Research On Music-dance Art Culture By Tianshui Sheepskin Drum

Drum is one of the most ancient and various instruments. Throughout the history, drum is always widely used and artificially added to too many mythical sense and mystical function, which turns out that it not only digs into many levels of traditional culture deeply and broadly,but necessarily catches all kinds of impacts from traditional culture.Tianshui is one of the important birthplaces of Chinese civilization, together with of the humane primogenitors: Nvwa and Fuxi. Here is found the site of Dadiwan with 3000 ages, which is proved to be the prehistorical boom period by archaeologist. Various folk musical instruments spread in Tianshui, one of which is sheepskin drum with good reservation and characteristic, and it coexists with an ancient ritual called "Chuanshen". The best-known sheepskin drum art is full of diverse actions and tones and Chuanshen ritual has dense atmosphere and complex procedures, so they are culturally and artfully valuable. The writer begins with such cultural phenomenon to catch music,dance and ritual as object, and concern local people as subject. Through repeated field survey, the writer objectively describes and subjectively explains various individuals, community and cultural phenomenon, and then analyses forming process and dynamic relationship between native people and their music culture to seek origin of music, dance and culture.This paper contains information, four chapters and conclusion:Introduction contains reasons for topic, analysis of research situation on relative subject, purpose and detailed record of field survey course during research.Chapter one generalizes sheepskin drum, its historical origin and chuanshen ritual.Chapter two describes Qin'an sheepskin drum in detail in terms of distribution, situation, costume, properties,etc. And it analyses the role of local people in ritual and mainly describes Chuanshen procedures of Qin'an sheepskin drum. Some tunes in ritual are recorded.Chapter three shows circulation of such music-dance and ritual in another region within Tianshui------Wushan County. In about the same ways, without recording all the rituals in the county in detail, the differences between two counties show through Contrastive Studies.Chapter four is the core of this paper, which focuses on the relationship between music-dance action in ritual and cultural local convention by analysing regional culture behind this art. The result also comes from field survey and desk work, including cultures related to Tianshui sheepskin drum: plowing culture, animal husbandry culture, Qin culture, Fuxi culture, the Eight Diagrams and The Three Kingdoms culture,etc. A simple comparison between Tianshui sheepskin drum and northeast single drum is mentioned.Conclusion refers to a brief closing research remark.