The Different Versions And Artistic Characteristics Of Qin Piece Longxiangcao

Guqin, with three thousand years of history, is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture.Academias regard and refer to it as a living fossil of ancient Chinese music, with itsrichly documented records. In recent years, there are significant achievements in thecompilation of original documents from various sources. However, research in thisfield is far from enough.Nearly every piece has been transforming since the day they were composed: thename, melody, remarks or notes, its significance in cultural and historic context, isreflected in its development. Some also have abridgments and branches. There is alack of work, study and comparison of different versions of a specific piece of music.Under the advice of my supervisor, Prof. Li Fengyun, I am writing on the piece called"Longxiangcao", tracing its development and different versions. Moreover, I attemptto provide evidences or references to address some ambiguous or unfoundedstatements.The critical point of this article is the piece called “Longxiangcao”.This thesiscan be divided into three chapters. Introduction. Chapter one: Different versions andscores. Chapter two: Musical analysis. Chapter three: Artistic characteristics.Concluding remarks.The main body of this thesis is the classification of different melodies that arerelated to “Longxiangcao”. Meanwhile, the research led to a complicated and precisestudy, comparison and findings of the various guqin schools or styles such as ZhangZiqian(1899-1991), Liu Shaochun(1901-1971) and the original Jiaoan Qin Score.Besides, this thesis will also discuss the musical analysis of Longxiangcao, what doZhang Ziqian and Liu Shaochun’s social environment around them and theircharacteristics have an effect on their different styles. I also elaborate on the currentversions, its evolution, transformation of scores, styles and present day interpretationsand performances.In the process of analyzing and exploring, I have found something new that arequite different with some unwritten statements including:1、we have over threethousand pieces of qin, but delete same names of pieces, there are only six hundredleft.2、Qiushui, the representative qin piece of Chuan group and Longxiangcao, therepresentative qin piece of Guangling group have exactly the same melody butdifferent rhythms.3、the present version of Longxiancao is based on the same onepublished in Jiaoan Qin Score.