Suzhou Chantefable

Suzhou Chantefable, or tanci, is a genre of spoken and sung narrative that arose in Suzhou in the Ming Dynasty, making it one of the oldest forms that has continued basically unchanged until today. Tanci is usually performed by two performers, who play and sing and tell, the two musical instruments used for accompaniment being the sanxian. There is also one-person tanci as well as pieces which involve as many as six performers. Tanci, as an art form, stresses "shuo, xue, tan, chang," i.e., narrating, joking (funning), strumming, and singing.28 There are new tanci pieces from many other regions, which may differ in melodic line as well as dialect, such as, for example, Ningbo tanci, Yangzhou tanci, Changsha tanci, Shaoxing tanci, Shandong tanci, Guizhou tanci, and others. In the last few decades, tanci, in combination with pinghua, the straight spoken form of Suzhou storytelling, have come to be called pingtan, a contraction of pinghua and tanci. One last point to mention concerning tanci is its potentially crucial role as the link from the Tang Dynasty to the present. Chinese scholars have proposed that tanci is the direct descendant of bianwen, those religious/secular scroll texts ("transformations") that were found in the caves of Dunhuang in northwest China at the turn of this century. Although this theory has not been documented, it seems plausible from both artistic and geographical perspectives, and we look forward to future studies on this issue. (Pingtan is a composite term that includes Suzhou pinghua [straight narrative] and Suzhou tanci [chantefable: a story told in alternating sung and spoken parts; the sung parts are accompanied by one or two musical instruments: the pipa 琵琶 [four-stringed plucked lute, originally from Persia] and the sanxian 三弦 [Japanese name: Samisen: three-stringed fretless plucked lute]