1. The theme is to describe the scenery of mountains and rivers and the feelings during the journey. Because the author has been living in a foreign land in loaf about for a long time, he often feels that his life experience is sparse. Therefore, some personal feelings are often reflected in his song creation, but the content is serious and the style is fresh, and many of them are very distinctive lyric works, which can give people no enjoyment and have great appeal. For example, Apricot Blossom and Sky Shadow and Yangzhou Slow are quite touching and outstanding works. Jiang Baishi explained the main idea in the preface before the song: This song "Yangzhou Slow" was the winter solstice of Shen Bingnian (1176). When he passed Yangzhou in the evening, it happened that Chu Qing was just after the snow, and at first glance, there were green oats everywhere. The city is a depression, and a cold current presents a green color. When night falls, on the rostrum, the horn blows a bleak tone. This reminded him of the great changes in the past and present, and he couldn't help but feel sad. Seeing that Yangzhou was trampled by the nomads from the Golden Army and turned into a ruin, he expressed his personal feelings. Facing the scenes of "wasting trees in the pond" and "clearing the corners and blowing the cold", of course, he hated the nomads from the invasion and the rulers of the Southern Song Dynasty, but his focus was still on this broken scenery, which made the experts in poetry no longer "unable to feel deeply", rather than mainly expressing his concern for "Huma peeping into the river"
2. The other part is the sad narration of personal life experience, such as "Songs of Cuilou" describing the feeling of loneliness at the end of the world; "Apricot Blossom Sky Shadow" writes about the poet's worries about his journey and his yearning for his lover; "Yellow Willow" describes the anguish of homesickness; "Long sequence complains slowly" writes the deep feeling of parting; Dimfragrance and Thin Shadow are Yongmei's masterpieces, and so on. The tune of his "self-tune" is quite beautiful, and the poet Yang Wanli praised his works as "wonderful thinking of cutting clouds and sewing fog, striking the strange sound of gold and jade", which is related to his fresh style, sincere feelings, bitter and distant charm, and high style of words, such as "Mei Ling in a Creek".
3. His works attach great importance to technique, and he has made careful arrangements in aspects such as rotation, structure, mode and tone modulation. He advocates the use of seven tones, and often emphasizes and highlights the fourth and seventh tones. Sometimes high-pitched Shang, Zheng or Gong Yin are quoted to form a unique lyric style. Being in such a decadent and tragic era as the Southern Song Dynasty, his works are inevitably covered with some slightly dim colors because of his personal bitterness at home. However, the overall mood is not necessarily depressed, but rather lyrical and energetic. Of course, because his works are too elegant, it is impossible to be as popular as many folk tunes. Generally, they are only sung by her singers in a rich family, but the social impact is relatively small. He can accept and use both ancient scale, new scale and Yan music scale in terms of scale and temperament, emphasizing the use of inflection in the seven-tone scale and Gong Er inflection. In the aspect of musical structure, parallel structure, comparative structure and improvisational free body structure are adopted; In the aspect of rotation, it has the characteristics of frequent use of big jumps, continuous scale progression and arpeggio progression. His "Self-directed Music" is famous for its exquisite sound and rhyme, and it is a valuable musical heritage.
Modal tonality of "self-tune"
In Jiang Baishi's songs, modal tonality has obvious characteristics, which reflects that Song people pay attention to the use of Gongdiao and emphasize the color of modal tonality, which is embodied in two aspects: starting the tune and ending the tune.
(1) The theory of starting the tune and finishing the tune began with Zhu Xi and Cai Yuanding. Zhu Zi said, "Zhang Gongpu was in the line and recorded the score. Generally, he entered the melody, only the first word was a tune, and the end of the chapter ended with a carving." The treatment of Jiang Baishi's intonation is related to the structural length of each tune.
(2) The tonal color of a tune depends on its mode on the one hand, and the tone dropping in the middle of the tune on the other. They outline the tonal development logic of the tune and present the tonal color of the whole tune.
Melody features
The melodies of Jiang Baishi's songs can be roughly divided into three types:
(1) Revolving around: the backbone of this kind of melody is very obvious and steady, and the melody fluctuates around the backbone. For example, in "Meixi Meiling", "Good flowers are not fragrant with people, and the waves are sparkling." Another example is "Ode to the Autumn Effect": "The ancient curtain is empty, and it falls with a bright lily. Sitting in the west window for a long time, people are sad, looking at the bitterness, and the water is leaking, and the arrow pot urges the dawn. "
(2) Jump-in is the main melody, and the melodies of step-by-step are high and low, and the rocks are undulating, and the peaks are often protruding, and the melody lines are angular. For example, in Apricot Blossom and Sky Shadow: "The green silk gently blows the Yuanyang Pu, thinking that the peach leaves were called to cross at that time."
(3) It is mainly progressive, and the melody is stretched by jumping into this kind of tune, and the melody is smooth, beautiful and tactfully moving.
Melody development techniques The melody development techniques of Jiang Baishi's songs are extremely colorful, such as inheritance and mold development.
(1) This technique of inheriting is common in Jiang Baishi songs. It is useful between beats and between averages, and the melody is coherent and natural. For example, in "Songs of Cuilou", "The moon is cold and the sand is long, the dust is clear and the tiger falls, which was given at the beginning of the Han Dynasty this year."
(2) Die-in Jiang Baishi's application of die-in technique is quite special and excellent. The use of materials is unified, the development of music is compared, and it is very tactful and free, and there is nothing blunt in the change of tonal color. For example, in Yangzhou Slow, the three-dimensional model advances "calculate the present" and "be surprised when you arrive".
In short, tonal music has a long history in the music history of China, and it has formed its own special artistic rules. Only by putting Jiang Baishi's songs into this special field can we get a more correct understanding, understand Jiang Baishi's composition techniques, get a glimpse of the characteristics of music creation in the Song Dynasty and understand the development of music culture in the whole Song Dynasty. It has left a rich cultural heritage that cannot be ignored for future generations. It has had a profound influence on the ci and music circles. Jiang Baishi is a great poet with unique artistic achievements and far-reaching influence. Apart from his originality in aesthetic realm, another important reason is that he successfully applied the musician's artistic thinking and composer's composition techniques to the creation of lyrics, so that his ci has a touching artistic charm, and thus pushed the art of ci to a new height.