Chinese art songs—which are derived from over four thousand years of Chinese culture and combine unique Chinese literary and musical flavors with Western compositional techniques—remain largely unknown in the Western world. Chinese art song, a treasure of a genre, deserves more attention from Western singers and scholars. With a population of 1.41 billion, China has the largest potential market for bel canto singing. Not only will studying Chinese art songs enrich a singer's worldview and repertoire choices, doing so will also be advantageous when singing internationally. In order to assist non-Chinese-speaking singers overcome the difficult language barrier that often prevents them from studying Chinese art songs, I have chosen six songs by the renowned early twentieth century Chinese composer, Huang Zi (1904–1938) to analyze. Although he remains virtually unknown in the Western scholarly world, Huang's Chinese art songs, which include both ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry as well as Chinese and Western musical characteristics, are representative of this genre. By analyzing the poetry and musical settings of six Chinese art songs by Huang Zi, providing pronunciation instructions for Mandarin Chinese, word-for-word and poetic translations, practical International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions from the Pinyin system, and creating an interpretive guide of these songs, this project aims to help singers worldwide to prepare and perform Chinese art songs in a more expressive and authentic way. Taking this project as the first step, singers and scholars worldwide will be able to study and research more Chinese art songs and explore a new artistic world.

This dissertation examines the contributions of the early twentieth-century Chinese composer Huang Zi to the genre of Chinese art songs. It discusses how he combined Western compositional techniques with traditional Chinese music and ancient or contemporary Chinese poetry, focusing on his works 花非花 Flowers in the Mist, 点绛唇, 赋登楼 Ode to Ascending the Tower, 思乡 Missing Homelands, and 春思曲 Spring Nostalgia. Huang's songs, which created a bridge between East and West, are still significant today in China and deserve performance in the West, too. Translations and a phonetic guide to the four songs are provided so that Western singers have the tools they need to perform these songs.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when young Chinese scholars looked to Western nations for answers in hope of revitalizing a nation that once dominated the East, musicians and poets embarked on a journey of establishing a new Chinese style of music. Three sets of composer/poet collaborations and three different ways of infusing Western culture with Chinese culture laid the foundation for Chinese choral music today. Chao Yuan-Ren was a brilliant linguist and music lover who thought that to simply implant Western music onto Chinese text would suffice–his HaiYun, set to a poem of the equally brilliant poet Xu Zhi-Mo serves as a good example. Huang Zi believed in Confucius’ teachings that all new things must grow out of tradition. He and the lyricist Wei Huang-Zhang extended a literary tradition started in the Tang dynasty and produced Song of Everlasting Sorrow, which illustrates this philosophy quite well. Yet, for the underprivileged people who also loved music, folk songs provided a fertile ground as seen in the works of Xian Xing-Hai. During the second Sino-Japanese War, the poet Guang Wei-Ran and Xian worked hand-in-hand, producing the Yellow River Cantata that contains folksong-like melodies and many folk-music elements. Chinese choral music today is unavoidably connected to these three pieces. This document traces the early history of Chinese choral music through these three pieces and explains their influences on Chinese choral music today.

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