It is characterized by non-imagery nature in the flow of time, using sounds with different length, height, strength, and timbre as basic materials, and using rhythm, melody, harmony, and counterpoint. Vertical and horizontal organization to express certain emotions and feelings. In terms of content, it includes the beauty of real life and the thoughts and feelings embodied in the work. In terms of form, it also includes the beauty of melody, the beauty of technical factors such as scales, modes and harmony, and the beauty of timbre, which can arouse beautiful emotions in the audience.

It is transformed into a musical image and is felt by people through the secondary creation in the performance. The singers and performers, as intermediaries between the composer and the audience, maintain their individual characteristics and their own style in the secondary creation. .

The essence of artistic appeal and musical beauty is not the generalization of real sounds, the humanization of objective unison prototypes, or the movement of sound material forms, but the broad and free use of structural principles of formal beauty to refine and condense expressions. Emotional content, musical beauty can cultivate temperament, change customs, and even play a role in stimulating emotions and boosting morale.

Extended information

After Chinese history entered modern times, especially after the "May 4th" movement, the field of music and art began to be affected by modern revolutionary thoughts. The musical aesthetic thoughts of music theorists Wang Guangqi and others at that time all showed democratic tendencies to varying degrees. Wang Guangqi advocates:

① Music is the expression of national life and must have national characteristics. Therefore, Chinese traditional music must be based on ancient Chinese music and current folk ballads ("The Evolution of European Music").

② Music should express the feelings of the people, not the feelings of some intellectual classes.

③ Emphasizes the social role of music and believes that music can evoke the fundamental thoughts of the Chinese nation and complete its cultural renaissance movement.

④ The construction of new Chinese music also needs to learn from the scientific methods of Western music. On the other hand, after the May 4th Movement, Western romanticism and expressionism music aesthetics also began to influence China.

The thoughts of music theorist Qing Zhu have this characteristic. He is the author of "Music Talk" and "General Theory of Music", which systematically elaborates on a series of musical aesthetic issues such as the nature, content, form, creation, performance, and function of music. His proposition is: music is the "language of the soul." Or "a world language of the soul" (i.e., "the language of the upper world"); music is the expression of the soul, a subjective creation, and has the function of improving the human mind.

While paying attention to the emotional content of music, we also emphasize the ideological and spiritual nature of music, and the importance of life experience in creation. Its shortcoming is that it ignores the national characteristics of music. After the 1930s, among the pioneers of proletarian revolutionary music, Xian Xinghai was one of the first musicians who tried to use Marxism to observe music issues.

In the late 1930s, he wrote a series of papers such as "On the National Form of Chinese Music" and "Several Issues in China's New Music Movement at the Current Stage", focusing on how to develop the Chinese national music movement. Popular music, and how to view the national form of music and other issues. Its propositions are generally as follows:

① Developing the music of Chinese workers and peasants is the most basic starting point for creating Chinese national forms. The direction of new music is popularization, nationalization, and art.

② Content determines the form. The new social reality, the new national thoughts, feelings and life, that is, the new content, must require new music forms to adapt to them.

③ There is inheritance between the new form and the old form. New forms can only be produced on the basis of transformation, processing, change and development of old forms. Therefore, we must pay attention to the exploration, arrangement, criticism and research of inherent national folk music.

④ It is necessary to refer to Western forms and methods, but not to copy Western music.

⑤ Emphasize that the national form is a reflection of the national life tradition and lifestyle; the national form must have the unique style and style of the nation.