Cantata "Yellow River Cantata" is a large-scale choral music in the form of western cantata with traditional Chinese music style. Cantatas generally begin and end with a chorus, sometimes with an overture, interspersed with declamations, arias, or choruses. Although cantatas do not have a complete story line like operas, they do have a certain degree of theatricality. Xian Xinghai not only demonstrated this dramatic effect through his cantata "Yellow River Cantata", but also added musical compositions with Chinese national characteristics to the Western musical techniques, with the movements linked together by recitatives and orchestra as a backdrop, creating the earliest cantata in China. Xian Xinghai is a milestone figure in the history of modern Chinese music. He organically combined Western compositional techniques with Chinese folk music, learning Western musical compositional techniques while retaining certain Chinese national colours, which had a profound influence and value on the nationalisation of Chinese music.

After the middle of the nineteenth century, the systematic notation, counterpoint, harmony, composition and tonal style developed in Europe were successively imported into China from Europe, Japan and other places, resulting in great changes in Chinese music under the influence of the West. Liu Jingzhi used the term "new music" to summarise the musical works created by composers after the Opium War, using Chinese musical materials and adopting European compositional techniques, styles, genres and musical languages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which were different from traditional Chinese music, and pointed out that this "new music" was the most important element in the development of Chinese music. It is pointed out that this "new music" is an innovation of cultural significance in the course of the development of Chinese music.

When the Yellow River Cantata was formed, China's new music was still in its infancy, and its composers and lyricists were young and ambitious, and their achievements and those of their works were closely linked to the current situation, which was not only the birth of the authors and their works, but also a kind of corroboration of the authors and their works to the history of the time and space.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Western music began to take root in China since the rise of "school music". In 1920, Xiao Youmei and others brought the Western professional music education system and composition techniques to China, and China's professional music career formally began. The high degree of compatibility between the lyrics and music of poet Guang Weiran and composer Xian Xinghai has made the Yellow River Cantata, a large-scale modern choral work in China, to be handed down to the present day and to last for a long time.

The historical background of the creation of the Yellow River Cantata was the barbaric invasion of China by Japanese imperialism, which plunged China into an unprecedented national disaster. The Yellow River Cantata is a work of art that highly summarises the Chinese people's struggle against aggression during the anti-Japanese war era. The Yellow River Cantata has been repeatedly mentioned in the history of the Communist Party of China's literary and artistic resistance, and at its inception, it was called "a pioneering work of new music in the war period". Lv Ji considered it as "marking the peak of music creation in Yan'an", and Guo Moruo called it "the most successful new type of song produced during the war of resistance", and it is still active on the music stage and in film and television productions.

This thesis will analyse Xian Xinghai's cantata "Yellow River Cantata", before that, we will review the origin and development of cantata as well as the Chinese nationalised cantata to understand it. By studying the earliest Chinese cantata, the Yellow River Cantata, we will not only grasp the combination of Western cantatas and traditional Chinese musical culture, but also take a closer look at the patriotism that lyricists and composers expressed through their works during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.