Liu Dehai Pipa Playing Artistic Research

LIU Dehai is a famous Chinese contemporary lutanist and educationalist, who has become the leading figure of lute art. As a lutanist and an innovator, he has pushed the lute performance skills of both hands and expressive force into an unprecedented scale. As a result, the capability of lute has been fully explored. Many executants and composers are influenced by his eximious skills, unique style, original musical concepts and thoughts. This treatise focuses on the theoretical analysis of the perfect unification of art and his performance skills from the point of view of aethetics. Therefore, lute executants can be inspired by such unification so as to enhance their performance, and perfect their skills and expressive force.The treatise consists of an introduction, four chapters and an conclusion. The introduction concerns on the life of LLU Dehai, why I choose this topic, the process of collecting relevant materials and the status quo of similar researches. The first chapter contains the analysis on LIU Dehai's performance style, including a detailed research on how such style comes into being. The second chapter focus on LIU's artistic thoughts, including detailed explications, comments and generalization on his thoughts. The third chapter explores his expressive force, taking lute melody A moonlit night in Xunyang as a case sudy, which shows "natural" is the highest plane of artistic cultivation. The fourth chapter concerns on the cultural connotation of LIU's art, which shows good art is culture specific. The conclusion is an affirmation on LIU's positive influence on the art of lute performance.