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Preface
When it comes to Mr. Wang Jianzhong's attainments in piano works, it is very high.
The reason for this is that Mr. Wang Jianzhong has made many contributions to the integration of Chinese and Western music.
This has given us a new understanding of the development of modern Chinese music.
For example, in his work "Scene", there is an innovation and use of traditional Chinese pentatonic tonality, as well as the integration of Western composition techniques.
But how did Mr. Wang Jianzhong integrate Chinese and Western composition techniques without any sense of disobedience?
Pentatonic tone and ethnic style
As we all know, key is the foundation and important part of music, and there are common characteristics in different ethnic music, and at the same time, it also highlights the individual styles and aesthetic characteristics of different ethnic groups.
Therefore, when Mr. Wang Jianzhong explores the characteristics and aesthetic concepts of Chinese folk music, he integrates Western modern composition techniques into it, forming a unique and novel pentatonic harmonic style.
This reflects Wang Jianzhong's exploration and innovation of traditional music from the mainland and modern techniques from the West.
In the piano piece "Scene", Wang Jianzhong uses the Chinese pentatonic tonality, and also innovates on the basis of the pentatonic vocabulary and uses artificial modulation.
In fact, in the creation of piano, Mr. Wang Jianzhong attaches great importance to the use of pentatonic tones, and strives to develop on this basis, so as to present the national characteristics of Chinese national pentatonic tones.
The so-called pentatonic tone refers to the fact that the core of the tone organization is a tritone group composed of a major second and a minor third, and the key is based on this three-tone group.
However, the pentatonic nature of tone is not equal to the simple pentatonic scale, but refers to the most basic laws of movement of tone.
Therefore, in the piano piece "Scene", Wang Jianzhong takes the Chinese pentatonic key as the key basis of the piano work, and mainly uses the pentatonic melodic tone in the melody to express the national style.
There are five themes in this piece, each of which uses pentatonic mode.
But at the same time, there is also a part of the four-tone pattern in the song, and it is a pentatonic scale form formed by omitting a certain note, which is a variant of the pentatonic pattern.
However, the major third of the gong horn is an important basis for determining the key category of pentatonic tones, but this piece often lacks palace tones or horn tones, which also causes ambiguity in the key.
Therefore, from the second measure onwards, since the upper voice is composed of four sounds, #C, B, #G, and #F, the upper voice may be in the B or E mode, and this also forms a phenomenon of tonal ambiguity.
However, the lower part is in the F house (or bB house mode), using the most folk music four-tone cavity - Sol, La, Do, Re (or Re, Me, Sol, La).
And this four-tone cavity with a strong flavor has a wide influence in mainland folk music.
The presence of D and C tones in the inner voice of musical material, and the D note with #c to form a major seventh interval does not belong to the pentatonic scale.
However, the G note in the lower voice will form a pure fifth interval with the D note in the inner voice.
Therefore, the lower voice and the inner voice form a harmonious relationship.
Similarly, the C sound of the inner voice and the F sound of the lower voice can form a harmonic relationship.
The example above is the musical material for Section B.
From the melody, it can be seen that the theme phrase is composed of only four notes: D, E, G, and A, and there is no major third of the palace angle, so this also makes it possible for the work to have two key modes, that is, E feather quadatra (G house) or E angle quadruple tone (C house).
If the middle voice of the music material also uses the four-tone mode, then it is mainly composed of four tones: bD, F, bA, and bB, while in the D house key range, the main tone is bA, so the key is A and four-tone mode.
It can be seen that the four-tone tone used by Mr. Wang Jianzhong expresses its strong national charm.
From measure 4 onwards, the melodic part of this theme has four notes: C, D, F, and A, and there is also a major third in the F scale.
As a result, the melodic part takes a short, high-octave repetition and produces a sparkling acoustic effect.
However, the accompaniment part is a tumbling septuch, which is similar to the guqin, so it also gives the music a free and elegant beauty.
At the same time, this texture also highlights the expressive role of melody for the foiling voice texture, and also greatly promotes the development of music.
It is reported that the pentatonic tone in the pentatonic mode starts from the palace tone and is obtained by successive fifths.
According to the pentatonic order, the order of palace-sign-shang-feather-horn is arranged to form the pentatonic scale.
In "Scene", Mr. Wang Jianzhong uses pentatonic mode to express his national style.
In the musical material of section B, the melody parts are B, #C, E, #F, and #G五个音, among which #C is the main tone in the E key range, so its key is #C feather pentatonic mode.
In addition, this theme is very singable horizontally, and also has a very clear pentatonic characteristic.
The composer also uses a reduced third chord in the low voice, which increases the dissonance of the melody, thus bringing a certain sense of tension and dynamism to the music.
And in the music material of section A, the upper voice and the lower voice also use different keys, so it also reflects the characteristics of polytonality, and the three-tone part has five tones: bA, bB, bD, bE, and F, among which the main tone in the D house key range is bB, so its key is the B feather pentatonic mode.
However, in the C house or G tone, there are mainly three typical tritones E, G, and A, of which E and G are minor thirds, and G and A are major seconds.
Innovative application of manual modulation
When it comes to artificial modulation, as the name suggests, it is not traditional and inherent, but synthetic, and has the characteristics of customization, arbitrariness and personalization.
In the introduction and epilogue of the piano piece "Scene", Mr. Wang Jianzhong used an artificial octatonic scale.
It is reported that in some longer works, the artificial octatone scale is generally only used within a certain period of time or part of the passage, and the application of the octatone scale is not maintained as a whole.
