Western Musician's Chinese Music Soul

Aaron Avshalomov(1894-1965) is one of the western composer who ever lived in china for a long time and wrote many music compositions which have Chinese music style.The Great Wall (1945), one of his representative, is the earliest and the most import music-drama of recent china.Firstly, the music thinking of Aaron and his contribution to Chinese music can be introduced.The main composing thinking of Aaron is as following:Chinese music should not remain an antiquarian object:it ought to be developed. Into the texture of old melodic patterns there should be woven new elements—harmonic enrichment, orchestral colors and modern structural designs1. He tried his best to make it all his life and made a great distribution to Chinese traditional music.1. He traveled to many different places of china and collected a lot of Chinese folk music materials. And then he composed more than twenty music compositions using these Chinese traditional music materials which having Chinese style.2. He had a good relationship with Chinese music artists, such as Jiang Chun Fang,Shen Zhi Bai and Mei Lan Fang. And he joined a lot of music activities in china and made a positive progress to the communication between Chinese and western music.3. He made a great contribution to the development of Chinese traditional music with many music artists.4. He encouraged and affected many Chinese young music composer and called Ren Guang,Nie Er,Xian Xing Hai,He Lv Ding, Lv Ji that they should learn to use European music instrument and Orchestration but they should not be whole westernization.Secondly, the analysis of the Great Wall.1. The analysis of script.(1)The whole characteristic.Aaron Added his own things(such as ghost, fat man, Blind, Feather Dance and forest) based on the folk story of Meng Jiang nv. In his works he displayed Chinese style but also added some western music items. This is a great feature of the script and all these things never appeared in the development and spread history of Meng Jiang nv.(2)The characteristic of story thread.The development of the drama is by two threads. First thread is that Meng Jiang nv looked for his husband and the development has successive feature. Second thread is that the process of Qin Shi Huang commanded to catch Wang Xi Liang and the development has interrupt feature.(3)The feature of characters.In the drama, Meng Jiang nv has a personalities of kind-hearted and rebellious and persevering; Wang Xi liang dealt with things in passive ways and had a cowardly personalities; Qin Shi huang and ghost are the same characters who have the feature of sinister and ruthless, they and Mang Jiang nv are the reversed characters.2. Analysis of the music.The music of The Great Wall used the methods of Post-romanticism and Impressionism. The whole drama has twenty eight chapters. The form construction followed the logic of the development of story and between different chapters had strong relevancy and contrast. The structure feature of the whole music composition is that the vocal music and instrumental music compose the most part of the drama and it has only small part of dance. Almost all of the vocal music is large scale song and the solo vocal music has only one piece and has no ensemble theme feature.In this composition, the most import theme is folk music Mon chang's song, and this is the center and spirit of the drama; the most import development object is pentatonic scale which is used in many different part of the drama.Thirdly, the history status of The Great Wall.It should be discussed from two different parts.The first part is that Great Wall is the first music drama in the development of the Chinese music history. But because of all kinds of the reasons it cannot be valued and got attention to it in the last forty years.Anther part is that the story and folk music and drama of Meng Jiang nv have a long history in china. Among these stories of Meng Jiang nv, Aaron's music drama used western method to display the Chinese folk story firstly and successfully. And this made a great progress to the development of Chinese music drama.The Great Wall has a landmark sense in the development of Chinese music history, and the creation method made a new world for the development of music art about The Great Wall. We should analyze and recognize this works really and give it the history status that it should get.