"Songs, om, re Pron" Compiled by Koo. i: Kwang Hsue Publishing Ca. Peking Road.
This is an endeavour to record in Western staff-notation the better-known songs, religious and secular, of the Chinese people, and place such songs permanently on record in a form that is understandable to Western-trained musicians.
The effort is most. praise-worthy and to those interested in Chinese music there is much of value in the collection. The compiler is most modest in his pretensions and disclaims being anything more than an amateur actuated by the desire to prevent some of the melodies being lost due to the fact that hardly any Chinese music is written down and such that is written down is understood only by a select few.
Thus most of this collection has been complied by listening to melodics; the harmonization is his own. On playing through this music some difficulty will be encountered by the uneven balance of the phrasing which makes it strange and at time= almost incomprehensible to the Western ear. But this is to be expected.
While not the first attempt to record Chinese music, it is we think the first harmonized collection made available to the general public, and as such we wish it success. Westerners who are acquainted with Chinese popular songs will note some that are absent, and will find others that he has heard in a ferent form; this is explained by the author as being due to the fact that different versions of the same melodies are current in various parts of China.
The volume is on sale at the Commercial Press, the Chung Hwa
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.