On The Characteristics Of Folk Songs Of Children

We must study the characteristics of children's songs in order to create children's songs for suiting children's psychology and their likeness. Wang Chong in the Han, Kong Yingda in the Tan, Yan Shen in the Ming, Zheng Xudan in the Qing and so on all expressed their views on children's song's characteristics. On the basis of the predecessor's researches, this paper makes a tentative inquiry on the main characteristics of children's songs from essence, aesthetics, psychology, creation and variety. Playing is the essential characteristic of children's songs. Playing in children's songs is connected with children's moving in nature, and the study way of learning from playing. In aesthetics, children's songs are beautiful in artistic conception, pure and honest in idea, harmonious in language and full of children's interests, which give children happiness. Children's songs have more or less magical conception. Many children's songs try to explain bad nature, express their likeness on animals and plants, focus on society, and protect children in some magical way. All this roots from children's psychology and relates to collective consciousness. Children create songs by editoring and innovating, which made songs have features of bad songs with good songs, focusing on playing instead of teaching, and expressing different ages. Children's songs have regional feature in space and period's feature in time. They use territorial dialects, express regional custom and regional culture. Dismissing of old custom, changing of society's conception, replacing of civilization, appearing of political affairs, and reconstructing of social structure's are all found in children's songs.