This ID's Composition Assignments Recording, Idle Chat on Academician and Ministerial-Level Poetry Collections

2006/7/16 15:11:29

I said I'd put up some assignments from when I was studying composition, but haven't gotten around to it. First, because I've been quite busy recently, but most critically because these recordings take up a lot of space. The podcast hosting has limited upload capacity, and this ID would never be so shameless as to think composition assignments are more worthy of taking up internet resources than the great works of Beethoven and Schubert, so I'd rather leave more space for Beethoven and Schubert. Today I experimented and got a one-minute recording down to less than 700K, so I've uploaded under three minutes of assignments. The characteristic of these three assignments is that they're all single-movement forms composed of large expanded periods. Through these assignments, I'll introduce a bit of music theory to everyone. You see these three little pieces differ in performance length and mood, but their internal form is all the same. This is somewhat like the regulated verse forms in Chinese classical poetry -- the same seven-character regulated verse format can express all of humanity's different emotions and circumstances.

A major difference between amateurs and professionals lies in the mastery of musical form or poetic meter. For amateurs, forms and meters are constraints, but for professionals, it's different -- it's the so-called dancing in chains. Amateurs always clamor that forms and meters constrain thought, but this is simply a display of low ability. Minds that can't even handle forms and meters can only produce garbage thoughts. Speaking of genius, nobody can match Mozart, yet all his music unfolds within extremely limited forms. The number of these forms absolutely doesn't exceed twenty, and the most commonly used ones are probably just five or six.

Before this ID formally studied composition with a teacher in high school, I had already written a lot of things, entirely spontaneously. My first teacher was already in his 80s, a student of Xian Xinghai, and a recipient of a very prestigious arts achievement award. Upon first meeting, he heard some things this ID had written and was extremely pleased, but said that this ID's writing was too wild and needed to start from the basics, training strictly in each type of form. Fortunately, I met him while still in high school, so no lasting damage was done. It's like some people who write classical Chinese poetry: they develop bad habits from the start, and basically their whole life is ruined. A while ago, an academician sent a self-published collection of classical poetry to our family -- a thick book, yet I couldn't find seven characters in proper taste. Simply beyond words.

Here's a not-very-funny joke. One day at the Kunlun Hotel, I met a once-prominent figure who happened to be holding a poetry collection someone had inscribed to him. This ID picked it up and flipped through it, finding countless problems and criticizing them at length. Only when I flipped to the title page did I discover it was the work of a certain ministerial-level VIP, and upon inquiry, it turned out to be a gift from said figure. But this ID couldn't care less -- I continued my grand commentary, then we discussed the poetry of a certain figure from the last century who was reputed to be a great poet, and this ID let loose another round of merciless criticism. Then, in high spirits, I composed something via text message and sent it to the other party, then told him to compare for himself. Thinking about it now, the VIP's writing was actually far better than typical "old cadre style" poetry, and publicly available work has many constraints -- at least it can't be too sentimental -- so there's no need to be too harsh. But this kind of fundamental quality is probably a matter of the times. That's why in some historical eras, an entire epoch produced not a single good line of poetry or good piece of music -- not surprising at all.

This ID's music podcast is: Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán's Music Podcast. Music lovers, please visit to listen, download, and leave comments. This way, this ID's upload space will grow larger, and I can upload freely. If you don't like classical music, forget it -- there's no pop music there.

The player below contains three little one-part form assignments from this ID's high school days. Make do with them. But please stop the background music first, otherwise the sounds will overlap.