Music and musicians of the traditional Chinese 'dizi' in the People's Republic of China

This dissertation is a study of the solo repertory and players of the traditional Chinese transverse flute, the dizi, in the People's Republic of China. While solo dizi music is believed to have long existed in the history of Chinese Music, the current repertory and practice is in fact based on a number of regional instrumental traditions which has emerged since 1949. Similar to other social, cultural, and political institutions in post-1949 China, music has undergone a significant change according to the Marxist - Leninist political ideology and Mao Zedong's thought. The main thesis of this study is that this ideological shift has prompted the emergence a class of professional dizi performers and that their musical thoughts and practice largely conform to and embody in the state's political orientation and ethos.This study is divided into five chapters. Chapter one provides an introduction to the study, the instrument, the performance context, theoretical framework, a common view of the music, and the fieldwork. Chapter two focuses on the notion of musical professionalism in contemporary China and surveys the biographies and careers of three generations of state-employed zhuanye professional dizi players. In order to support the thesis that this music and its players are of recent origin, chapter three describes, compares, and contrasts the training procedures and methods in both the earlier period and the present. Chapter four is a study of the early 20th-century dizi repertory and the context in which it existed. The final chapter is an analysis of the post-1949 solo dizi music and a description of its salient features based on a corpus of compositions collected during my field research in the People's Republic of China in 1986 and 1987.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio