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50ИСКУССТВОВЕДЕНИЕ
ART SONGS OF ANCIENT CHINESE POETRY: CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE SONGS IN CHINA
SOCIETY
Чэнь Синь
Introduction.
The work of art or even literature has a very huge significance towards the intended community or group. Despite the heavy misunderstandings that may come from the work and the ignorance that the people may have towards the work, there will always be rich content that the authors intended to communicate. Culture has the same trends as these works of art, as it generates the information intended for a group or a community to adhere to and make use of the directives provided. With misunderstanding within the culture, there is a high possibility of losing its meaning as intended. This makes it important to have the quality and reliable protectors of the culture from being long forgotten. In this context, the art songs of ancient Chinese poetry had the same trend, as they were important to the community and they had huge rich value for the people. Without proper protection, there could be high levels of ignorance that would make the songs lose their value and intended objectives.
Understanding these measures was crucial to the works which made them highly important to the people, assuring quality outcomes from the people. Using these songs developed a huge impact on the people, ensuring that their intended objectives have been achieved through the quality means available. For many decades these songs have been used and enjoyed by people that understood them. With the many talented people that created and produced the songs, there remained a consistent supply of new and creative songs for the audience to enjoy. Some of the major impacts of the songs include facilitating education, preserving the culture, facilitating interaction, facilitating expression, environmental protection, and entertainment among others. Through these impacts, many of the changes within the Chinese environment were experienced as a result of the songs.
Facilitated education.
Education is an important part of human life, without it many of the activities that happen would be impossible. The art songs of ancient Chinese poetry made a huge contribution to educating people. People had many lessons to learn from different songs as they addressed important matters of the community at the time. Just like today, in case of management need for the community to learn and understand something, they incorporate songs and different artwork that is in use today. In this regard, people made huge contributions to learning and communicating valuable lessons to people through their songs and poetry. With their unique status that the songs had, it was certain that people would get the message being communicated and understand the need to observe and respect it (Lee, J. 2015).
With some of the songs getting deep into politics, there was a clear education to the people of their leadership and the actual status that the country was in. this gave people a better understanding of the progress of their country. When important issues come up, it is mainly the work of the easiest means of getting to people that would be used to pass the message and educate people on the matter, especially where there is no technological advancement which is in most countries. During these early days, the quickest way to communicate to people would have been the use of these songs as they would be played in most of the areas. Education of the community would ensure that everyone within the community gets the correct way of the required information and therefore be able to act on the information (Dingle, G., Sharman, L., & Larwood, J. 2018). Today many local musicians have done the same, with the high rates of infections of the coronavirus, they ensure that they communicate the required information to the people to educate them on the best way of protection from the virus. These efforts of education are very similar to what the ancient songs of the Chinese had. Contributing to the public good and ensuring that they are out of harm. Without these creative means of giving people the right information in an easy way that they can access and understand, there would be accumulated risk associated. Thus the ancient songs were completely important to the people through education.
Preserving cultural ways.
Through the music, the normal routines of the community that was valuable to the people were not only taught but also preserved for generations to come. Maintaining the cultural trends in a safe way for the people to use as examples made it possible to completely take good care of the cultural way from manipulating with other information and ways that are not related. This made it possible to ensure that the culture remained relevant for a long time and that the young generations would know how the ways of the communities were (Gautam, S. 2018). These strategic ideas may not have been in the initial process of their work, but it came as a result of the content provided in their work. While education was managed through artwork, they became an easy way of preserving the cultural ways of the community.
Music and artwork have good and detailed content that can narrate a story of the time flame that they are meant to concentrate. Preservation of information is important as human beings can manipulate and distort information if trusted to pass it on to different generations. Many experiments have been conducted to determine the depth of the truth in that statement, and the message chain can be easily changed throughout the process of transmission. The accuracy of receiving the information from the way it was released in the first place is very low,
making it a poor method of preservation. But with one way to narrate and ensure people understand the ways of the culture, it is very successful in the passing of the message. The works that concentrated on the culture made a huge change in ensuring that the cultural ways have been well and accurately preserved to educate the young generations.
Facilitated interaction.
The nature of human being tends to mainly concentrate on individuality, most of the activities and actions that we choose are mostly concentrated on personal development and growth. With a common factor that can create a relation, there were possible ways that people were able to come together and interaction was encouraged. China being a community-based country, the interaction was encouraged with a common factor of the artwork of songs and poems. The songs brought people together creating an atmosphere that was important for the process of interaction. In this context, people were in a better place to relate with others and interact in a positive direction, creating unity in terms of development and success. On the other hand, there was a possible solution for the issues that may have been experienced within the community. The common factors gave people time to think about the issues and come up with the best solutions for these problems.
Through interactions, people with conflict and other issues are able to determine the best solutions to ensure that the problems are eliminated. As it is evident in conflict resolution, the most important issue is the possibility of communication to manage and learn the solutions to take in the process. This was made possible through the interaction process as people were in a position to learn and understand each other. Interactions also encouraged relationships as people would be in a position to interact with the romantic music that was provided.
Facilitated expression.
Expression through music is mostly used today, many of the music produced has been used as a reflection of what is in the community and the people's thought. Although there are other factors that have been incorporated in that, there is wide use of music for expression. As discussed through the process of interaction, people used the music for relationship issues and interacting on a relationship basis. They also expressed their emotional feeling to their intended partners by singing the songs or the poems to their partners. Expression was also involved in the political dimensions and social affairs of the good of the public. In this directive, the music would address the main issues that affect the community and the target group, to facilitate a better understanding of the context of the moves. It may have been difficult for people to get their fair community treats through normal trends, but the music made a good representation of the lives of the people. It may not be very political but all the information concerned would be influential in people's lives.
