There are two remarks before the lecture. The first is the purpose of this article, that is, why these things are long-winded and what readers can understand after reading this article. The author feels that some students have been learning erhu for several years, but they are dumbfounded when they encounter fingerings that the teacher has not taught, and expounded the relevant music theory knowledge, so this article is divided into two parts, the natural paragraphs 2 and 3 are Some relatively boring music theory knowledge, you can know what tonality and mode are by reading these; the latter paragraphs respectively express the way of expressing tonality in line notation and numbered notation, and link it with Erhu, explaining the fingering of Erhu. principle. This article is entirely for beginners with a certain foundation of erhu, so there are some places that are not very rigorous for easy understanding. Professionals please ignore this article; but if you don't understand, you can pass 2, 3, and 4 naturally. Duan - these are about basic music theory, you can still play erhu if you don't understand; The second is the preparation before reading this article. First of all, you have learned and memorized all the things mentioned in the elementary school music class. At the same time, you know that the pitch is determined by the vibration frequency. Need to understand a basic but easily overlooked fact: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si are not fixed, for non-transposing instruments the true pitch is C, D, E, F, G , A, B, the latter corresponds to different vibration frequencies, and the vibration frequency determines the level of the music. Understand this, then start to get to the point.

The tonality we are talking about here is actually what we often call "tune". Often people will say "turned up" after they can't sing well. The "tune" that ta said actually refers to the key he used when singing. Tonality = mode + pitch, everyone should understand what is going on with the pitch, the auditory sense is the level of the sound, and the physical explanation is the size of the vibration frequency. Below we understand what a mode is. The so-called mode, in layman's terms, is a group of sounds of different pitches, with a certain tone that sounds very stable to people as the main tone, and a regular arrangement around this main tone. The most common modes in our country are the major and minor tones and the pentatonic modes commonly used in traditional Chinese music. Here comes a question: what is a tonic? The tonic is the core tone of the mode, and usually the last note of the music ends with this note (just usually ha! Some songs are deliberately not ending to the listener, just like the ending of some novels.), so you listen When a certain tone appears repeatedly in a piece of music and often appears in an important position such as the strong beat of a measure (do you remember the strong and weak sub-strength we talked about in elementary school music class?), then that tone is generally the tonic! Taking the main tone as the starting point and the ending point, the other sounds are arranged in the form of a scale in the order of pitch, which is called a mode scale. The scale arrangement of each mode is different. For example, the scale arrangement of the natural major scale represented by simple notation is 1234567i. Because the pitch is different from a whole tone and a semitone, the scale arrangement of this mode is characterized by the 3rd and 4th tones. The tone is a semitone relationship, the seventh tone and the first one octave higher are semitone relationship, and the other two adjacent tones are whole tone relationship; natural minor is 67 (there should be a dot below 6 and 7... ...) 123456, the 2nd tone and the 3rd tone are semitone relation, the 5th tone and 6th tone are semitone relation, and the rest are whole tone relation. The natural major and minor scales are the two most commonly used and common modes, and everyone must always know where the relationship between the several semitones is. In addition to these two modes, there are many other modes, such as harmonic minor, melodic minor, etc., which can be regarded as the deformation of natural major and minor, so I won't say more. What kind of scale is used in a piece of music can directly reflect the style of the piece. For example, a piece in a natural major key feels brighter and more open; a piece in a natural minor key is "graceful and graceful", such as a lot of popular songs. The scale arrangement of many traditional Japanese music is harmonic minor.

Well, the concept of tonality has been clarified, let's take a look at what tonality is. As mentioned above, the key is the mode + pitch. It is often said that so-and-so is what tone, so-and-so is an English letter, indicating what the tonic is; what tone indicates the scale arrangement of the tone. For example, in the key of C natural major, C indicates where the tonic is, and the major key indicates that this piece uses the natural major scale 1234567i arrangement. The tonic of this scale arrangement is C, the second is D, the third is E, and so on.

After understanding the most basic concepts above, let's talk about how the tonality is reflected in the spectrum. However, it should be noted that the musical score can only reflect the pitch, and the specific mode can only be known by analyzing the musical score. The easiest way to analyze is to find the main tone and listen to the feeling. If the tonic found is 1, then it is a major mode; if the tonic is 6, it is a minor mode; and the specific subdivision is not very useful. Let's talk about pitch determination. If it's a staff, then there will be key signatures after the clef, either a bunch of sharps or a bunch of flats (or maybe none). Taking the treble clef as an example (that is, looking at the most complicated clef), for the scores of non-transposition instruments - such as piano, violin, oboe and other musical scores, of course, the erhu is not considered to be the current erhu in China. The spectrum is still mostly simple notation - the lower line of the staff is the middle C, which corresponds to the vibration frequency of 256Hz. If the key signature of a score is not one sharp or sharp, then it means that the song is in the key of C major or A minor. If there is a sharp, and the sharp is placed on the fifth line, and the tonic of the piece becomes G, then the piece is in the key of G major. The number of different sharps and sharps corresponds to different modes. Because folk music often uses scaled notation, it is not very useful for everyone to know more about them. Therefore, we will not be verbose and directly talk about how our commonly used musical notation expresses tonal tones. High.

