There are actually many people who truly systematically examine "phonological beauty" from a rational perspective. They are usually called the "metrical school", and are most popular among Song lyric writers and scholars who care most about meter. The female poet Li Qingzhao's "Ci Lun" said: "Poems and prose are divided into flat sides (oblique), while lyrics are divided into five tones, five tones, six rhythms, and clear and voicing." Zhang Yan in the late Southern Song Dynasty. A related story is recorded in the monograph "Etymology" on Ci: His father is a musician. Once when he was writing lyrics according to the tune of "Ruihexian", he discovered the word "flutter" in "Pink Butterfly, I will never let you go". The word "slightly unharmonious" needs to be changed to the word "shou" to make it more comfortable and harmonious. Zhang Yan concluded: "The five tones have lips, teeth, throat, tongue, and nose, so they can be divided into light, clear, and heavy turbid."
In the eyes of people in the Tang and Song Dynasties, the "phonological beauty" of poetry actually came from the beauty of music. , and the four tones of Chinese characters and the cadences of sentences just match the melody of the song. Jiang Kui, a great poet and musician of the Southern Song Dynasty, once reformed the lyrics of "Man Jiang Hong" and replaced the standard oblique rhyme pattern with flat tones, which made it more harmonious. For him, the metrical requirements of words only serve to make singing more smooth, and have little to do with the judgment of "beauty." "Beauty" belongs to music. For example, Jiang Kui said in "The Desolate Prisoner" that the song "has a very beautiful rhythm" when played with mute chestnuts, and in "Secret Fragrance and Sparse Shadows" he said that the newly composed song "has harmonious syllables" , there is no mention of literal factors such as "Ping up and enter".
It is said that the origin of the metrical consciousness of Chinese poetry is inseparable from ancient music. Starting from Yu Xin and Shen Yue of the Southern Dynasty, Shen Quanqi, Song Zhiwen and others in the early Tang Dynasty held high the banner of "regular poetry". What they targeted was the problem that Yuefu poetry did not pay attention to rhythm: since the poems written by literati often let music Workers have no idea where to start, so they might as well just specify the phonology. After the music scores were lost, ancient poems lost their original musical meaning, and their rhythms became almost obscene. As early as the rise of Song lyrics, people had already distinguished "poetry" in a narrow sense from melodic lyrics.
However, for thousands of years, poets and scholars have never given up using "phonological beauty" as the starting point to explore the mystery of classical poetry. Instead, they have developed meter into an important knowledge and formed an independent Existence value. For example, Professor Qiu Shiyou of Sun Yat-sen University once commented on a story in "Diao Jian Lou Ci Hua": The word "fan" in the sentence "Jiantai Liquid Wave Fan" in Liu Yong's "Drunk Penglai" made Song Renzong very displeased. The emperor thought that It would be more appropriate to change it to the word "成". But from a metrical perspective, if we list the pronunciation positions of each word in this sentence in medieval Chinese, we will find that "fan" is more harmonious than "cheng".
The interpretations by metrical scholars are certainly wonderful, but unfortunately, finding the phonological rules of classical poetry creation does not mean feeling the beauty. The only ancient works that can use the beauty of music to explain the necessity of meter are a few lyrics songs, piano songs and carols in "Songs of Taoist Baishi". To take a step back, even if we only consider the need for recitation, the pronunciation of contemporary Chinese may not be able to reproduce the various original sound characteristics of ancient poetry. In the sound of students reciting ancient poems, I heard the desire to transform "phonological beauty" from an academic concept into an artistic experience.