The 20th Century Choral Creative Thinking Research

Chinese choral music at the very beginning of the 20th century is the result of "Western Music Learning Extending to the East". During the century, it went through the process of "enculturation" and "nationalization". The choral music thinking as the origin of the choral music development, the core of choral production, plays a vital role in the flourishing of choral arts. The renovation of choral thinking is closely associated with the social change, the economic development, the cultural and psychological structure of the society, the behavior code and the aesthetic value. With the choral thinking as the main concern, based on the theories of music history, music aesthetics, ethnomusicology, combined with the study of choral works, this paper aims at exploring the development course of "nationalization" of the Chinese choral thinking in the 20th century so as to do some contributions to the prosperity and development of Chinese choral music.The paper can be mainly divided into three chapters. Chapter one is to clarify the development of the Western choral thinking and its spreading, and the process of its "enculturation" and "nationalization" before the founding of our China. Chapter two analyses the inheritance and innovation of the choral thinking embodied in the military and the lyrical kinds, in the traditional ones, in the large-scale choral vocal divertimento. Chapter three is mainly about the nationalized multi-dimensional development of choral thinking reflected in the lyrical and the expressive kind, the kind of traditional style, the large vocal chorus divertimento, and the multi-dimensional development of the holistic choral thinking. In conclusion, we summarize the general development course of Chinese choral thinking in the 20th century, namely: the use of multiple human voice; the use of choral genre with the adaptive characteristics of the time; the development of subject from the singleness to the diversification; the development from the description and paean to the lyrical and the expressive ones; the development of national exploration; the change of choral ideas and etc. In addition, we propose five suggestions and offer our own understanding based on the trends appearing in the first 10 years of the 21st century:the establishment of professional choral club; excavation and utilization of the aboriginal multi-voice of the folk songs; reflections on the chorus competition; reflections on the 2009 Palatino Awards——The Fourth Quarter Composition. Finally, based on the envision of china's 21st century choral music thinking, we suppose that in the context of culture globalization, the overall open mind would be the main trend of Chinese choral thinking in the 21st century.