Yuankai Bao And His Compositions With Chinese Music Elements

As a famous contemporary composer and music educator in China, Yuankai Bao perseveres in inheriting Chinese traditional folk music and has composed plenty of excellent musical works, such as Chinese Sights And Sounds-24 Pieces on Chinese Folk Tunes for Orchestra(1991), six pieces of symphony Memorial (2004), Sketches of Taiwan (1996/2000/2006), Beijing Opera(2006), Xiamen (2008), The King of Yu (2009), The State of Yan VS Zhao (2012) and children’s chorus divertimento The Four Seasons (1980) as well as Rhyme Children’s Folk of Jing Po Minority (1981), among which Chinese Sights And Sounds turns out to be the orchestra work with highest ratio of performance home and abroad for this work succeeds in surpassing the various cultural backgrounds in more than 40 countries and regions to perfectly demonstrate Chinese traditional folk songs in the form of western music. Actually, the performance of the works has aroused resonance among our overseas Chinese and has drawn the attention of the orient and western music circle.The orchestra work Chinese Sights And Sounds consists of 24 well-known folk songs in China as its material. Accompanied by orchestra, this work vividly describes a folk life style for its audience. In Chinese Sights And Sounds, Yuankai Bao combines Chinese folk song with Western orchestra to preserve the rhythm of folk song and take the advantage of orchestra in terms of voice arrangement, sound effects and color. In this way, Chinese traditional folk song is renewed to suit both refined and popular tastes, which makes it popularized in the world.This paper will analyze the Chinese and western music elements in Yuankai Bao’s representative work The Charm of Chinese by collecting information about his life, composition and musical activities, in order to explore in what manner Yuankai Bao can make western musical instrument "speak Chinese" and integrate the two music elements.