On The Aesthetic Value Of Western Poems For Dance With Musical Accompaniment In The Tang Dynasty

The Western Region in China has ever been a multi-national area with clashes and mergence of, and cultural exchange between, different nationalities and it was in this region in the Sui and Tang Dynasties that the western poems for dance with musical accompaniment came into being with a great variety of forms and unique and systematic features.Western dances with musical accompaniment were so elegant, beautiful and skillful that they were popular with both the imperial family and ordinary people. As a result, they were not only appreciated by the ancient literati but also became the source and subject of the poets'creation due to their novelty and elegancy, resplendence and their diversity of forms. Actually, in all the Tang poems one can easily find western poems for dance with musical accompaniment, which have the description of dances, songs, the playing of Hu music and musical instruments like Qiang flute, pipa, konghou, and reed pipe; however the studies on the poems for dance with musical accompaniment have not been attached much importance. According to the present standard on classification and collection of poetry and the works on the history of Chinese literature, Tang poetry can be classified into 55 units which in turn fall into 227 categories covering 1175 types. In such classification, the Frontier Fortress type, which touched on western poems for dance with musical accompaniment and only had the coverage of the frontier culture, the tribulation of war and the sadness and hatred of soldiers, were identified rather than the type of western poems for dance with musical accompaniment. Therefore, this thesis attempts to make a further exploration of the aesthetic value of the Tang literature to enrich the connotation and the subject of Tang poetry and expand the scope of the study on the poetry by examining the cause for the flourishing of western tang poems for dance with musical accompaniment and the authors'achievements on poem creation.The thesis analyzes western tang poems for dance with musical accompaniment from the following four aspects: 1) the influence of western dance with musical accompaniment upon the creation of Tang poems; 2) case study of the cultural interaction between western dance with musical accompaniment and Tang poems; 3) graphic description of the music, musical instruments, musicians and dancers in the cultural communication of Western tang poems for dance with musical accompaniment; 4) the praise and the aesthetic value of Tang poems on the three major types of dances with musical accompaniment(Huxuan dance, Huteng dance and Zheji dance) of the Western Region.