Let Guqin music "open" to the contemporary
Simultaneous interpretation and re-arrangement will achieve the modern integration of ancient piano music in the form of performance and bring new vitality to Guqin music
Guqin art is a national art treasure. How to make a modern interpretation of Guqin music, awaken a rich treasure trove of music, and make it better integrate into modern music life? I have been thinking about this issue.
Unlike modern music notation, Guqin's "minus word notation" does not directly record the pitch, only the string position, emblem position and fingering are recorded, and its rhythm has more room for expansion and contraction. Performers need to recreate the original music by trying to reproduce the original appearance of the original music based on familiarity with the general rules and performance techniques of the piano music, so as to complete their own interpretation of the music, which is called the score. That is to say, in the face of the same Guqin score, the music played by different violinists is very different. The musical thinking of Chinese piano music, such as "playing music", has greater openness and interpretation space, making Every musician can participate in the creative interpretation of the same piece of music, thereby forming the qualities of Guqin music that have been in the same line for thousands of years and are new with the times.
Today, how to do this kind of notation interpretation that is both traditional and reflects personal creativity? I think it mainly works on problem solving and empathy.
Problem solving refers to a literary description in front of each piece of music, describing the realm created by the piece of music. Solving the problem has a directional effect on the musician's interpretation of the work. Not only is it particularly important for the qinist to play the score, but also has a considerable impact on the score style and even the melody structure. For example, when many qinists played the ancient melody "Xiaoxiang Water Cloud", they were based on the lyric poetry of the landscape in the "Wuzhizhai Qinpu". During the Anti-Japanese War, my inner patriotism inspired my father Wu Jingluo. He believes that the reconstruction of the ancient song "Xiaoxiang Water Cloud" should not only express the interest of mountains and waters, but should also emphasize the thoughts of worrying about the country in light of the Southern Song era where the writers are located. My father scored this song for the first time and organized a performance of "Jinyu Qinshe" in Shanghai to express his feelings and caused a sensation. It can be seen that different problem solving, supplemented by different times and different situations, will make the same piano music show different appearances.
Empathy means to be good at understanding the metaphor of the title of music in the performance of Guqin, and then use Guqin to shape emotional symbols and aesthetic images. Taking the "Mysterious Secrets" version of "Xiaoxiang Water Cloud" as an example, each subtitle has a metaphor for the possibility of creating a music atmosphere and emotional image: Dongting smoke and rain, cold rivers and cold moons, reminiscent of the misty clouds and misty clouds Based on this, a cool music atmosphere was created; Jiang Hanshuqing and skylight cloud shadows gave people a clear and hopeful association; the waves and clouds, and the wind and the water surged, but also made people feel emotional and surging. These images can be organically integrated into the performance. Adhering to this concept, my father and I have composed more than 100 traditional piano songs, enriching the long-lost Guqin music library.
Due to the limitations of Guqin instruments' own performance, such as the lack of volume, scale and harmony, traditional piano music has a low proportion in modern music life. How to make the traditional piano music with a long history be better used by modern people? In my opinion, the development of Guqin music library should be increased on the basis of traditional creative interpretation. According to the statistics of relevant experts in the 1950s, there are more than 160 musical score collections and more than 600 pieces of piano music with different names. So far, if you count the different versions of the same piano music, there are more than 3,000 pieces. These more than 3,000 pieces of Guqin music are the treasures of Chinese folk music. Try to play with various musical instruments and various forms, so as to better integrate with different music of various nationalities in the world.
Specifically, other instruments can be added while retaining the Guqin, in the form of accompaniment or concerto; or the Guqin can only be played with modern instruments and performance forms without using the Guqin. Functionally, it can achieve the transformation of piano music performance from individual to group; from the form, it can transform the piano music from mono to multi-tone; from the method, it can make the rich music library of piano music fully developed and use.
It should be noted that modern arrangements can be enriched from various aspects, such as adding multiple sounds, harmony, etc., but the original structure of the piano music should be maintained. If only the most well-known section of the piano music is used as the motive, the others are directly adopted in Western modern music styles. In this way, the created music cannot fully show the original Guqin tone and the ancient music structure.
The unique minuscule notation of Chinese Guqin notation makes the interpretation of piano music open. Nowadays, people can use this as a basis to re-arrange a large number of piano music in the traditional music library. Simultaneous interpretation and re-arrangement will achieve the modern integration of ancient piano music in the form of performance, make the treasure trove of ancient piano music integrate into modern music life, and bring new vitality to ancient piano music. This is my expectation for the future of piano music, and it is also my reflection and summary of my 60-year Guqin career.
Wu Wenguang, born in 1946, is a professor at the China Conservatory of Music and the first group of non-genetic inheritors of the national guqin. Won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the China Piano Association, the album "Xiaoxiang Shuiyun" won the first Golden Record Award of the China Recording Society, and published "Yushan Wu's Piano Score", "Magic Secret Music Interpretation" and other scores. Wu Jingluo and Wu Wenguang's father and son two generations of virtuoso completed the work of composing the whole work of the earliest guqin music collection "Magic Secret".
Wu Wenguang