Analysis Of The Composing Techniques Of Weiguo Guo's Diao Chan

Diao Chan is a piece of classical dance music composed by Weiguo Guo in the 1990 s.This musical composition,with the theme of Diao Chan,one of the four greatest beauties of ancient China,is not only of a big success in light of its artful synthesis of Chinese and western musical cultures and its skillful use of both traditional and modern music composing methods,but also a new way of dancing creation.The major characteristics are as follows:1)The adoption of western music writing method assures that the Sole Pentatonic echo-ish motive revolves around the theme of this music;2)Using traditional Chinese folk melody to create the rhythm,while the main body of the chord line,both in major and miner,remains western;3)The image of Diao Chan is whipped into shape by harmonizing the timbres of all instruments in every voice parts.It's made even more vivid by skillfully manipulating various orchestral instruments and by using a small band;4)The rhythm of the small time marking drum is adopted in this music composition as Chinese folk operas usually do;5)Guanzi,a kind of Chinese folk music instrument and other percussion instruments which can be found only in China are adopted in this composition;6)Although Guo is not the first musician who combined the Chinese traditional music instruments and western orchestra,he really is the only one who brought the symphonic thinking into the composition of dance music;This paper is to probe into the concepts of Chinese classical dance and dance music by analyzing the creation techniques adopted in Weiguo Guo's Diao Chan and thus,to shed some new light on the importance of the introduction of symphonic thinking into the composition of dance music.Therefore,this research can be viewed as the learning report on or rather,a dissemination of Guo's music composing techniques and his unique way of instruments collocation.