The Study Of The Prosody Of Cantonese Opera

The tunes of Cantonese Opera can be simply grouped into two kinds: the fixedtunes and non-fixed tunes. Anong the non-fixed tunes, the most important are the socalled Banghuang. One characteristic ofbanghuang tunes is that,when sung todifferent sets of text,aImost always have distinctly different melodic contours. Thereare about 30 kinds ofpreexistent tunes upon which the banghuang songs are based,but the line pattern of the lyric is much fewer,about 5-6. One of the goa1s of my thesisis to define the patterns of 1ines in terms of metrical units, the ending musical notes ofphrases and lines, etc. We find that the same line structure in lyric can have different,pattern while sung by different tunes. We find out also the melody of a banghuangtune partly depends on the linguistic tone structure of a line, and partly depends onwhat kind of tunes it belongs and the performance of the singer .But The linguistictone structure determines the "mode of melody". And the structure of finals of wordsyllables affect the singers in choosing sounds to sing the omamenta1 notes. Finally,there are two imPortant findings on the rhyming eechani," of Cantonese opera songs:in nasae endings mechanism of Cantonese opera songs:first, those with same vowels though differ inIndingican rhyme with one another.second, those semi-vowels ending finals with short nucleus rhyme according to highfroflt codas.