Methods Of Researching On Chinese Music With Scope Of American Field

The Merriam’s Model has been widely used in the field of ethnomusicology since it was put forward, having providing researchers on ethnomusicology with the theoretical structure and basis for further analysis. Scholars in America sometimes also apply this method to their research on Chinese music. Rulan Chao Pian, a Chinese-American scholar, raised his method of "using the triple Merriam’s Model on the research of Peking Opera", considering "insiders’cognition of their own culture" as a premise for research and searching for the mechanism of different rhythms under the same tune in Peking Opera. Bell Young applied "leader-and-follower double Merriam’s Model" to describe the sketch of composition of Cantones Opera in time and space from the perspective of composition of Cantones Opera. Joseph S.Clam analyzed the music in the queens’qincan ceremony related to social behavior from the perspective of politics after analyzing several kinds of conceptions in musicology and jurisprudence. Besides that, he also mentioned the conception of "Musikscape" to deal with the relationship between characteristics of music and specific cultures. J. Lawrence Witzleben, a non-Chinese-American scholar, combined academic backgrounds of sizhu music in Jiangnan, western music and Javanese music together to interpret the relationship among conception, behaviors and sound from the multicultural perspective. Fritz A.Kuttner, a unique German-American musicologist, had been living in China for ten years. However, due to the restriction of his Chinese, his cognition and understanding of Chinese culture often differ from others’, and his conception of Chinese music is also under fierce controversy.Scholars in America often use microscope perspectives when doing research on Chinese music, and Bell Yung created a unique application of the Merriam’s Model from the perspective of physics in his research on the music of guqin. As a result, the author takes his "research model of physical principle" and "Merriam’s Model" as basis and raises "physic-to-music model" which is exclusively used in the specific microscope research. The "physic-to-music model" emphasizes on the unique, microscope and continuing changes. In the macroscope way, the "physic-to-music model" is the microscope research in the particular angle of the Merriam’s Model, and it is attached to a part of the Merriam’s Model. However, in the microscope way, the "physic-to-music model" contains some elements which the Merriam’s Model does not refer to, such as the muscular perception, the perception of the locomotor mechanism, the sense of touching and the sense of hearing of performers. These elements are all body behaviors which can not easily been caught by eyes, and these trivial body behaviors are the very significant elements to express "beauty of harmony" and "beauty of enjoyment" of Chinese music.