, such as vendors' cries and children's rhymes, show stricter tone-melody alignment than musical genres (Chao 1956).Chao's observations were later confirmed using statistical approaches: mismatches between tone and melody are common in both traditional opera (Stock 1999) and popular music (Wong 2002).However, in Cantonese, high degrees of correspondence were found in both popular music (Chan 1987;Wong 2002) as well as traditional opera (Yung 1983; Yung 1991).These findings have been supported repeatedly since then (including in this journal, Li 2021).[3] James Kirby (2022, 226) explains the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin text settings this way:To the extent that texts involving contour tones will more frequently result in non-similar settings, Cantonese lyricists are at a distinct advantage, given that syllables bearing contour tones make up a rather smaller proportion of the lexicon.In Mandarin, on the other hand, it is much more difficult to compose a text of any sort without making extensive use of contour tones.[4] Kirby's observations about contour tones are consistent with a recent article comparing two unrelated ethnolinguistic cultures, Cantonese and Yoruba (West Africa), co-authored by myself, Edwin Li, and David Aina.We found many commonalities in text setting between the popular music of the two cultures.Moreover, we argue that a prevalence of level tones and their compatibility with global trends in music production may explain the similarity between the two disparate cultures (Li, Carter-ny and Aina 2024).They also share a point of sociocultural similarity: in both cases, ethnic language is used to distinguish the Footnotes 1. Qian's explanation of chngc: "Among all genres of vocal music, the element involving spoken sounds is known as chngc (literally, "sung words").That is, what is in opera known as 'libretto' and in songs known as 'lyrics' are in a more general sense for all vocal genres collectively known as chngc" (note 5).