The place of children’s works by Sergei Prokofiev in music education in China in the context of Russian-Chinese pedagogical interaction

Abstract

The article examines the functioning of children’s works by Prokofiev Sergei Sergeevich within the system of music education in the People’s Republic of China as an indicator and instrument of Russian-Chinese pedagogical interaction shaped by the Russian piano school and contemporary transformations of Chinese music education. It is shown that Prokofiev’s children’s repertoire («Children’s Music», Op. 65; the symphonic fairy tale «Peter and the Wolf», and their arrangements) in Chinese practice serves not only as instructional material but also as a means of restructuring artistic thinking: it introduces students to the aesthetics of «new simplicity», irony, and the grotesque, to an expanded modal-harmonic logic and motoric rhythmics that require a different auditory orientation compared with the dominant Classical-Romantic models. The study highlights a contradiction between the high level of technical proficiency of Chinese students and a deficit of stylistic semantic sensitivity in the interpretation of Russian musical modernism; as a result, «simple» pieces reveal greater interpretive complexity than virtuoso texts. The analytical perspective includes a comparison of the musical score with the editorial premises of Chinese editions, a hermeneutic interpretation of cultural barriers to perception (pentatonic auditory experience, the normativity of Confucian ethics, and features of tonal language), as well as the identification of methodological strategies that make it possible to preserve the composer’s intent under conditions of cultural adaptation. The significance is substantiated of training the hearing of vertical sonorities as phonic complexes, cultivating «speaking» articulation, and developing polyphonic hearing and orchestral timbral imagination at the piano; particular attention is paid to the risks of reducing programmatic content to illustrativeness and of the «étudization» of motor pieces under competition-oriented conditions. The productivity of integrating theatricalization and multimedia practices is noted, as is the role of master classes and the direct transmission of performance tradition in forming an adequate Prokofievian sound production. The article’s material makes it possible to assess the relevance of Prokofiev’s children’s legacy as a pedagogical «bridge» between the classical tradition and the artistic codes of the twentieth century within the Chinese educational environment.