Wang Xingnan
Abstract: China folk music has a long history and has formed its own unique style characteristics. China folk music pays attention to lines, harmony and artistic conception, and pursues a broad, free and beautiful space in inner thought. Among them, the language mode, the traditional notation mode and the "freehand brushwork" aesthetic expression thought in China's traditional culture all have a great influence on the formation of China's national music style.
Keywords: China; National music; Culture; Style characteristics; Form A
Chinese library classification number: J63 document identification code: a
China folk music has thousands of years of historical accumulation, which is the result of the co-creation of all ethnic groups. In the genre and form, tone and style of music, it presents a colorful face. The formation of China's national music style is influenced by the natural ecological environment, the main modes of production, living customs, language, religion and many other factors, which reflect the aesthetic standards, life concepts and ways of thinking of the Chinese nation. China's traditional music can be divided into five categories: songs, song and dance music, rap music, traditional opera and instrumental music. Their style features are both * * * and individual. Moreover, they * * * have formed their own distinct internal personality: paying attention to charm and artistic conception; Emphasis on character and appearance; Pay attention to the harmony and unity between man and nature; Pursuing the combination and infiltration of emotion and ethics in performance; Advocate implication and graceful music; Observe harmony and neutrality, simplicity and moderation, etc. These unique aesthetic pursuits have shaped the inherent style characteristics of China's national culture and art.
First, the basic style characteristics of China folk music
Although China folk music has its own characteristics due to different nationalities, regions, genres, varieties and schools, they all contain the above characteristics in the same place and are reflected in all aspects of music form. China folk music reflects its own style and characteristics different from western music. The main reason is that the patriarchal society based on traditional production and lifestyle in China has determined people's social ideology and psychological quality for thousands of years. On the one hand, "cultivating and helping others" aims to maintain various relationships; On the other hand, influenced by Zhuang Zen, he pursued deification and was born. Diligence and simplicity, respect for tradition, self-sufficiency, and advocating the golden mean have become the collective subconscious, which permeates all fields and aspects of social culture. The cultural foundation of people's psychology, physiology, material and survival makes people form a habit in long-term artistic practice, paying attention to harmony, pursuing understanding and so on, which is included in the creative skills, forms and psychological needs of music. The basic style features of China folk music are shown in three aspects: lines, harmony and artistic conception.
1. Lines
China folk music is a linear thinking mode, which is obviously different from western music, which pays attention to three-dimensional sound effect, forms a musical framework to express a philosophy through harmony and multi-voice thinking, and has rich logical characteristics in music. China folk music is a monophonic music system, which mainly expresses tunes. It pays special attention to the various changes that can be produced when the melody is played to enrich the content of monophonic music. Its melody is directly generated in the acoustic color of poems, words and songs, and is bred in rich local tones, accents, accents and dialects. It is colorful and elegant, and will be used in calligraphy, painting, sculpture, dance and other artistic lines. It is often used in music through the linear expression of music. It is embodied in the beautification treatment of lines, one is the treatment of single tones; The second is the decoration of the melody.
the process of pronunciation is the movement process of sound. In this process, the artistic treatment of single tones, such as volume and timbre, makes the lines of music modified and becomes one of the important manifestations of national music style. The sound of China folk music is not to make it disappear in a straight line after singing or playing, but to modify it after the sound is issued to increase the depth and charm of the work. For example, in folk songs, operas, instrumental music, various decorations such as sliding tone and leaning tone, and the techniques of singing, rubbing, pushing and pulling in instrumental performance, which are produced by the rapid alternation of the basic tone and the slightly lower or higher tone, are a kind of expressive playing technique, which makes the sound wave-like and curved, forming a back-and-forth curve and increasing the charm of the music.
The melodies of national music are mostly based on the five-tone mode or the five-tone mode as the backbone. They are all natural and smooth in the direction of the melody, and they are not of the same pitch in most drawdowns or long notes. It needs to add flowers, variations and other methods to beautify the melody, so that the melody can be combined with dynamic and static, driven by static or with dynamic and static, making the music more vivid and the melody lines more beautiful.
