An Study Of The Composing Skills Of Bao Yuankai’s Symphony Orchestra Chinese Sights And Sounds

Mr. Bao Yuankai, a famous Professor and composer in contemporary China,devotes himself to the exploration of Chinese folk music and has created manyoutstanding musical works. Since1990s, he began to interpret Chinese folk musicthrough western symphony, which brought Chinese music to foreign countries.Combining folk elements with western ones, he has created a series of musical workswhich he calls “Rhapsody of China”. Chinese Sights and Sounds, the first part of it, iscomposed of24Chinese folk tunes which are selected from six provinces (Hebei,Shanxi, Shanxi, Yunnan, Jiangsu and Sichuan). Four songs as a group are chosen fromeach of the six province and are named respectively Yan Zhao gu shi, Yun ling su miao,Huang tu bei huan, Ba shu shan ge, Jiang nan yu si, Taihang chun qiu. These musicalsuites have been performed by top domestic orchestras for numerous times, and havebecome the most frequently staged symphonic works. Highly commended bydomestic and overseas experts and audiences, it is included in the national high schoolMusic Appreciation Textbooks.The tremendous success of Chinese Sights and Sounds propels music lovers toconduct various researches on it, and this thesis is also produced out of the deepinterests aroused by its composing skills. Harmony, musical organs, polyphony, andmusical form are the most significant aspects in composing skills, and the outstandingand creative composing skills used in this work deserve our further analyses andresearches. This thesis conducts a detailed analysis of the harmonic skills, thetechniques of musical organs, polyphonic methods and the structure of musical forms.Although it is a full-length suite, a clear induction can still be performed based on thecomposing skills of the whole work. As for musical organs, it mainly adopts thewestern double orchestration and some of the works include Chinese folk musicalinstruments like Sanxian, Banhu and Suona. In terns of polyphony, it is mainly basedon imitative polyphony and contrast polyphony. As for the musical form, one-partform, two-part form, three-part form and variation form are the main ones that havebeen used.