Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
From Transcription to Transformation: Exploring the Creative Use of Chinese Folk Song in Gao Ping's "Distant Voices"
Abstract
Gao Ping is a living Chinese composer born in Chengdu in 1970. While growing up in a musical family and studying as a piano performance major at the music middle school attached to Sichuan Conservatory of Music, he was influenced by China’s concurrent transformation from a collective to a market economy. The transitional cultural clash between East and West left traces later in his music. Therefore, his musical style conveys the mixture of Western tradition and Chinese heritage. Distant Voices was a piano work written in 1999 during his composition studies at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. This is the only one of his compositions in which three authentic Chinese folk songs play a part in the motif. In this research, the work is examined movement by movement; the stylistic analysis focuses on the use of formal, thematic, and rhythmic structure in each movement. In the three movements, Gao Ping develops various compositional possibilities through these folk melodies and captures traditional folk singing on the piano. His creative use of these source melodies recasts the rich, microtonal palette of traditional Chinese folk music by exploring the diverse sonority of the piano without distorting the fundamental qualities of the folk songs.
Subject Area
Music
Recommended Citation
Bi, Lei, "From Transcription to Transformation: Exploring the Creative Use of Chinese Folk Song in Gao Ping's "Distant Voices"" (2017). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI10270984.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI10270984