◎Jin Zhaojun (music critic)
This topic was copied from my old friend Zhou Haihong.
In 1998, Zhou Haihong asked his lover and my colleague Xu Dong to bring me a manuscript "Why does music need to be "understood" - Reshaping the concept of music aesthetics". I felt the same after reading it, and felt that although it was a bit of a "clickbait" , but in fact it is a very comprehensive and important discussion on music aesthetics, which was published in the fifth issue of "People's Music". This article caused a lot of controversy at the time, but it also became the core of Zhou Haihong's academic activities in the rest of his life.
mentioned this article because he saw the various controversies that have become a hot topic in recent days over the TV variety show "Singer". Among them, the "comments on comments" are even more colorful, even ridiculous to the point of "defending the home and the country". Therefore, it is somewhat necessary to reiterate Zhou Haihong’s views.
Zhou Haihong graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music, majoring in music aesthetics and music psychology, and has made great achievements in children's piano education. Unlike some colleagues who focus on the academic field, he also pays attention to feeding back the results of theoretical research into practice. To put it bluntly, he also expresses unique insights into phenomenon-level issues in music life in the form of essays, comments and speeches.
Copy a few of his "famous quotes":
Why do you need to "understand" music?
What does music understanding need to be "correct"? There is no standard answer to music understanding.
Don't let your children learn a technology and hate an art.
The fundamental goal of children learning piano should be to love music through learning piano, love art through music, love life through art, and experience happiness through life; improve perceptual quality, perceptual ability, and perceptual wisdom through art education, so as to prepare children for their future success. Pave the way and add color to happiness.
makes education an integral part of happiness in life.
What Zhou Haihong really cares about is "people", that is, the cultivation of people's "perceptual qualities, perceptual abilities, and perceptual wisdom" through art education.
He pointed out back then that most of the music popularization introductions on television, radio, music appreciation manuals, etc. were artistic, literary, and even philosophical and sociological explanations of "music content." The explanations of many of these contents seriously ignore what music conveys to us and what we give to music. Content commentators on
media appear in front of the audience with an authoritative appearance, and introduce their personal understandings that have little basis (or even no scientific basis) to the audience as the inherent performance content of music. In fact, they seriously mislead people. Musical aesthetic concepts.
uses a literary and artistic way to explain music as the main way to popularize music? It has an unexpected side effect - people need to gain visual and conceptual understanding of the content from music; they need to use artistic and literary methods approach to grasp the art of music. In many cases, the audience cannot hear the content specified or hinted by the narrator in the music, so the majority of listeners think that they do not understand music, and thus feel that the music is "too advanced" and difficult to accept.
When the listener "understands" a work (seems to feel the content provided by the narrator from the music), and accepts a work on the surface, it is actually getting further and further away from the broader world of music and art.
"Floating down three thousand feet" is false, but it is beautiful. As a rational judgment, it is a worthless misunderstanding; as a perceptual description, it has endless perceptual power. Obtaining correct understanding is not the fundamental function and responsibility of art. Measuring the value of aesthetics by knowing what is right or wrong can only kill the value of art.
Zhou Haihong pointed out through the research of music psychology that there is a phenomenon called "isomorphic synaesthesia" in human psychological activities. This synesthesia phenomenon manifests itself as the stimulation from one sense organ can cause the feelings of other sensory organs. For example, high pitch in the auditory can be synesthesia with the brightness of the vision, the excitement of the emotion, the lightness and smallness of the object, the sensitivity of movement, etc. There is a synaesthetic correspondence between the auditory bass and the darkness of the vision, the suppression of emotions, the weight, size, and clumsy movement of objects.The strength or weakness of the sound can be perceived as corresponding to the size of the object, the size of the movement, the strength or weakness of the psychological impact, etc. The rhythm and speed of music correspond to the rhythm and speed of movement of various things in nature, and the tension of music sound corresponds to the tension and relaxation of human psychological experience, etc.
One thing that needs to be clearly emphasized is that music can only experience corresponding relationships with those objects that have the possibility of synesthesia in the four aspects of height, intensity, relaxation, rhythm and speed. Music does not have these four characteristics. Objects cannot be expressed through music.
Jin Haixin once sang a song - It doesn't matter if you don't like singing, just let the first ray of sunshine wake up your ears. In fact, it is to the point.
It is said that when filming the TV series "Fortress Besieged", Chen Daoming went to ask Mr. Qian Zhongshu for advice. Mr. Qian Zhongshu said it well: "If you feel good after eating an egg, why do you need to know the hen that laid the egg?"
Tao Yuanming said in his own account : "If you are good at reading, you don't need to understand it; every time you understand it, you will happily forget to eat."
Heine said: "Music sounds at the end of the language."
rambled on above, trying to elicit another sentence - the dust returns. Dust, dust returns to dust. Let music be music.
Finally, I will copy a quote from Zhou Haihong - People who lack perceptual qualities are less happy, people who lack perceptual qualities have difficulty succeeding, and people who lack perceptual qualities do great damage!
2024.6.8
Photo courtesy/Yuyi
