Today something struck me when I was watching the CCTV New Years program 2007. During one popular song of that year, "吉祥三寶", actually a Mongolian song, due to the programming, the song was sung first in Mandarin and then in Mongolian. It was very obvious that it sounded dull in Mandarin but much more interesting and likable in Mongolian.
From this phenomenon, which I'm confident that most Mandarin speaker would agree with me, I see the first reaction by me is that Mandarin is very monosyllabic (and having a low variability in terms of syllable structure), in contrast with Mongolian.
Meanwhile this doesn't mean all Mandarin songs are dull to listen to. There are plenty of them that people find likable, but this one is just not one of them.
Thus comes the question: Does Mandarin vocal music have a tendency to prefer certain rhythmic types in music when text setting, thus to complement the feature (low variability in syllable structure) of its linguistic rhythm? If so, to what extent does this principle apply and to what genres/times? How about other languages? Can we in general find a foundation for the preference of musical rhythm in a certain culture as related to linguistic rhythmic features in similar ways?
In fact, while this might be viewed as an explanation of the link between m/l rhythms, such as proposed by Patel (also touches upon variability index), this is actually counter Patel's argument about English and French, because in his study instrumental music rhythm tends to have the same relative value on nPVI as the linguistic rhythm, keeping them consistent. So this might shed light on how are we going to see the whole picture. Is it possible that the preferred instrumental musical rhythmic type in a given culture is shaped by its linguistic rhythmic feature, where vocal music serves as a medium state? (first have preferred vocal music rhythm that can compliment the linguistic rhythmic feature, then expand to music)?
No comments:
Post a Comment