As shown in the figure, the structure of the octoatonic scale is arranged at intervals between semitones and diatonics, where the arcs are marked with adjacent diatonic relations (major seconds) and those without marks are chromatic relations (minor seconds).
This artificially sound scale of minor second + major second also contains two tritoneal frames (#C与G, F and B), which are characterized by symmetry.
At the same time, the variations also provide more possibilities for the writing and harmony of the melody.
However, although "artificial scales" come in many forms, they usually have a tonal center or core.
In the example above, the center of the key is clearly unified on the #c sound.
However, in the piano piece "Scene", Wang Jianzhong divided the artificial octatonic scale into two four-note sequences with pentatonic tones and three diatonic relationships between them, and applied them to the upper and lower parts of the music, so that the music not only has a national style, but also has a modern atmosphere.
From the second measure onwards is the musical material for section A, where (a) is the four-note sequence of the upper voice, (b) is the four-note sequence of the lower voice, and (c) the two four-note sequences are arranged in the order of high and low notes.
It can be seen that the upper and lower voices of the music material are four-tone columns in pentatonic mode, which has a strong national charm.
However, the upper voice is in the E or G mode, while the lower voice is in the B or F mode.
However, from a longitudinal point of view, the upper and lower voices maintain the framework of tritones, such as in the second measure of the above example, the G note of the lower voice and the #C sound of the upper voice are increased by a fourth, that is, the relationship between the tritone, so the musical material has the characteristics of an eight-tone "artificial scale" in terms of pitch organization.
Wang Jianzhong's use of the eight-tone artificial scale into two four-tone columns in the music actually reflects a kind of creative technique of shifting, in which (b) is the shift of (a) upwards to make the three-tone relationship, which is also an important means of unfolding the whole music, which can make the musical material more abundant.
It is worth mentioning this eight-tone artificial scale, which can also give the music a polytonal character.
It is only because in the piano piece "Situation", the pentatonic sound effect has been retained as one of the most typical acoustic qualities.
And because Wang Jianzhong pays special attention to the "depiction" of sound and the need for rich tones, he often infiltrates artificial keys into pentatonic tones, so as to realize the ingenious integration of Western modern technology and traditional Chinese tones, and form a unique national style, and also make artificial keys have innovative significance.
Multi-tonal acoustics
Polytonality is compound tonality, which means that there are two or more different tonality overlapping vertically.
Among them, the compound of two tonalities is generally called bitonality, while the compound of two or more tonality is directly called polytonality.
At the beginning of the 20th century, polytonality, as one of the common tonal techniques in Western music composition, was developed by composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and it can be said to be quite mature.
However, this was not the case in the early days of Chinese music creation, so the composer actively explored and experimented with the overlapping of keys, which promoted the subsequent music creation.
It is reported that the polytonality in the pentatonic mode is composed of the longitudinal superposition of different palace systems.
This means that the various levels of music can be a combination of pentatonic and pentatonic keys, or pentatonic keys and other keys.
However, in terms of longitudinal relationship, the relationship between different keys can be divided according to the interval distance between the palace tones and the number of common tones between the various tones, which can be roughly divided into four categories: close relationship, distant relationship, far relationship and relationship with the main tone.
In Wang Jianzhong's piano piece "Scene", the main thing is to use the polytonality of distant relationships.
However, when the key signatures differ by three ascending and ascending signs, or the overlapping of three or more different tonalities, it is called distantly related polytonality.
In the longitudinal relationship between these two tonalities, although the interval distance between the palace sounds may be a major and minor third, or a minor second or an increase of four or a decrease of fifth.
But in reality, the more key signatures differ, the less common notes there are between the keys, especially the tension and dissonance.
Therefore, in modern works, the application of distance relationship polytonality is more extensive, and the form is also rich and colorful.
In the B section, there are two levels of voices, of which the voices in the bD range are in the B feather pentatonic mode (be, f, ba, bb, bd).
However, there are three tones in the lower part of the G house tuning range, e, g, and a, which have the characteristics of the pentatonic tone of the A quotient.
Therefore, when the relationship between the upper and lower voices is reduced by five degrees, it is a tritonic relationship, which belongs to the polytonality of the distant relationship.
However, when the section is polytonal in the vertical direction, this dissonant sound greatly enhances the momentum of musical statement and development.
As shown in the figure below, the music material is divided into two layers, in which the D and C tones of the inner voice belong to the lower voice (the G sound of the lower voice and the D, C and F tones of the inner voice all form a pure fifth interval, so the lower voice and the inner voice constitute a harmonic relationship).
When the melody part is in the B house or E house, the low voice is in the F house or B house, and the key signature difference is 6.
In terms of the palace sound relationship, it means that their distance between them increases by four degrees, so they belong to the distant relationship tonal superposition.
And the hierarchy between these two tones is very obvious, and the longitudinal dissonance is very strong.
However, since the structural feature of the artificial octoatonic scale is to emphasize the interval relationship of the tritone, the tonal overlap of the whole piece is also closely related to the tritone relationship.
However, in the piano piece "Scene", Wang Jianzhong divides the artificial scale into two groups of four-tone sequences with pentatonic characteristics, and because these two groups of four-tone sequences are different by a three-tone relationship, the polytonality formed is the polytonality of the distant relationship.
epilogue
Mr. Wang Jianzhong's works not only enrich the expressiveness of Chinese folk music, but also open up a new path for the development of modern music.
In particular, the tonal innovation he shows in "Situation" reflects his deep understanding of traditional Chinese music, and also shows his bold attempt to integrate Western musical techniques.
It can be seen that Wang Jianzhong's creative practice plays an extremely important role in our understanding and appreciation of modern Chinese music.