Stage-Speech Melody: Musicality, Contour Transformations, and Dramatic Narrative in Yao Chen’s Kunqü Opera <i>Pipa Plays Opera</i> (2015)

Abstract Yao Chen’s chamber work Pipa Plays Opera (2015) consists of three scenes, each based on an act from the classic Chinese play The Romance of the Western Chamber. The first two of these scenes are self-standing soliloquies assigned to a Kunqü singer. However, instead of singing, the performer declaims the libretto using an important Kunqü vocal technique called 念白 (stage speech), which is similar to the Western recitative but without any accompaniment or prescriptive notation. First, the Kunqü singer analyzes the linguistic tone of each Chinese character. Then, based on the textual semantics and syntax, they group several characters to form a word, the lexical tone of which projects a more melodious contour. Thus, stage speech is a highly stylized interpretation of declamation. To analyze the role of stage speech in Yao’s Pipa, I apply the minimally divergent contour network to study the nested relationships among the stage-speech melodic contours in Scene II, “The Sentiment of the Zither.” My analysis reveals that the contours gradually transform their guises along a continuum within the network, closely paralleling the text’s depiction of the zither’s various sounds. This analytical framework serves to relate contours into affinity families that move the narrative forward.