When it comes to the issue regarding the creation of nationalistic tendency in Chinese piano music composition in the contemporary period, the discussion should focus on how to merge the traditional culture images together with novel methods of composition skillfully. As for the selection of the piano work, the piece named "Twelve Zodiac Piano Suite" by Yao Henglu can be the subject of this paper. Most existing researches tend to focus their analysis from the perspective of cultural interpretations and local techniques. However, there are still some aspects that are ignored. Therefore, this research article examines the development of nationalism in the composition from an ontological perspective of musicology through its relationship between style development, structural creation, and texture execution, and validates the recognizable musical characteristics of the piece via auditory experiments. The findings indicate that in the auditory image identification test, the highest rate of accuracy for auditory image identification of rapid segmentation rhythmic units was achieved by the music-major participants with 88.0%, while the non-specialized individuals were 85.4%; in the structural identification test, the highest accuracy rate for structural identification of ternary structures was realized, which is 91.2%, far exceeding the accuracy rates of variation structures (78.6%) and free structures (62.4%).

Yubo Wang. Stylistic Construction and Textural Expression of Yao Henglu's "Twelve Zodiac Piano Suite" in a Nationalistic Context. Frontiers in Art Research (2026), Vol. 8, Issue 2: 7-13. https://doi.org/10.25236/FAR.2026.080202.

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