2. Harmony
"Music is the sum of heaven and earth". From the large-scale ritual music used to worship the ancestors of heaven and earth gods in the ancient Western Zhou Dynasty, the "collective subconscious" gradually formed in the long-term practice has far-reaching historical continuity. As a result, China's music has been rooted in the national soil for thousands of years, and has always maintained the temperament of the land and the divinity of natural regional characteristics. This is ethical and illogical. Therefore, many national music works use variations, transitions, reappearance and other methods to express the music's slow expression and patience, instead of paying attention to the comparative struggle of contradictory themes in western music. Harmonious beauty has become one of the important features of Chinese national music. It is embodied in structure and performance.
in national music, balance, symmetry and stability are emphasized in structure. For example, the whole song "Moonlit Night on the Spring River" uses the form of ending in many paragraphs, which sounds very harmonious and unified. Symmetrical structures are also common in folk songs. In the process of music, the relative stability of music is formed on the basis of pentatonic scale, so as to achieve a unity of sound, and at the same time, there are changes in the unity. In addition, the overall dynamic balance formed by civil and military, yin and yang, rigidity and softness also gives people a sense of peace and beauty.
in the artistic expression of Chinese national music, the expression of emotion in singing and playing is the organic unity of "inside and outside", and music can reach a perfect state. We should have inner feelings and experiences, express them by singing (playing), and seek the harmonious unity of emotion and qi, strength and qi. Only by paying attention to the harmony and smoothness of qi and force can we effectively express multi-layered musical emotions.
3. Artistic conception
For thousands of years, China folk songs, rap, opera, instrumental music and other musical forms have been manifested in the pursuit of artistic conception. As a finished work of art, the realm of beauty is generally manifested in two aspects: emptiness and reality, paying attention to vividness and enlightenment.
Virtual reality refers to the virtual reality formed by the acoustic entity, the created image and the technology in the works. Unlike painting and sculpture, music directly depicts the entity of the object of expression. It expresses the artistic conception through personal skills, self-cultivation and understanding of music, which reflects the emptiness and reality. In music, the general package contains some connotations other than music sound, including real sound entities and people's own feelings about music, which should be achieved through association. For example, it is often said that "the sound is broken, the sound is broken, and the meaning is not heard", "the intention is to write before the pen reaches the air" and so on. It means to express "silence is better than sound here" through gaps and pauses in music. Only the combination of reality and reality, dynamic and static dependence, change in which music has charm.
China folk music also attaches great importance to the expressive function of music art. Accompanied by music in a scene, you can often see or feel various scenes, but this kind of vividness requires certain conditions, that is, "enlightenment." Enlightenment means that people's thinking can achieve a strong grasp of the essence of things after intense exercise. Comprehension requires solid basic skills and extensive cultivation, and it is necessary to get rid of the technical troubles. The cultural communication of China folk music mainly relies on "oral instruction", and this traditional mode of communication has also become an objective condition for the pursuit of artistic beauty in national music. In national music, whether it is creation, singing, performance or appreciation, the highest level of artistic beauty can be achieved only after grasping the essence through "enlightenment".
Second, the formation of the basic style characteristics of China folk music
As an indispensable part of Chinese national culture as a whole, China folk music, after thousands of years of inheritance, development and evolution, has formed the aesthetic foundation and artistic paradigm of * * *, including the "line"-based musical thinking mode, simple and appropriate musical expression methods, symmetrical and stable rhythm arrangement and balance. Generally speaking, the language mode, the traditional notation mode and the "freehand brushwork" aesthetic expression thought all have a great influence on the formation of China national music style.
