Ma Ke Ma Ke

Ma Ke (simplified Chinese: 马可; traditional Chinese: 馬可; pinyin: Mǎ Kě; 1918 – July 27, 1976) was a Chinese composer and musicologist, best known for his patriotic songs, including Nanniwan.

Ma was born into a family with faith in Christianity, at Xuzhou, Jiangsu, while his name was said to be derived from the saint Mark. He enjoyed chemistry since he attended at the high school, thus he studied chemistry at Henan University, where he encountered Xian Xinghai and the team he led to tour the country in an anti-Japanese roadshow. Ma suspended his studies and followed Xian since then. In 1939 he traveled to Yan'an. On Xian's recommendation, he studied at Luxun Academy of Arts with Lü Ji and others. Besides, he began to collect and record a massive number of Chinese folk songs. In 1947 he joined the Communist Party of China. After 1949 he was appointed the Vice President of the China Conservatory of Music and the head of the Chinese Opera House.

He composed more than 200 musical works, including Nanniwan, We are Democratic Youth（我们是民主青年）, Powerful Workers (咱们工人有力量), Lüliang Mountains Cantata (吕梁山大合唱), the yangge opera The Couple Learn to Read (夫妻识字), the opera Zhou Zishan (周子山), co-composed with Zhang Lu (张鲁) and Liu Chi, The White Haired Girl with Ju Wei, Zhang Lu, and Xiang Yu, Xiaoerhei's Marriage (小二黑结婚), the orchestral piece The North Shanxi Suite (陕北组曲).

As a musicologist, he devoted special study to the work of Xian Xinghai, writing a biography about the composer. He also studied the development of modern Chinese music drama and China's tradition of revolutionary music with several books and approximately 200 papers. In 1978 a partial collection of his songs was published.

A festival dedicated to Ma Ke, called the China Xuzhou Ma Ke Art Festival, was held in Xuzhou in June 2004.

Ma and his wife Yang Wei (Chinese: 杨蔚), they had three daughters: Haixing (Chinese: 马海星), Haiying (Chinese: 马海滢) and Hailing (Chinese: 马海玲).