A Study Of The Relationship Between Phonology And Gong Diao In Chinese Ancient Songs

There was a custom in the art of Chinese Ancient Songs that rhymes, such as Tang Shi, Song Ci, and Nan Bei Qu, could be sung as Yue. It was said,"Songs, the word of which are a certain kind of literature, could be called Yue Fu." Therefore, Tang Shi, Song Ci and Nan Bie Qu could be all classified as Yue Fu.The creation of Yue Fu could be done in two ways. In the first one, there are certain patterns of music, on which the words of songs, wrote by authors, are based. And in the second one, melodies are based on words of rhymes which have already been created. Although there are two different forms of creation of Yue Fu, authors must make sure that the pronunciation and the tone pitch of a rhyme are harmonically joined with mode, pitch and melody in one song. The rule of creation of Yue Fu was recorded in Yue Fu Za Lu, which was wrote by Duan Anjie who was a theoretician in the Tang Dynasty, and was recounted and supported in Xiang Yan Ju Ci Zhu which was wrote by Fang Chengpei, a theoretician in Qing Dynasty. So there must be a certain relationship between the words and the melody of a Chinese Ancient Song.It is the purpose of this work to examine the relationship between words and melody of Chinese Ancient Songs, to maintain the viewpoint of Duan Anjie’s, and to discover how the relationship mentioned above was changed.During writing, there were some significant problems that should be solved at the beginning, such as the pitch of Huang Zhong, the relationship between Six Gong and Eleven Diao in Nan Bei Qu music and Eighty-four Diao, and the classification of the rhyming word that ends a line of verse. In order to solve these problems, a Ci-Xiong Flute theory was built after a lot of reading, logical thinking, comparative analyses, and finally, based on fingering of Bamboo Flute, the pitch of Huang Zhong in Nan Bei Qu music was defined, and so was the relationship between Six Gong and Eleven Diao in Nan Bei Qu music and Eighty-four Diao. The classification of the rhyming word that ends a line of verse has been done by using a concept of Yun She in phonology.