1. the influence of language mode
the differences between Chinese and western languages determine the characteristics of their respective national music arts. In the long-term development process, the style features of China's vocal music art are mainly manifested in the way of using the voice, the adjustment of the voice, the skills of vocalization, the characteristics of language, the style of music and aesthetic requirements. The melody trend of China's traditional songs is always roughly consistent with the tone trend of lyrics. In the farming culture dominated by oral culture, people's survival knowledge, behavioral norms, aesthetic interests and other spiritual cultures mainly rely on oral language, and singing is one of the main behaviors of cultural inheritance. The beauty of voice and melody has become the aesthetic ideal of China national vocal music art since ancient times. The choice of timbre in China's national vocal music is fundamentally based on China's language and pronunciation, which forms the timbre characteristics of China's national singing based on Chinese pronunciation and has accumulated into a stable timbre aesthetic concept. Different from the European vocal music art, in which emotional expression is straightforward and individuality is emphasized, China national vocal music art pays more attention to storage, moderation and collectivization. The aesthetic standard of "being happy without lewdness, being sad without injury" runs through China's music for more than two thousand years.
"Runqiang", which is unique in China's national vocal music art, is also an important style feature in China's national vocal music. In the aesthetic activities of national singing, "Runqiang" has become an important criterion to judge whether vocal music works and their performances have aesthetic value. This style is called "charm" in China's traditional aesthetic theory. Runqiang can not only make singing full of charm, but also make up for the lack of emotional expression in tunes, so as to achieve the purpose of profoundly depicting characters' personality and artistic conception. At the same time, these inevitably affect national instrumental music, resulting in pipes and erhu, loud and bright suona, flute and other musical instruments and their techniques.
2. The influence of traditional notation
The traditional "frame" notation in China has had a great influence on the formation of China folk music style. China music culture has a long history, but it has always followed the "inaccurate" and "framed" notation. This is the product of many factors such as the unique cultural background, humanistic values and emotional expression of the Chinese nation. Some main features of China's national music noumenon and humanity are related to it and mutually causal, which is a materialized display of the unique thinking mode of China's national music. China's traditional frame notation is only an outline record of the basic pitch and rhythm of traditional music or vocals. In this way, in the process of music inheritance, folk artists and performing artists are encouraged to innovate in the musical form and structure, and their artistic expression cannot play the unique artistic functions of "one song is changeable" and "one song is multi-purpose" across time and space in China national music. In China folk music, different folk artists play or sing songs according to the same Gong-Chi score, and often play (sing) various innovative works of different versions according to their personal experience and self-cultivation ability. Therefore, the same musical score can produce different versions and musical styles under the performance of different musicians. It is precisely because of this inaccurate notation form that an impromptu performance style which is unified with China's traditional aesthetic thought is produced. The Book of Music says: "The musician is the sum of heaven and earth." By abandoning the division of objective time value of music, we get rid of the written and accurate notation that binds the performance (singing), supplemented by oral instruction, so that people can easily forget themselves when playing (singing) music, thus "feeling" and "natural expression" and enter the highest realm of "harmony between man and nature".
3. The influence of "freehand brushwork" aesthetic expression thought
There are obvious differences between the expression methods of China folk music and western orchestral music. China's national music has a profound artistic conception, which is completely different from western music. The style and characteristics of China folk music, like Chinese painting, calligraphy and other China arts, have formed a unique "freehand brushwork" style, full of emotional expression. If the national orchestral music "Moonlit Night on a Spring River" is regarded as a long scroll of ink and wash, it depends on the branches of the melody itself and unfolds the scroll through the changes of timbre, range and texture. China's instrumental works are limited by the characteristics of musical instruments, and most of them appear in the form of solos. Even large-scale instrumental music works are mainly played in unison. To achieve the colorful artistic effect of music, it is necessary to achieve it through the change of musical instrument color, the ups and downs of melody lines and the cadence of phrases. Melody is the dominant factor in China folk music for thousands of years. Like other art forms in China, * * * is a freehand brushwork style.
China folk music is mostly "freehand brushwork", which often expresses the object in a virtual and imaginary way, and pays more attention to "spirit likeness". China folk music is good at representing the face with points, with ten generations, and is good at expressing the music content by symbolic means. Although it is not as full and heavy as western orchestral music, it gives people rich imagination space.