China Youth Daily
Ma Yuping
February 5, 2022
An acappella choir composed of forty-four Chinese children sang the Olympic Anthem in Greek at the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. The children are all from Fuping County, a mountainous area in Hebei Province. Four months ago, the majority of them even didn’t know many songs, not to mention numbered musical notation.
The Malanhua Children’s Choir sang in Greek at the Beijing Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony, Wearing Tiger Pattern Costumes
Zhang Yimou, the chief director, decided to invite children from rural areas to sing the Olympic Hymn when preparing for the opening ceremony, and his idea was supported by the Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee. The Malanhua Band from Malan Village, Fuping County attracted the attention of the committee. The band has been around for nearly sixteen years, with all the members from Malan Primary School. Deng Xiaolan, aged seventy-eight, is the band’s founder and the only mentor. After retirement, Deng came to teach music at Malan Village. In the early years, the band used to practice violin in the field and hold music festivals along the river valley for the reason that there wasn’t a proper venue to be found. As a result, the organizing committee began to select Malanhua Choir members from the Malanhua Band and nearby villages as well.
The Olympic anthem is a choral cantata composed by Greek composer Spyridon Samaras, with lyrics by poet Kostis Palamas. The anthem made its first public debut in1896, and it was declared as the official Olympic Anthem by the International Olympic Committee in 1958. For this time in Beijing, it is a challenge to have children who barely knew Greek and numbered musical notation to sing the song.
Liang Youlin, a member from the Malanhua children’s choir, said that before he was selected, most of his knowledge about the Olympics came from school. It was mainly because Liang was not yet born in 2008 when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics. He learned from textbooks that the design of the Beijing Olympics medals was inspired by ancient jade; he also learned that the Jamaican runner Usain Bolt broke the world record in the men’s 100-meter race. As one of the very few children in the school who has been exposed to musical instruments, Liang entered the primary selection stage of the choir together with another approximately seventy students from rural primary schools in Fuping County.
Kids of the Malanhua choir rested on the insulated blankets of the mushroom shed as they returned to Fuping County
In the process of preparing for the chorus, in order to help the children better memorize the melody, Gao Yue, a music teacher of the choir, transcribed the musical notation of the anthem into the numbered version. Subsequently, Fu Baohuan, currently a volunteer teacher in Fuping county, further adjusted the numbered musical notation to make it easier to learn. “Even for those who have received years of professional music training, it would take quite a while to perform properly as a choir,” said Su Zhiyan, another music instructor for the choir. Su mentioned that the children almost started from “do re mi fa” and then received pitch and breathing training. “They are desperate for music — this is the most important thing. They study extremely hard and practice over and over again,” said Su. After a period of time, Su was amazed to find that the children hardly made mistakes in inflections that could even embarrass music majors.
To prepare for the chorus, the children from Fuping started to learn Greek for the first time in their lives. In mid-October 2021, Qin Yezhen, a lecturer from Beijing Foreign Studies University, and Lin Jiahao, a teaching assistant, arrived in Fuping to teach the children Greek. Qin and Lin knew that starting from the basic twenty-four Greek letters might not work, so they came up with a method that children could easily accept. They modeled on Latin alphabet to spell Greek letters, which resembled a variant of the Chinese pinyin. It was for the first time that common Greek greetings, such as “Καλημέρα (good morning),” “σας ευχαριστώ (thank you),” and “καληνυχτα (good night)” were put on the mobile blackboards in teaching buildings of the rural elementary schools. Another member of the choir, Wang Jinyang, recalled that he had flipped through his notebook for the musical notation and Greek spelling countless times. He would recite the lyrics in Greek every night before going to bed. He said the chorus members searched online for videos of the Olympic anthem performed at the Athens, Beijing and Tokyo Olympics, and repeatedly watched them to correct his tune and pronunciation.
The choir doing the vocal exercises
The opening performance is not the children’s only story about the Winter Olympics. In 2015, Beijing, together with Zhangjiakou, won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Since then, students from rural areas in Hebei have been able to be exposed to more ice and snow sports. In 2020, Hebei Province announced the distribution of 100,000 pairs of roller skates to rural primary schools, with each school rationed according to the maximum class capacity. Later, most of the rural primary schools started to offer roller skating and land curling lessons. Gu Zhanhao and another four children from the Malanhua Children’s Choir were also young athletes in their school’s roller-skating team.
As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics coincides with the Spring Festival of the year of the Tiger in the Chinese lunar calendar, the choir members wore specifically clothes with tiger patterns at the formal performance. Deeply touched by the chorus, Zhang Yimou was quoted as saying, “I enjoy their performance very much. I believe it’s a kind of heavenly choir. It truly represents the new look and spirit of this new era, as well as that of China’s next generation.”
Source: FDU外院
