The Humanities and History of Listening
2007/5/27 10:36:48
Got up early wanting to upload music, but found the website on strike, so I can only chat about other things. Music, in material terms, originates from human hearing, but mere hearing alone cannot constitute music. Without the spiritual projection of the human being, music would be meaningless as music.
Music requires drawing a circle and staying within it -- only music that draws its own boundaries possesses the infinity of the spiritual world. But modern people have forgotten all this. Modern people think the world exists only where the wheels of material progress roll, not realizing that this is the real prison. The expanded boundaries of music have given music a material infinity, while music's spirit has thereby shriveled to its limits. Music has consequently become politicized, popularized, industrialized, bed-moanified.
For music to be reborn, it must first draw its boundaries anew, put on chains again, dance in chains again. Reducing material possibilities to a minimum is what ignites the infinite light of the spirit. True music, in essence, can only be the product of suffering. Without the soul's struggle, without life's extremity, there can essentially be no music at all. Music, in essence, is solitude. It is precisely because of this desperate solitude that it can sit atop the temple of the spirit, rather than at the festival of matter.
Look at these names -- which of them was not a soul struggling in life's extremity? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich -- even including Tchaikovsky, whom this ID holds in extreme contempt. Just like the Chinese classic "Moon Reflected in the Erquan Spring" that Chinese people know so well -- isn't it the same? The life and soul here need not be individual. Without the extremity and struggle of an entire people, there would be no "Yellow River Cantata." Fundamentally, after 1949, not a single work stands on its own in terms of the breadth of life and the depth of soul. Works like "The Butterfly Lovers" and "The Yellow River" only make this ID nauseous.
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán 2007/5/27 10:40:23
Been too busy lately, yesterday was another full day. Today I have some free time, this ID needs to go somewhere for a beauty treatment. Heading out first, see you tomorrow morning.