In order to allow young students to take on the important task of promoting and developing the tradition of Chinese poetry and music, and to integrate the excellent traditional Chinese culture into the practice of school education and teaching, Sun Hongjie, professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Music of Shanghai Normal University and adjunct professor of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, conducted a personalized exploration of the tradition of Chinese poetry and music, and set up a course "Theory and Practice of Ancient Chinese Poetry and Music Singing" for graduate students, a preliminary grasp of the ancient Chinese poetry into the music and singing methods.
Recently, Professor Sun Hongjie and the graduate students of the School of Music of Shanghai Normal University successfully held the "Ancient Meaning and Modern Picking - Ancient Chinese Poetry and Literature into Music and Singing Concert", so that the ancient poetry and literature that has lasted for thousands of years will be rejuvenated with artistic brilliance on the occasion of "entering music". The young figure on the stage and the long-standing poetry and music civilization together constitute the long-lasting Chinese cultural heritage of string songs.
This concert will be created by the 2023 master's degree students who are studying this course, during which 10 literary classics (4 poems, 4 words, 2 texts) and 2 contemporary pseudo-ancient poems (1 teacher and 1 student) will be performed in the form of music singing. Among them, 6 are students' original songs, 3 are students' original tunes, and 3 are students' interpretations of Professor Sun's original works. This kind of repertoire arrangement reflects the interest of poetry and music, dialogue between the present and the ancient, creation and performance, and teacher-student collaboration, and the audience truly experienced this primitive and novel way of "opening" ancient Chinese poetry in the passionate interpretation of "chanting poetry into music".
Different from traditional concerts, this concert adopts the form of a combination of lectures and performances, and the performance is interspersed with Professor Sun Hongjie's explanation of the characteristics of the repertoire and the methods and techniques of ancient poetry and singing.
The concert is divided into four chapters: "Interpretation Repertoire", "Original Repertoire" (Group 1 and Group 2), and "Composed Repertoire". The "Interpretation Repertoire" is a self-composed work by Professor Sun Hongjie, which begins with Su Shi's seven-character quatrain "Spring Night", accompanied by the clear overtones of the guzheng and pipa. The Han Dynasty's Yuefu Ancient Ci "Jiangnan" and the Song Dynasty Lin Sheng's "Title Lin'an Di" led the audience to appreciate the cultural heritage of Jiangnan. And when another female two-part chorus, the poem "Outside the Mountain, Qingshan Lou Wailou, West Lake Song and Dance Break", was sung, the audience was amazed by the high degree of compatibility between the beautiful melody and the meaning of the poem, as if the tune had been passed down for hundreds of years.
If the "repertoire" is to highlight the fun of teacher-student collaboration, then the performance of original repertoire is a full display of students' innovative achievements, and the students' original works occupy half of the whole concert. After learning the theories and methods of ancient Chinese poetry and singing in the classroom, students worked together to create, compose, direct and perform their own poems, and use their professional expertise to inherit and carry forward the tradition of Chinese poetry and music. The singing versions of five classic Tang and Song poems took turns to appear, graceful and bold.
Professor Sun Hongjie's original ancient poem "Time" closely follows the meaning of the words in terms of harmony and orchestration, and the addition of musical instruments such as piano, guzheng, pipa, and singing bowl renders the empty and vast atmosphere. Tao Yuanming's "Words of Return" and Liu Yuxi's "Burrow Inscription" both use Chinese folk instruments to reflect the strong Chinese aesthetic style. The combination of "poetry, music and dance" is particularly eye-catching, this song is written in pentatonic mode, the performer heartily and briskly chanted the words in the text with the "old national sound", and the beauty of rhyme, rhythm and rhythm reflects each other, which aroused warm applause from the audience.
The School of Music of Shanghai Normal University pays attention to the combination of classroom learning and stage practice, and actively practices the educational concept of educating people with aesthetics and culture. This concert is a vivid exploration and practice of integrating the excellent traditional Chinese culture into the curriculum of colleges and universities, and it is also a creative transformation of the excellent traditional Chinese culture implemented by contemporary youth in the process of modernization, reintroducing the tradition of poetry and music education into the vision of the younger generation, and cultivating college students into a "new force" that consciously inherits and actively promotes culture, which is of self-evident significance to the continuation of Chinese poetry and music.