Bai Juyi's Pipa Journey is a narrative poem, which tells the story of a pipa girl's decline in her later years, and also expresses the poet's bleak mood of "seclusion and illness". In the second paragraph of the poem, the pipa girl plays "Nishang" and "Liu Yao" and uses metaphors to write the ups and downs of music, so that readers can see this person and hear his voice. Li He's Elegance of Li Ping turned abstract music into objects with the help of strange imagination, and highly praised Li Ping's outstanding skills in playing elegance.
Pipa Travel and Li Ping's Elegance are praised by people as a series of exquisite metaphors, which spread all over the paper and are deeply rooted in people's hearts when describing music.
Pipa Travel uses people's tangible voices in real life to describe abstract and intangible music as tangible and tangible entities, making readers seem to hear overwhelming music, which is light or heavy, fast or slow, or agitated and high-spirited, or low and sobbing. For example, the rain is heavier and duller than the music, the whisper is thinner and rounder than it, the pearls fall on the jade plate, the birds are singing, the silver bottle is broken, the water bursts, the soldiers are riding horses, and the guns are ringing. After listening to this series of clever metaphors, it is like listening to a complete tune: first, it starts with a brisk Xu Youyang, as if to arouse memories from meditation, then it is brisk and smooth, showing a happy mood, and then it gradually slows down and becomes a subtle inaudible, like a sad sob; Then, the music turned loud and clear, reminiscent of the battlefield of Jinge Iron Horse, swallowing the momentum of Wan Li like a tiger, and the ending was abrupt and meaningful, leaving room for artistic imagination. How can you not immerse yourself in the wonderful music realm! Li Ping's quotations also use a large number of metaphors, which give concrete and vivid realism to the audio and intangible things that appeal to hearing. If the written voice is crisp and pleasant, like the plum rain in Kunshan; Write a gentle and touching voice, singing like a phoenix; The music is sad and sad, which makes Furong cry. The lively music made Lan Xiang laugh. The author uses sensory synaesthesia as a metaphor for each other and visual metaphor for hearing, which makes music more colorful, both sound and tangible. At the same time, the author notes that images used for comparison can give people a special aesthetic feeling. Their images make people fondle admiringly, and their sounds are naturally fascinating. This not only mobilizes the reader's hearing and vision, but also stimulates the reader's association and imagination.
Autumn, as opposed to spring, is often full of yellow, sadness, desolation and sadness in people's eyes. Coincidentally, "Pipa Xing" and "Li Ping's Poems" are both written in autumn, with the peak of writing style, long melody, sadness, connected sentences and deep feelings in paragraphs, all of which show their rare talents with the help of music. Bai Juyi was an official in Hanlin, and was demoted to Jiangzhou Sima because he dared to speak out and angered the emperor. He is empty-minded and idealistic, and is not used by the court. His disappointment and indignation can be imagined, and he can only express his feelings in poetry. In Pipa, the pipa woman writer played "a meditation on each string, a meditation on each note, as if she were telling us about her life's pain", "falling into deep sadness and lamentation, telling more in silence than they did in their voices", and wrote that she was "her first guitar note made me sigh. Now, after listening to her story, I. We understand. What is the relationship between acquaintances? "In her heart! The same experience made him very sad: "but who among them cried the most?" , this Jiujiang officer. My blue sleeves are wet. " However, Li He was born into a family descended from a declining royal family. When he was a teenager, he was outstanding and ambitious. However, because he avoided his father, he could not take the Jinshi exam. He was just a low-ranking official who offered sacrifices to Li Lang, so his mood was very sad. He also wrote a series of poems to vent his resentment and complaints. In Li Ping's poems, he used unrealistic fantasies and symbolic language to express his thoughts of grief, indignation and loneliness: when he wrote about Chang 'an, it became cold and dense, and the sun was setting, which startled the Purple Emperor; The sky is broken, the autumn rain is falling, and in the holy mountain, the goddess holds the piano for advice; In the secluded stream, the old fish are skinny and dancing; Before the Moon Palace, WU GANG leaned against a tree and stayed up all night ... The grotesque and sad artistic conception described in the whole article complements Li He's sad mood of "self-injury".
Of course, if we deeply compare and analyze these two poems, we will find that Bai Juyi and Li He actually have their own characteristics in their creative styles. Although both of them describe music, they are quite different. Let's make a simple comparison from five aspects.
Adoption of creative methods. Bai Juyi, an advocate of the New Yuefu Movement, clearly put forward the creative principle that "articles should be written in time, and songs and poems should be written for things", emphasizing that poetry should reflect people's livelihood. Pipa Xing was written in accordance with these realistic thoughts. It objectively describes the singer's movements, tone sandhi, playing scenes and the environment at that time according to the true colors of life. In music performance, it also uses common images in life to compare and describe, faithfully reproducing the unparalleled beauty of pipa music. In addition, the author is also good at choosing and using the voice of the language, and directly simulates music with onomatopoeic words such as "noisy" and "earnest", which further increases the musical sense of the poetic language. However, Li Ping's quotations are romantic. Li He inherited the tradition of nine songs of Chu Yuefu in the Southern Dynasties and was directly inspired by Li Bai's romantic spirit. Therefore, imagination and exaggeration are often used in his poems. From the outside of Chang 'an to the inside of Chang 'an, from underground to the sky, the author gallops freely without any obstacles. The power of his music can not only break through the clouds, but also drive away ghosts and gods. Such a magical imagination and bold exaggeration are really thrilling.
