Ye Xiaogang Harmonic Technique Research In Music Creation

Ye Xiaogang is one of the most internationally influential composers of Chinese contemporary music, and his compositions have made outstanding contributions to bringing Chinese music to the world. This paper takes Ye Xiaogang as the study object, the compositions of him in different periods as the research scope and the harmony skills within his compositions as the research contents, through the research on the basic structure components of the harmony, the nature of structure components and their relationship, the skills of derivative and the structural rules of the whole pitch relationship system, tries to reveal the harmonic thinking and technique characteristic of Ye’s music composition, and finally sums up the personal characteristics of the harmonic techniques in his music style.The paper is divided into two parts. The first chapter of part1discusses the cultural background and the formation of the aesthetic conception of Ye Xiaogang’s music, The second and third chapter sorts out and concludes the personal characteristics of Ye’s basic harmonic structural components, through the dynamic harmonic structural components and the skills of incorporating the dynamic stylistic structural components. The fourth chapter copes with the techniques that Ye uses to produce the variation, development, derivation and comparison. The fifth chapter deals with the whole characteristics of Ye’s harmonic structure.Part2includes three chapters, which have done research on six representative works composed in different creation stages. The sixth chapter researches the harmony techniques of two works written before he went abroad—Poems of China and Horizon. The seventh chapter researches the harmony techniques of two works that he wrote in America——Enchanted Bamboo and Last Paradise. The eighth chapter, studies the harmony techniques of two works he wrote after his return——dance drama suites Shenzhen Story and Song from the Earth.By doing research on technique theories and analysis of works in two parts, it’s finally possible to sum up that Ye Xiaogang’s composition absorbed the cultural identity of Chinese traditional music culture, and meanwhile, combined the western classical and modern composing techniques and concepts, which has found the right position at the cross of tradition and modernity, Chinese and Western, and finally form the chromaticalized pentatonic harmonic style of Ye Xiaogang.