Exploration And Harvest

With the flow of western knowledge into China in the early 20^th century, Chinese musicians gradually started professional music composition. The process of learning from the quintessence of modern western music lasted nearly a century and it was indeed an extremely long and tough road.Ever since then, the localization of harmony has been an eternal subject. The investigation into harmony localization began soon after the western harmonic techniques were utilized for local music composition. After 1979, with the wide spread of contemporary composition techniques and different genres in western music, Chinese musicians were not content with pure imitation anymore and they tried hard to embed our traditional music language into modern composing methods. In the 1990s, professional music composition matured in China. During this period of time, music theoreticians as well as composers conducted a lot of studies and experiments on various harmonic techniques, and excitingly, both the breadth and the depth of the research were remarkably enhanced.In this thesis, we select 60 piano solos which were published in the renowned Chinese periodical "Musical Works" during the five years 1996-2000 and we make an in-depth analysis on these pieces from the perspective of harmony. We attempt to cover the exploration and harvests by the musicians of this period in the aspect of harmonic techniques.