The spirit of Confucian ritual and music and the artistic style of Zhuangzi's music are not new issues in academia. With Western learning to spread to the East since the mid-19th century, various theories of Chinese music have been introduced under the cultural impact of Western music. With this trend, the aesthetics concept of Chinese music has taken its place in music theory. As the two major sources of Chinese culture, the importance of Confucian Confucianism and the Taoist Zhuangzi in influencing art is self-evident. The themes of Confucius' spirit of ritual and music and Zhuangzi's style of musical art are addressed in both music and Chinese. In the Chinese field, most of the arguments are elaborate on the state of thought, focusing on the revelation of the spiritual realm. The focus of the music field is on how the spirit of thought is put into practice in music. The causality between sonic presentation and ideology is the major concern of scholars in music.
This study takes the spirit of Confucian ritual and music and the artistic style of Zhuangzi's music as the theme, and provides an in-depth analysis of contemporary music scholars' discussion of these two. The researcher proposes there are three influential factors concerning the direction of interpretation in the discourse of contemporary music: the trend of the classics period, the specific conceptual vocabulary, and the analysis of the aesthetic experience. Regarding these three factors, the researcher has emphasized the interpretative rationale between the construction of ideological contexts and musical realities, resulting in different interpretative phenomena.
To a certain extent, interpreting the relationship between sound and thought reflects the aesthetic view of the classics period. The researcher’s interpretative theory is to explore the ancient orientation of music. Taking the three factors that influence interpretation, namely, the trend of the classics period, the specific conceptual vocabulary, and the analysis of the aesthetic experience, the researcher analyzes and summarizes the phenomenon of interpretation in contemporary music, and tries to propose an alternative path of interpretation.