Dissemination, Integration And Storage

Located in the southwest of Shandong province, Heze is contiguous to three other provinces: Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu. There is a huge variety of folk music on this wide space of over ten thousand square kilometers, including seven local operas such as Shandong Bangzi and Liuzixi, local rap and instrumental music such as Shandong Qinshu, Yingge Liushu, Zhuizi, Shandong Zhengyue, Guchuiyue of Southwest Shandong, Pengbaban and etc. These constitute an intensive and unique cultural landscape. Due to the same reason, various honors have be granted to Heze, such as the Hometown of Opera, the Hometown of Suona, and the Hometown of Guzheng, and Heze also becomes one of the cities in Shandong with the richest folk art resources. Based on "music-region-people" relationship theory and cultural geological theory with a perspective from musical geology, this paper intends to study the local operas in Heze, and investigate the impacts of "people-region" relationship on the formation,evolution and storage of local operas in Heze.The paper consists of three parts:introduction, the main content, and conclusions.The paper starts with introducing the motivations, meanings, and potential value of this paper, and also a review of the existent research and findings in the related area.Chapter1describes the theoretical background and the idea of this paper, and also the research methodology that is applied in the paper.Chapter2illustrates the geological background for the formation of Heze local operas, from the perspectives of natural geological environment, ancient civilization, and language respectively.Chapter3narrates the current situations of local operas in Heze, including opera troupes, opera education and opera under the modern social context. Within this chapter, I will also discuss on the survival conditions and the issue of "people-region" relationship.Chapter4makes discussions on the relation between the dissemination and geological environment of local operas in Heze, and depicts a route map for the formation, evolution, and maturation of the seven local operas. Chapter4also makes a systematic analysis of the medium, type, and the factors influencing the dissemination of the local operas in Heze.Based on the integration theory in cultural geology, Chapter5makes a deep analysis of the mutual influencing and integrating effects of local operas with local rap music, instrumental music, and also those among different kinds of local operas, in order to find the common characteristics in musical language in these arts. I find that there is a close association and integration between local operas and local rap and instrumental music, since local folk music is a particular case of local music, as a cultural combination, whose components co-exist and co-develop with mutual absorption and mutual influencing. Chapter6examines the reasons for the survival and co-existence of multiple local operas in Heze, from the perspectives of both history of natural evolution in geographical environment and history of cultural development in geogrophical environment.In the conclusion part, I will sum up the main themes of this paper, and present my self-reflections in this research as well.