Weekend Concert 11: Eternity Amid the Gunfire
2006/9/29 17:55:35
Purely descriptive, narrative music, like purely argumentative poetry, is the result of excessive force. Human stupidity and greed can be infinitely overdrawn, and the same applies to art. The best way to kill an art form is to infinitely expand it. When all forms have been infinitely expanded, everything becomes nothing, leaving only the deficit created by human stupidity and greed, finally balanced in death's ledger.
How much artistic value descriptive, narrative music actually has is a discussion that will probably never reach any conclusion. On a very physiological level, this question is equivalent to how much influence human hearing has on the human soul. Similar questions can extend to human sight, taste, touch, and so on. Therefore, whether a single act of intercourse and a single listening of descriptive, narrative music have the same meaning for the human soul is absolutely not a sensationalist question.
Post-Classical music increasingly sinks into such questions. If music merely manufactures certain fluctuations of the human soul, recording certain events of human activity, then how does music's function differ from that of sexual intercourse? When listening to music becomes a sexual event manufactured by the ear, music's so-called sublimity becomes an ideological fantasy. True music transcends fantasy. Music that is equivalent to sexual intercourse is merely sound. Music has always been relatedly unrelated to the vibration of eardrums; emotions manufactured by sound have nothing to do with music.
Whether Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony is equivalent to sexual intercourse -- for this work born in the fires of the siege of Leningrad, such an inquiry may be excessively cruel. But at least one thing is certain: this work whose first movement alone thunders for nearly half an hour has been ideologically fantasized about like sex from the day it was born. This work that won Shostakovich worldwide ideological acclaim -- is it a bloated version of the 1812 Overture, or does it transcend that comrade's non-comrade production? This is truly a question that only transcending ideological fantasy can answer.
Foreplay, climax -- the habitual terms of ideological analysis, constructing an ideological musical world. What Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony witnesses, the answer lies not in Leningrad's gunfire. True music is relatedly unrelated to witnessing. And war, like sex, is a collection of chaotic sounds and movements that cannot constitute true music. Yet music -- Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony -- became eternal amid the gunfire.
Music is not in the listening, but music must be listened to. Please turn off all background music. What is to be listened to below are the four movements of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony.
Comments
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán 2006/9/29 19:07:01
[Anonymous] QWJHUHWQ
2006-09-29 19:00:10
First time listening, didn't feel much.
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20th-century music differs from 19th-century; you need to listen more. When this ID was in middle school, I once asked Li Delun a question: "Who is greater, Shostakovich or Beethoven?" -- that anecdote I'll tell when the opportunity arises.
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán 2006/9/29 19:03:58
Happy holidays to all.