The emergence and rise of words are closely related to music and adapt to the new needs of social development. Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, with the development of social economy, there have been many prosperous commercial cities and a large number of citizen classes. In order to meet the leisure and entertainment needs of urban residents, various new forms of rap performances came into being. Among them, singing new words to music is a kind of leisure and entertainment that citizens like. At first, musicians and singers sang with metrical poems written by some literati, but the words in metrical poems were strict, and sometimes they could not match the ups and downs of music well. So folk musicians and singers, as well as some down-and-out literati, began to write some lyrics that matched the length of the music, and in this way, words came into being. Therefore, the rise of ci can be said to be in the new environment after the complete separation of poetry and music after the Han Dynasty. Regression in a new way under new conditions. It was not until the end of the Southern Song Dynasty that, for various reasons, Ci broke away from its attachment to music and became a kind of metrical poem in essence.
With the aim of harmony, Ci has formed its own unique institutional characteristics. For example, poetry always has a title, and the title of poetry always has some relationship with the content of poetry. But the word has no title, only a tablet indicating the tune. Because the lyrics are always written according to the score at the beginning, and they are sung in chorus, it is the epigraph that indicates the names of these different tunes. For words, this is more important than the title of the summary content. For another example, poems separated from music after the Han Dynasty, regardless of length, usually start from themselves and end with a paragraph. Most words are segmented, such as disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetrasyllabic, especially disyllabic with upper and lower gaps. The reason is also very simple, that is, to make use of the rhythm, resulting in the artistic effect of "shallow singing" and "singing three sighs". In addition, the interval of rhyming sentences of words is more flexible than that of poems, and the rhyming is rougher than that of poems. There are no hard and fast rules on antithesis, but the requirements for level and level are stricter than poetry. These institutional characteristics are also related to the musical expression characteristics of words.
Qu He Ci, like Ci, was first popular among the people and came into being at the time of the decline of Song Ci. As a popular art form, Song Ci once flourished in the Song Dynasty. However, because many literati added characters to the creation of Ci, on the one hand, it certainly improved the artistic value of Ci, but on the other hand, it also made Ci lose its original mass base because of its increasing elegance. In the late Southern Song Dynasty, because many tunes of Ci were gradually lost, they could no longer be sung, and even became something that only a few literati could play, so they gradually became rigid. Just at this time, the northern minorities such as Jurchen and Mongolia became stronger and stronger, and the Jin and Yuan regimes were established one after another. With their invasion to the south, a new kind of music, which was originally popular in the northern region where they lived, gradually aroused the interest of the people in the Central Plains, and tried to create new lyrics of long and short sentences to sing along with them, so Yuan Qu was born. During the Southern Song Dynasty, with the characteristics of southern music, a kind of "southern music" was produced among the people. Although Nanqu was not produced in the Song Dynasty, it was very prosperous in the Ming Dynasty. In order to distinguish it from Nanqu in the history of literature, Yuanqu is also called "Beiqu".
Traditionally, the so-called Yuanqu includes two different styles: one is the so-called "Sanqu", which is a kind of long and short sentences that can be sung by music, divided into poems and Sanqu, belonging to the style of poetry; Another kind of drama is mainly based on lyrics, but the story is dull, with plots and characters' actions, which is similar to later dramas, so it is also called drama or zaju. In fact, both Sanqu and Opera originated in Liao and Jin Dynasties, but they were named as "Yuanqu", because the ethnic discrimination policy pursued by the Yuan Dynasty objectively promoted the prosperity of Ququ.
After the Yuan Dynasty unified the whole country, fat people were divided into Mongols, Semu people, Han people and southerners, and Han people and southerners were discriminated against and persecuted. In addition, the rulers in the early Yuan Dynasty did not understand the importance of knowledge and intellectuals, so they stopped the imperial examinations for decades. The majority of Han Confucian scholars had no choice but to enter the official career, so they participated in the creation of Yuanqu in large numbers. Their depression inspired their creative enthusiasm, their hard life provided materials for their creation, and their high cultural accomplishment provided a guarantee for improving the artistic quality of Yuanqu, so the creation of Yuanqu was pushed to an unprecedented climax and became a literary style representing the times. However, by the end of the Yuan Dynasty, due to the restoration of the imperial examination system, many scholars resumed their studies, and the number of people devoted to the creation of Yuan songs was greatly reduced, and the artistry of their works was greatly reduced. Since then, zaju in Yuan Qu has been gradually replaced by drama in Nanqu. In the Ming Dynasty, the Southern Opera, Legend, was even more popular throughout the country.
The biggest difference between Song Dynasty and poetry in system is mainly reflected in two aspects. First, poetry always rhymes every other sentence, while songs rhyme every sentence, and the rhyme is enough to be even. For example, in Qiu Si, the five words "crow", "home", "horse", "summer" and "elegance" all rhyme, among which "horse" and "summer" belong to rhyme. Second, interlining is often used, and most of the interlining used has the language characteristics of the northern nationalities, which will never appear in metrical poems.