Abstract
The Chinese art song, yishu gequ 藝術歌曲, is a typical genre of New Music (Xin yinyue 新音樂) of the May Fourth Movement. Such pieces were primarily composed by Chinese graduates of European and American universities who found inspiration in European Romantic art songs, especially nineteenth-century German lieder.
The existing Western literature about this genre emphasizes the connections between the Chinese art songs of the twentieth century and European Romantic songs and does not consider any relationship with the domestic Chinese tradition. As this paper demonstrates, the Chinese art songs that emerged during the May Fourth Movement were not created solely by following a Western model.
Their uniqueness is the result of combining the search for "new culture" with the significant traces of domestic roots in the social role of music and the tradition of joining words and music in a single artistic whole.