Providing influential content would encourage the leadership to consider making proper changes that will be of substantial use for the public. Therefore, people would make more quality and reliable work addressing the issues of power that were affecting people. There was also a solution in most of the social factors in life that affect people (Cohen, A., Bailey, B., & Nilsson, T. 2002). Many people may hide the issues that affect them, to prevent their image from being associated with weakness. To this issue, people benefited from the art songs of the ancient Chinese poetry as they facilitated therapeutic nature that would help to relax the mind. These songs would also provide information that would help people in dealing with life challenges, thus helping to solve the issues of life that people faced.
Facilitated environment protection.
According to LI Qianru (2016) "A selective study on art songs composed by Chinese contemporary composer Liu Cong," there were many songs that were composed on environmental bases. These songs were composed to evoke a sense of environmental protection among the people. The article provides information that the author, Liu Cong composed many songs that were directly involved in environmental protection. With the love of the environment, the author made it his responsibility to ensure that he insights people to protect the environment through his work (Qianru, L. 2016). This was one of the important things that the work of the authors facilitated, ensuring that environmental protection has been observed and encouraged by people. These songs highly impacted people's views towards the environment and the need to keeping it well protected from pollution. The environment is an important part of human daily life, without a safe environment there are many dangers that can be experienced especially due to the high rates of industrialization at the moment.
Encouraging people to go green may be an easy idea but executing and ensuring that it is possible becomes another level of difficult and complicated ways of experience. It is quite a difficult test to make people adapt to environmental protection, but through their loved music, it would be easy. It is not that different from today's world. If anything needs to go fast and reach a huge number of people, music and the favorite artist can make it happen. With the availability of social media and other platforms to pass the message, there are some of the popular superstars with a high number of followers on their platforms. Within a matter of minutes, the content can be accessed by millions of people. This is how significant the songs were also, as many of the Chinese people would listen to these songs regularly, the message intended would be communicated at a very high rate.
Environmental protection is a major issue addressed by their music made it possible to create a better place by reducing the rate of pollution within the regions with the music. It is evident that the music stars are influential towards the people that follow them at all times. A good example is a way people dress and behave, most of these characters come from the music icons that people love as they try to imitate their life. Today, with the high rates of access to information and the social lives of these superstars, it has even become easy to imitate them, if they encourage a given activity, a high number of people will follow in that direction. Through this kind of influence,
the songs would make sense to the audience that was enjoying the songs and it would lead to them following their best superstars' direction.
The songs facilitated moral influence.
Songs are a good source of most of the characters today, with a song that suggests a kind of activity, the people that listen to the music becomes attached to these moral and things done in the music. Most of the music today is currently morally depleting songs, creating another culture with misguided moral directions. The most surprising thing is that the more immoral the songs are today, the more the songs are loved and listened to. Most of the young musicians will go to deep edges of immoral behaviors to get the popularity and make money. They have no considerations of the moral background that they are impacting their followers so long as they make some substantial money. Unlike the many musicians that have a golden chance to positively influence the lives of their followers, the traditional ancient songs were based on molding the moral background of the people to follow the right way that respects the traditional culture of the communities.
These songs made more contributions to developing a good culture in people and ensured that the right guidelines were provided. Despite their access being challenging than today, the efforts made sure that a good massage has been directed to the people through the songs, therefore at any time people got the chance to listen, or watch the songs the message would impact the people's hearts and change their trends for the better. The more the people got the chance to hear the works of their artist, the more influenced they would be, creating a very relative environment that learns and respects the people at all the time. Developing these good behaviors among the people may not have been easy, but the works of the authors made sure that the objective was achieved. With today's power to be accessed by millions of people, the songs would make very high influence rates among the listeners, molding their character to better people in society (Dingle, G., Sharman, L., & Larwood, J. 2018).
Conclusion.
As songs were meant for entertainment, for people to have fun and enjoy the talent of the musicians, there were other benefits that the songs came in with. These benefits affected the people that listened to this music, transforming their lives and the environment in general. To better understand the impacts of these ancient songs, there is a high need to focus on the current trends that we have. The more popular the music and the artist, the more the influence they have on people. As a result, it is easy to observe that these songs had a great impact on the people that were well connected and frequently accessed these songs. The most important aspect of the influence being personal development, which was made up of the issue of moral development. A positive development of this area was made possible by the cultural and traditional considerations, which today is not followed and thus the poor moral behaviors among people. It would be better if the songs would more often be used in the communities, as they will create a better generation with moral standards.
Reference.
Cohen, A., Bailey, B., & Nilsson, T. (2002). The importance of music to seniors. Psychomusicology: A Journal of Research in Music Cognition, 18(1-2), 89.
Dingle, G., Sharman, L., & Larwood, J. (2018). Young people's uses of music for emotional immersion. Handbook of music and adolescence.
Gautam, S. (2018). Preserving Culture: A Study of Impact of Culture and Identity on Gross National Happiness. In International Conference on The Soul in Symphony: Spiritual and Pragmatic Aspects of Happiness.
Kawakami, A., & Katahira, K. (2015). Influence of trait empathy on the emotion evoked by sad music and on the preference for it. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1541.
Lee, J. H. (2015). Using popular music as a teaching tool: a literature review. Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology, 5(1), 99-106.
Qianru, L. I. (2016). A Selective Study on Art Songs Composed by Chinese Contemporary Composer Liu Cong. Cross-Cultural Communication, 12(3), 29-34.
Rolvsjord, R., & Stige, B. (2015). Concepts of context in music therapy. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 24(1), 44-66.