In the choice of expression. The journey of pipa is mainly described from the front. Before playing, the pipa girl tried to tune the strings with a spindle, frowning while playing, bending her fingers, and then began to play. The fingering in performance is "take", "twist", "wipe" and "dial", and the fingering at the end is "take" and "dial". The melody of writing music changes from Xu Shu's fluency to gradual sinking, from intermittent pause to radical grandeur, and finally comes to an abrupt end. Although at the end of the paragraph, the phrase "the east boat is quiet in the west, only watching the autumn moon in the heart of the river" was used to touch the atmosphere at that time and describe the state of the listener waking up from a dream, thus setting off the wonderful timbre of the pipa, but generally speaking, there are few elements in the profile description. Li Ping's elegance is mainly based on profile description, and through the echo of fantasy realm, the strange and changeable voice is set off. Look, the clouds in the sky stopped to listen, and ChristianRandPhillips Motome mourned for it; The purple emperor in the sky touched the heartstrings, and the gods on the mountain were greatly impressed; The fairy WU GANG stayed up all night for it, and the Moon Palace Jade Rabbit was crazy about it. This kind of music performance effect can not help but make people gasp in admiration for Li Ping's superb playing skills and extraordinary tunes.
In the arrangement of structural order. As far as the whole poem is concerned, Pipa Travel is written in order: listening to the pipa by the river, listening to the pipa in the middle of the river, listening to the bitter life experience, singing with sentimental and rigorous structure; As far as music description is concerned, first write the tuning movements of the pipa girl, then write her performance content in two stages, and finally write the music score, with distinct layers. "The Elegant of Li Ping" first renders the artistic effect of music, using the brushwork of "pulling one hair and moving the whole body", and then points out that Li Ping is playing, and only uses two sentences to directly describe the sound, but focuses on depicting the strange and grotesque artistic realm, reflecting the exquisiteness of Li Ping's technology and dense images through the reaction to the objective environment. The Book of the Old Tang Dynasty says that Li He's "style of writing is like worshipping a cliff and rising thousands of miles", which vividly shows the "strangeness" in Li He's poetic structure.
On the emphasis of performance content. Pipa Trip mainly highlights the image of pipa girl, and the delicate description of music only plays the role of expressing pipa girl. Therefore, the author's description of pipa music is closely related to the complicated inner feelings of pipa girls everywhere: "Every string is pondered, every note is pondered" is infinite sorrow for her "unsuccessful life"; "Big strings sound like rain, small strings sound like whispers" is a surge of emotion that shows her ups and downs, while "The silver bottle broke water at the beginning, jumped out of the armored horse, and the weapons hit each other" is another emotional explosion. Finally, "the four strings all make a sound, such as the sound of tearing silk", and the sound of the piano comes to an abrupt end, revealing the heart of the pipa girl. Coupled with the tragic story of the pipa girl, how can it not arouse the poet's feeling that "we are both unhappy-we meet each other forever"? We understand. What is the relationship between acquaintances? ”！ This not only implies the theme of the poem, but also sublimates the content of the poem. In Li Ping's Elegance, the performer and the listener are basically ignored, and only the phrase "Li Ping China plays elegantly" is used to describe and introduce, mainly highlighting the performer's playing skills and describing the artistic effect of music.
In the expression effect. Fu Nan, a scholar in A Qing, once commented: "Pipa on Baixiang Mountain ... Li Changji and Li write sounds based on cymbals ... Li is enough to cry ghosts and white is enough to move people." Moving and crying ghosts can be regarded as an image summary of the different expressive effects of these two poems. "Pipa Travel" touches the scene and is inspiring. It depicts the pipa sound with vivid and appropriate metaphors, and sets off the atmosphere with simple and clear scenery, all of which are written around people's emotions, so that the foreground in front of us, the voice in the ear and the scene in the heart are combined, integrated into one, full of sound and emotion, and the scene is blended, which has received a strong artistic effect. When the singer played again, the author compressed the more complicated environment and characters' modality into four poems: "Although the tune was different from what she had played before, the banquet guests were all listening and burying their faces. But which of them cried the most? ? This Jiujiang official. My blue sleeves are wet. " Describing music can be integrated with the emotions of characters, so Pipa Xing is famous for expressing euphemistic and true emotions, which can really touch people's temperament. Li Pingyou praised Li Pingyou's superb skills by describing the bizarre artistic realm created by Li Pingyou, and also expressed the author's sad mood in a tortuous way. Motome, the princess of Hunan, heard the sound of tears and shed a little tears on the already tearful bamboo. Even Motome, who is good at drumming, is disappointed and hurt. This music not only touched the immortal on the mountain, but also made it difficult for the immortal WU GANG to sleep ... If we say the author's feelings in Pipa, we may all have had similar experiences, but Li He's Li Ping Quotations needs us to imagine with the author. Some people say that the description of this poem is "if you are a ghost, if you are stubborn", which clearly points out its characteristics, that is, winning by depicting a cold and grotesque artistic conception is also earth-shattering.
In a word, Bai Juyi's Pipa Travel and Li He's Li Ping are both composers, but each has its own strong points, which are amazing and worthy of being two wonderful flowers in the poetry circle of the middle Tang Dynasty.