Guzheng "tragic" Music Phonological Research

Zheng is a chinese traditional musical instrument, and has been widely used in musical performance since ancient time to express strong emotional feelings-mostly sadness-in people's lives. The Chinese people have built up a rich colleciton of Zheng work, in which zheng vibratos evidently palyed a critical role in realizing these inner emotional feelings. This thesis, with the vibratos-by-the-left-hand as an emphasis, aims to examine in details why and how zheng vibratos could achieve the role it did. The thesis is organized into three chapters. Chapter one discusses briefly the history of the development of Zheng music and the esthetic consciousness, specifically, the predominant sadness-is-beautiful scenario, in those Zheng work that the author has searched and compiled during the past several years; Chapter two examines in details the left-handed vibrato method and its four major techniques, i.e., "knead", "tremble", "slide", and "press", and further showes how these skills could help better achieve Zheng's musical effects in expressing sadness. Chapter three provides an analysis on the general relationship between zheng vibratos and sadness expression in Zheng work from both a micro- and a macro-scale approach.