2015, Vol.23, No.2

Journal of the Korean Society for Musicology 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.64

eISSN : 3092-2410
https://journal.kci.go.kr/musicology

Meyerbeer’s Opera, Robert le Diable, gained a huge success since the premiere in 1831. Six years later in 1837, Balzac wrote a novel, Gambara, depicting that a genius composer, Gambara, disputably interpreted this opera. Meyerbeer and his music was received extremely well in the 19th century, while it was completely forgotten during the 20th century. Now, we can currently see that there have been interesting attempts to rediscover the values of Meyerbeer and his music. This present research tries to reflect on this current scholarly interest on Meyerbeer, and, furthermore, extend music history to cultural studies, utilizing literature research. Gambara, in this novel, has two opposite viewpoints regarding Meyerbeer and his opera, which implies that public audience of Paris—drunken Gambara—and critics —sober Gambara—stood in different directions in the 19th century. Balzac and his publisher Schlesinger, in doing so, harshly criticized the taste of the Parisian audience, and provided the German romanticism as an alterative and futuristic new musical aesthetics.

The purpose of the study is to examine Chinese school songs and nation building in the modern era. School songs are typical in the music culture of East Asia, having accepted Western music and its cultures into the region. In late Qing(淸) Dynasty, Chinese school songs, which are called xuetangyuege (學堂樂歌) in Chinese, were sung in the music classes(樂歌) of newly modernized schools(學堂). After the failure of the Hundred Days’Reform in 1898, many intelligentsias fled to Tokyo, Japan, studied Japanese school songs and started to write similar songs in a Chinese version. By virtue of experiencing school songs in Japan, they could make their own and teach them at schools in China as well as publish the music scores by the middle of the 1900s. In this paper, I examine Chinese school songs as follows: First, the purpose and process of accepting Japanese school songs after the China-Japan War in 1894. I regarded this as a reform movement by the intelligentsias against the old structure to save the Qing dynasty. Second, analyzing five different music scores published from 1905 to 1909, I examine how Japanese school songs became utilized in China. Lastly, as Chinese school songs are interconnected with a save-the-nation movement by the intelligentsia who tried to build a nation-state to overcome a semi-colonial situation, a text analysis of the songs based on “On the New Citizen”(新民說) by Liang Qi-chao(梁啓超), a powerful reformist in modern era, is conducted. He insisted that knowledge(知), morality(德), and a healthy body(體) is 88 positively necessary to build a nation. I classified songs according to these three keywords to study particular features of Chinese school song. Notwithstanding that the study of the influence of Western music in East Asia has begun to emerge, there is still a lack of research on Chinese music compared to Korea and Japan in the field of Korean musicology. Therefore, this study fills an important gap in academic studies and brings China into a field of studying school songs in East Asia.

Following result was concluded by analyzing harmonics of E♭ and B♭ notes of western double reed instrument, oboe and Korean traditional instrument, Taepyeongso, Piri. First, distinctive sound by double reed instruments represents green color in colored hearing sense. Common ground of oboe, Taepyeongso, Piri is that all these are double reed instruments, and thus, when blowing hard, they sound like peculiar tones with slightly chubby and duck like feeling. Characteristics of these double reed instruments are close to green color from a colored hearing standpoint. This is consistent with the assertion by Lavignac. He claimed that oboe tone carries green color. Second, the third harmonic has yellow-green and fifth harmonic with blue-green, and odd number harmonics such as 3 and 5, indicate distinctive unique color of double reed instruments. As first, second, and fourth harmonics are the same with tone of basic frequency with octave difference, they show tone color rather than unique color of the instrument. And front odd number harmonics excluding first harmonic seem to represent independent and unique color. Third, double reed instrument represents green color of “Five traditional Colors,” and green indicates combination of yellow and blue. As shown in oboe and Piri, yellow-green and blue-green show up one after the other, this has relevance to the fact that green came out of combination of yellow and 124 blue. B♭ note carries green color close to yellow, and E♭ note carries green color close to blue. Yellow color means soil, and blue color indicates wood, and oboe, Taepyeongso, and Piri all belong to wood wind instrument group made of wooden material.