Whenever we get a complete score, there must be a "1=X" symbol in the upper left corner. This symbol tells us which key is used in this song, but it can only tell us these, and we cannot distinguish whether it is A more specific division such as major or minor. General friends usually use which fingerings to use according to this, for example, if 1=D is marked, then it is 15 strings, and if 1=C is marked, it is 26 strings and so on. Maybe many people learn piano by rote memorizing this set of fingerings. Anyway, I was like this when I was a child. Although I have learned a lot of music theory, they are all staffed notation, and I rarely rely on the musical notation. But the problem arises when we see a piece like "Erquan Reflecting the Moon", because the piece is marked with 1=G, but we use 15 strings when playing it! This forces us to think about why the key of D is usually the 15th string, and the key of G is the 52th string. Through the above verbosity, you should know that various tones determine the pitch of a piece of music, and our erhu strings can be tuned. So how is our erhu tuned? Under normal circumstances, we set the inner string as middle D and the outer string as middle A, that is to say, the vibration frequency of the two strings is determined, that is, the pitch is fixed (if you don’t understand this, go to junior high school). the acoustics part of the physics). If the notation is marked with 1=D, it means that the sound of D is regarded as 1, and our Erhu Li chord is set as D, and the natural chord is 1. When D is 1, DEFGA, 12345, A is 5, so the outer string is 5 - so, when 1=D, which is what we often say in the key of D, our erhu is 1 5 string. Similarly, we are looking to see if the same is true for other tunes. Just give an example, such as 1=A. This is the key of A, which means that the sound of A is regarded as our 1. It happens that our erhu outer string is set as A, so the outer string is regarded as 1. DEFGA, 45671, D is a 4, so the inner string is 4, so that the A key is the fingering of the 4 1 string! Understand this, when we encounter a new key, such as 1=B, we can also understand what the sound of our erhu empty string is, take 1=B as an example, and take the pitch of B as 1, And the inner string of our erhu is D, BCD, 123, so the inner string is 3; the outer string is A, AB, 7i, so the outer string is 7 - so, when 1=B, we use the 37th string (Very unusual). Then why is the fingering of "Erquan Yingyue" so special? This is because theoretically, when playing this piece, the tuning of our erhu needs to be changed, the inner string is set to the bass G, the outer string is set to the middle D, so we can calculate according to the above, it should be 1 5 String it~

Knowing what sound the empty string represents, you can naturally deduce the position of other sounds. The pitch is divided into whole tone and semitone, between 3 and 4, between 7 and i is semitone relationship, and the rest are whole tone relationship. For fixed pitch C, D, E, F, G, A, B, between E and F, between A and B are semitones, and the rest are whole tones. Based on this, let's calculate the fingering of 1=D. When 1=D, the sound of 1, 2 and 1 are in a whole tone relationship, so there is a large distance between our first finger and Qianjin; 3 and 2 are also in a whole tone relationship, so our second There is also a large distance between the finger and the first finger; the critical moment is coming: the relationship between 4 and 3 is a semitone, so our fingering is that the third finger and the fourth finger are almost next to each other; the outer string and the inner string are the same . When several of our fingers are used up, we will change the handle. However, it should be noted that when the position is downward, according to the vibration principle of acoustics and the regulation of pitch, when a whole tone or semitone is formed, the finger spacing of the playing will become narrower and narrower, which is why when we When playing the fourth or fifth position, it is often necessary to "give the finger", which means that the distance of a whole tone is already close to a certain extent. The same principle applies to other tones. For example, when 1=G, the fingers on the first position of the inner string are placed in the same way as D, but when playing the outer string scale, the second finger and the first finger are next to each other instead of the third finger. This is because 3 and 4 are semitones, and 4 and 5 are whole. If you still want to play the second and third fingers next to each other, then the pull will be a sharp 4 - because the sharp 4 and 3 are a whole tone relationship, and the 5 is a semitone relationship.

After mastering the above, we can leave the teacher and the book and learn all kinds of fingerings by ourselves. Let's use the theory mentioned above to make a derivation. The Japanese erhu song "The Street Where Wind Lives" has a long section in the key of D-flat in the middle and at the end. I believe that no teacher will teach students this fingering. But after reading the above, I believe that everyone should be able to deduce the exact position of each pitch by themselves! D flat and D are semitone relationship, so if D flat is 1, then what is D? Yes, drop by 2 (it can also be said to be raised by 1). What about outer strings? A reckoning, oh, drop 6. Then push down the position of the other sounds. The hollow string of the inner string is 2-flat, then a finger position slightly close to the daughter can play 2 (in fact, this distance is the distance between 3 and 4 when we pull the key of F, why? Because the 2-drop Like 2, 3 and 4, they are all semitones), then leave a large distance, press 3 with the second finger, and play 4 with the third and second fingers next to each other. Treble position. According to the known position, refer to the fingerings that you are familiar with in other keys, and assign a set of fingerings that you are used to pulling for the new key. How about it? Got it~ Very easy!

In fact, the principle of other musical instruments is the same, let's take the pipa as an example. The tuning of the lute is AEDA. If it is in the key of D, then the fourth string is 5, the third string is 2, the second string is 1, and the first string is 5. Then each fret is a semitone relationship, based on which you can determine the position of all the notes!

Music theory is not complicated, and knowing some music theory will be very helpful for the learning of musical instruments. Many friends around me can play musical instruments very well, but they don’t know anything about music theory. They are dumbfounded when they face the notation. I want to come to the teaching of folk music and often ignore the teaching of music theory (I mainly refer to the Western music theory here, because the traditional Chinese music theory is a little outdated and not very practical, and the essence is too advanced...), I hope You can find more books on basic music theory by yourself, and strive to make our national music in line with international standards and carry forward our traditional elegance~