New Strings Gather at the Pear Garden to Evoke the Sound of Unmatched Beauty: The National Sound-Dramatic Rhetorics of Jia Daqun’s Liyuan

Abstract

Professor Jia Daqun’s large-scale national instrumental concerto Impressions of Liyuan is a magnificent work for which the composer consciously selected a musical vocabulary rich in Chinese national characteristics, which refer to appropriate and innovative forms of national symphonic music and rhetorical construction to present a unique spiritual charm. Liyuan has become an outstanding example of national exploration in contemporary Chinese musical creativity with its unique musical rhetoric and profound cultural connotation. The work uses specific instrumental timbres to create regional rhetoric, while dramatic rhetoric is constructed through the humanisation of sound and the logic of opera structure. Through the analysis of Liyuan, this article explores the innovation and practice of this work in the rhetoric of national sound drama from four aspects: the regional rhetoric of specific instrumental timbres, the dramatic rhetoric of sound humanization and the logic of opera structure, the genre rhetoric of sound subject arrangement and the thinking of genre naming, and the spirit of Liyuan rooted in the ecology of Chinese opera. Genre rhetoric is explored through the relationship between sonic subjects and genre form naming. The Liyuan (梨园) of the title, which literally translates as “pear garden,” serves as a cultural symbol to refer to the Chinese nation’s dramatic attitude towards life.

Keywords: Liyuan, musical rhetoric, national character, regional rhetoric, dramatic rhetoric, genre rhetoric, sound humanisation, dramatic structural logic, spirit of Liyuan