THE SYNTHESIS OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE AND WESTERN CLASSICAL TECHNIQUES IN MODERN VOCAL PEDAGOGY

Abstract

Vocal training in the universities of the PRC takes shape at the intersection of the European academic canon and the national singing tradition, yet the mechanisms by which the two are joined in teaching practice are described in a fragmentary manner. Two loosely coordinated interpretations coexist in the scholarly discourse: the synthesis is understood either as a technical adaptation of bel canto to the phonetics of the Chinese language or as a value-based and worldview reinterpretation of vocal instruction, while the connection between the technological and the aesthetic planes of teaching remains underclarified. The aim of the work is to determine through which mechanisms traditional Chinese and Western classical techniques are joined in the modern vocal pedagogy of the PRC, and to identify the pedagogical strategies that ensure the formation of a singer’s universal competences. Comparative analysis of acoustic and articulatory parameters, the historical-genetic method, hermeneutic analysis of vocal works set to the poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties, and theoretical modelling are applied. A three-level model of multi-aesthetic synthesis is proposed that distinguishes the technological, the aesthetic-pedagogical and the psychological-pedagogical levels of integration and links each of them with its own mechanism of joining the traditions. It is established that the synthesis is realised not as the replacement of one technique by another but as the subordination of the Western technological resource to Eastern aesthetic tasks: the principle of “Zizheng Qianyuan” preserves clarity of articulation while maintaining a high singer’s formant, whereas the concepts of “Lejiao” and “Dao fa zi ran” shift instruction from the training of the voice to the education of the personality. Reliance on the national repertoire and on the intonational vocabulary of the mother tongue is found to lower the cognitive and emotional barrier that students meet when mastering a foreign vocal canon, and training becomes more effective as a result; where Western models are copied mechanically, with no allowance for the tonal nature of the language, the effect is reversed.