Pu Poems Music Features And Singing Style

Pu Songling is a prominent litterateur and Liqu (folk song) artist of Qing Dynasty. By means of employing the popular tunes and vulgar songs of his age in his native place, Pu Songling has composed fifteen kinds of Liqu in spoken vernacular and Zichuan dialect with the form of tune cluster, which is great contribution to both music and popular literature.Some tune names of his works continue to be popular for more than three hundred years in his hometown and are hailed as the living fossil of folk songs of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Based on the inheritance from the predecessors, Pu Songling made bold innovation and broke through traditional tune cluster of jointing South and North music opera together. Instead, he has adopted the folk songs with lively language and simple melody and his compositions are popular at all its levels and are deeply loved by the masses. In the process of choosing and creating tune clusters, Pu Songling, in the light of story plot and character performance and by traditional principle of singing according to characters, has combined the tune with the local dialect to the utmost, which is characterized by a strong local color and typical Shandong folk music melody. The performance contains talk-and-sing form and opera form. Liqu resorts Zichuan dialect to unify the performance style and to standardize the singing method. It is sung by genuine voice with heavy guttural sounds.This dissertation is composed of six parts: introduction; chapter one on the creation conditions and social significance of Liqu; chapter two on the musical analysis of Pu Songling's Liqu; chapter three focusing on Liqu performance; chapter four on the inheritance and development of Liqu and conclusion. The second chapter in conjunction with the third one constitutes the major body of this thesis.After giving a brief presentation of domestic and foreign research status, the introduction part points out the weakness of contemporary study on singing and thus brings forward the research purpose of this paper. Chapter one introduces Pu Songling and his Liqu and then discusses the conditions for Pu Songling to compose Liqu. The creation of Liqu is enormously related to the social music background of that age along with Pu's eventful life experiences as well as his social status. It is the full display of Pu Songling's talents on music.Chapter two begins with classifying the structures of joint sets and back sets in Pu Songling's Liqu and then analyzes the four on-going popular representative Liqu tune names from the perspectives of tune structure, musical materials, melodic progressing, approaches of making sound and featured tune in order to further appreciate the musical characteristics of Liqu.Chapter three spreads out exposition from the following three aspects: performance form and musical accompaniment, performance style and sounding treatment. The"sounding treatment"section focuses on the enunciation and articulation. This chapter gives a detailed exposition on the differences of enunciation and articulation between Zichuan dialect and Chinese mandarin. Taking the librettos in more than ten Liqu melodies of Pu Songling from the official publications as example, this paper summarizes the performance characteristics of folk artists and puts forward the writer's own insights on the improvement of the performance.Chapter four draws a conclusion on the significance of this research and has proposed the writer's own opinions on the development of Liqu composed by Pu Songling. The study of Pu Songling's Liqu is not only grounded on the basis of inheritance and development but also serves the purpose of drawing inspiration and making innovations. It is of great positive significance for expanding Chinese excellent national culture, enhancing national vocal music and mastering the delivery style of Shandong folk songs.