The Influence of Western Instruments on the Development of Chinese Music
At the beginning of the 20th century,western music pushed open China's gates,and the Chinese gradually accepted western music instruments and learned performance and composition of instrumental music.One group of national composers after another with national consciousness and creativity gradually gave up imitating western styles in the beginning through their creative practices and explored a new road of"absorbing ancient elements to be used now,and foreign elements to be used in Chinese music."Brave in absorption and reference and mutual fusion,they created many instrumental music pieces loved by the people.As early as 1934,Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin or Qi Erpin held a contest in"collecting Chinese style piano works."Corydon Piccolo by He Luting won the competition.It is a piano piece with typical Chinese tastes,and until now the charm of this number has not diminished,and it has become a song that every Chinese child learning piano must play.
In 1959,He Zhanhao and Chen Gang,two students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music composed the violin concerto Butterfly Lovers (Liang Zhu) For half a century,Butterfly Lovers has become a classic symphonic works with the most prestigious international reputation in the music history of China,and has become a symbol of the music culture of China.
Butterfly Lovers describes the steadfast love story of a young couple named Liang Shangbo and Zhu Yingtai.The piece uses the tunes of Yue Opera (or Shaoxing Opera)as thematerial and is written in the form of a concerto.Although it combines Chinese and western styles,it is full of national style.In terms of music structure,the composers use the western style sonata to reflect the dramatic conflicts;in terms of artistic process,it gives full play to the characteristics of folk music,and absorbs a rich variety of expressions in Chinese opera.For example,in the presentation part it absorbs the form of singing"dialogue"in opera to express the theme of the love between Liang and Zhu;in the roll-out section,"wailing soul jumping into the tomb,"it uses the daoban in Beijing Opera and xinoban in Shaoxing Opera.It made a bold and successful attempt to explore the way of nationalizing symphonies in China.Once it came out,people loved this work.
In the international community,this piece called Butterfly Lovers is widely spread and loved by people around the world.The Chinese folk music instrument has been reformed with the development of the society and technology,professionally referring the reform of tone and expansion of diapason, as well as the application of the national musical instruments in the national symphony. This reform plays an important role in the development of the Chinese national symphony. To win a greater popularity of folk music, musicians have done a lot. The spread and development of electronic music encourage the musicians to create a new kind music named as "new folk music,"which is integrated with folk music, electronic music and pop music.
This new folk music enables a better performance of the Chinese instrument and adds more popular and fashion elements to the folk music, which is now more popular. Twelve Girls Band, a band established in 2001, should be an example for combining the traditional Chinese cultural elements together with modern audio-visual effect. Twelve beautiful and well-educated girls use the Chinese music instrument like guzheng, yangqin, erhu, pipa, xiao and bamboo flute to perform music integrated with strong folk music features and pop music elements. High-tech is used for playing music, which brings newaudio-visual enjoyment for the people. Although there is still dispute in the artistic value of such kind of music, the new folk music indeed creates a way for the popularization and internationalization of the Chinese folk music.
