I thus continued to login to my Youtube account and decided to go through the videos and music pieces I had searched before. And of course, I had "favourited" two videos, which included me in the concert performance. That was during the DHSCO anniversary concert:《华夏情韵回顾30年》 or "Melodies of the Chinese Spirit - Recollections". The pieces played then weren't my most proud moments/best pieces, but ah well... better than nothing!
There were quite a number of DHSCO videos online, put up by the younger generation of juniors. It was also easier cos somehow they even managed to get their hands on the video recording of their SYF competition pieces (we didn't even get to see our own, during our time in '93 and '95, competing under the Sec and JC categories respectively)
Continued browsing then I just realised that one of the songs I'd listened to and committed to memory (from constant playing and re-playing on now old-fashioned tape recorder) from the '91 DHSCO concert tape, 弓舞 , was actually the music accompaniment to a Chinese dance piece 小刀会...
To me then (when I was 13 and listening to what my seniors played in the annual concert) and even now after almost 20 years, it never did strike me that those titles 《序曲》and 《弓舞》meant anything more than CO music piece titles. Today, I watched a Youtube video featuring the song being played as music to a chinese dance piece and then it dawned on me how the different parts of the music piece tied in with the story enacted in the dance item. And it was literally a "弓舞", cos the dancers were dressed in period costumes and dancing with bows (弓) in their hands.
Of course, I am sure 小刀会 was one of the few state-sanctioned "cultural" pieces that could be played during that era (the info on the youtube video listed it as 1967) in China and beyond. If you had, like myself, scanned the handful of shops at Bras Basah selling CO tapes and CDs in the early 1990s, you would have realised that the variety of items being sold were limited. Commercial pieces produced (mostly from mainland China origin) featured the same few repertoire. It was as though the merchants could only bring in certain products. The themes, inevitably were those that featured bravery, loyalty, brotherhood, filial piety and other holistic, traditional Chinese values.
During a later period when I was interested in listening to such music accompainment CO pieces to Chinese opera (cos we had played a couple of pieces in a concert, and it got me interested), I went around and looked at the CDs again. Those such as 《红灯记》， 《沙家浜》， 《智取威虎山》were the modern revolutionary Peking operas that we had performed excerpt pieces from. Thus, it was quite interesting to listen to the full opera music on CD, though I had little inkling what the opera stories were about, except they were probably very communist, judging from their opera lyrics.
I thought it was quite funny to see how the producers and the higher authorities had used the form of peking opera to their public relations/communications/publicity uses, highlighting the qualities they wanted to expound to the larger public, such as loyalty to the party, how the party had given them the strength and bravery to do XXX/YYY, even charge up a hill and confront a tiger in 《智取威虎山》.
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