A Study On The Composition Technique Of Chen Yi’s Piano Concerto ’Four Spirits’

Chen Yi,a Chinese-born female composer,has established herself on the world music stage with her blend of tradition and modernity,her innovation and her distinctive personal musical language.This article selects Chen Yi’s piano concerto ‘Four Spirits’,composed and premiered in2016,as the subject of this study,which is based on the traditional Chinese mythological images,the Blue Dragon in the East,the Black Xuanwu in the North,the White Tiger in the West and the Red Phoenix in the South,for piano and orchestra.The work combines the composer’s individual compositional techniques and sets an excellent example of a piano concerto written with modern compositional techniques and Chinese folkloric writing.This article analyses the work in terms of pitch material,tonality,acoustic texture and structure,with a view to exploring in some depth the ethnic connotations of the work and the composer’s unique compositional techniques.The basic expression of the first chapter is to analyze the diversified pitch materials of the work and to discover the sources from which the pitch materials are taken.It is mainly divided into two different types of folk music elements and six-tone groups designed by the composer,and categorizes and exemplifies the diversified developmental techniques of different pitch materials throughout the work.The second chapter introduces the compositional techniques that reflect the composer’s individuality in the work,mainly at the level of tonality,harmony,timbre and weaving,in the context of music rhetoric theory.The third chapter is an analysis of the structural design of the work,which is based on the structural characteristics of trichotomy,combined with the principles of variation and reverberation and the principle of shifting of the board of Chinese opera,and summarizes the complex and multidimensional structural alignment of the work.In the composition of her works,Chen Yi constantly pursues a blend of tradition and modernity,ultimately achieving a high degree of unity between sensibility and rationality,form and content.On the basis of her absorption of traditional Chinese musical culture,she boldly innovates,thus forming her unique musical language and making the Chinese style of piano concerto a reference in composition.