Ding Shande’s Piano Playing Style

In the modern music history of china,there are many musicians who were both composers and performers,.However,the academic studies of these musicians have almost unanimously tended to take the composer’s perspective,lacking research into their status as performers and their performances themselves.Ding Shande was both the first pianist in China’s history to give a public solo piano concert and the first pianist to make a recording,making him a very important figure in the history of Chinese piano performance.However,the existing research on Ding Shande has focused almost entirely on his compositional career and his style,and the little literature on his piano playing is mainly popular,lacking a scientific and systematic study of his piano playing.The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by discussing Ding Shande’s piano playing career from a historical perspective,and to explore the characteristics of his piano playing style,especially in terms of tempo and intensity,using an empirical analysis.This thesis is divided into four chapters,in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.The first chapter is devoted to the classification of Ding Shande’s piano career through the collection of historical data related to his piano playing activities(including the year,number and repertoire of recordings,as well as the date,place,repertoire and nature of concerts,etc.).The author divides Ding Shande’s piano career into three stages: the early(1928-1934),the middle(1935-1946)and the late(1947-1983).In terms of the number of performances,the early period is the most frequent,the middle period the second most frequent,and the late period the least frequent;in terms of the repertoire,the early period consists entirely of foreign works,the middle period includes a few Chinese works but is still dominated by foreign works,and the late period consists entirely of works composed by Ding Shande himself.Ding Shande recorded two solo piano recordings in the middle of his career and four in the later part of his career,and all of the recorded works are in the Chinese repertoire.The content of this chapter provides an important context for the later empirical analysis of Ding Shande’s piano playing style.The second chapter provides a detailed description of the research material and analytical methods employed in the two subsequent chapters.Ding Shande has made a total of six recordings of solo piano pieces,four of which are selected for this paper.Since a comparison of versions can provide a more accurate and reliable analysis of Ding Shande’s style of playing,the author has selected 16 recorded versions of The Shepherd’s Boy Piccolo,six recorded versions of Lullaby,eight recorded versions of Going to the Countryside and eight recorded versions of the First Xinjiang Dance as the material for analysis,and used the audio analysis software Sonic Visualiser to analyse the tempo and intensity of each of these recordings.The tempo and intensity in each of these recordings were analysed in detail by the audio analysis software Sonic Visualiser.In this chapter,the author describes the analysis of tempo and intensity in detail.The third chapter discusses the tempo characteristics in Ding Shande’s recordings from both macro and micro aspects.In terms of macroscopic tempo,Ding Shande plays at a faster overall tempo.In addition,there is a greater variation in tempo between sections in the faster,more rhythmically varied works;conversely,there is less variation in tempo between sections in the slower,more melodic works.At a microscopic level,Ding’s tempo changes show a more pronounced ’arch’ at the phrase level,reflecting his tendency to outline a clear musical structure in his playing and to stay true to the style of the work.The fourth Chapter discusses the strength characteristics in Ding Shande’s recordings at three levels: beat processing,macroscopic strength variation and microscopic strength variation.The results show that Ding’s strength patterns at the metrical level are more in line with the beat numbers of the score and follow the metrical structure of the work than most other performers.In addition,Ding’s macroand micro-variations of intensity tend to show an ’arch’ at both the section and phrase levels,suggesting that Ding’s approach to intensity,like that of tempo,has a clear sense of passage and phrasing,and that many of the changes in intensity are consistent with the melody,rhythm and intensity markings of the score,demonstrating his This demonstrates his philosophy of playing with fidelity to the score.The concluding section summarizes the tempo and intensity characteristics of Ding Shande’s recordings.Overall,in all four recordings,he tends to present a clear musical structure through clever tempo and intensity changes,making his playing sound very neat and disciplined,with a sense of layering and structure.The tempo and intensity characteristics of Ding’s playing show a strict adherence to the score,reflecting Ding’s disciplined and rigorous style of playing and demonstrating his notion of fidelity to the work and to the score.This study applies this popular method of empirical analysis to the performance of Chinese pianists and explores the performance style of Chinese pianists,which is an innovative point and an academic contribution to the study of the recent history of Chinese music and performance style.