Philosophy of imitation in Chinese piano works

Abstract

Imitating traditional Chinese instruments to make piano works have a Chinese style is a common creative technique in Chinese piano music. For example, composer Zhao Yuanren uses appoggiatura to imitate the hua (glide) of the guqin in the piano work “Hua Ba Ban and Xiang Jiang Lang”. This paper will use the philosophy of imitation and Bandura’s imitation theory as the theoretical basis and use the method of comparative analysis to analyse how the composer uses different composition techniques to imitate different music elements of traditional Chinese instruments.  Finally, this paper find that the methods of imitation are roughly divided into four categories: direct imitation, synthetic imitation, symbolic imitation, and abstract imitation. The culture of Chinese national musical instruments has been reflected onto the piano, which means that through the transformation of musical instruments, Western musical instruments have the sound of the East. It hopes that pianists could gain a deeper understanding of the imitation of Chinese national instruments in Chinese piano works, so as to better interpret these works.