The stream of consciousness continues at:
in bite-sized chunks. I’m off long disquisitions for the time being.
Mozi Bei Si is one of the most remarkable pieces of music I am aware of. I have never played it seriously, though that is set to start soon. The genius recording by Wu Jinglüe is quite enough to satisfy me on the musical level. As for the content, the heart and soul of any Chinese composition…in subtlety and scope MZBS ranks among the best. Here we may be in Xiao Xiang Shui Yun territory, leaving behind even the likes of You Lan and Guangling San, hobbled as the latter remain by the yawning stylistic centuries between their transcription and their modern resurrection.
The story goes that Mozi (otherwise known as Andy Lau, hair shorn and saving the world through paramilitary moralizing) was walking through town one day when he came across silk dyers plying their trade. He was moved to tears by this scene as it led him to reflect that on the inevitable force exerted on man by his surroundings, his relationships, and his experiences. Life dyes us: we can never go back to the way we were, let alone imagine how we might have turned out if this hue, that hue had never bled through us.
Imagine that reflection spun into fifteen minutes of solo music.
Now imagine that four hundred years (exactly; first publication 1609) of Chinese literati have been reworking this music and refining its sentiment. And that, along with “Song of the Woodcutter”, “Song of the Fisherman”, and “Admiring the Orchid”, it was recognized as one of the four most esteemed treasures of the Guangling school.
Wu Jinglüe, for my money the best qin player of the last century, got his hands on this piece and infused it with his deep lyrical emotion and soaring vision. The result is heartbreaking and electrifying at the same time. Like many qin pieces it features a shift of material and mood near the mid-point. The first half of the piece is tender, caressed by every kind of grace, vibrato, and timbral shift Wu’s inimitable fingers can summon forth. It is a lament by the player, for himself, perhaps for some other in his heart, for all of us every one–in being dyed we are all the same, and none of us can escape ourselves. Yet like much of the world’s saddest music, the melody is in a major key. Here we recall Confucius’s timeless praise for “grief without injury”: if there were no hope here, no gentlest brushing away of tears, this would not be Chinese music.
Reaching its plaintive peak through the subtle cycling and development of its signature motifs, the melody gradually takes on a heroic aspect, a determination, a drive. More angular now, it shifts octaves and rolls triumphal cadences before we are ready for them, only to retract them and careen us forward with the promise of more. The original lament motifs never leave, but now they weave with hope, joy , and zest–just as thoughts of grief slip, refigure, and melt away into the reassurances of friendship, play, and a future always undiscovered.
This music must be heard to be believed. And even now, counting the years…I still don’t believe it.
I started improvising again this week after months of more or less abstaining from it. The reasons for the abstention were complex; the reason for returning to spontaneous music from the heart, on the other hand, was very simple. I heard L. Subramaniam, unexpectedly, in a movie, and my entire being melted away.
For years L. Subramaniam was my oft-cited “favorite musician”. I would not formulate that concept in the same way now as I did back in, say, 2006. I am much more pluralistic now than ever I was, and more aware both of stricture and of freedom as prompts to creativity and transcendence. I know tradition and innovation now in subtler ways than before. And now, as years ago, L. Subramaniam occupies a place apart in my heart, a place I can reserve for no Chinese musician…perhaps the place Munir Bashir would be if I were in Arab music. L. Subramaniam remains iconic because he has done something very few musicians are able to do: create a truly new musical idiom based on deep expertise in multiple received traditions. A musical idiom that not only satisfies the requirements of formal rigor and thoughtful adaptation but which sings deeply from the musician’s core and could be the sound of no other human being on the planet.
LSub’s music is not Carnatic, as the purists will never tire of reminding us. It may owe as much to Bach as to Carnatic music, but he will never be primarily identified with a tradition other than CM. He has extended and modified CM, absorbing a toolkit of techniques and sensibilities from Western musicianship that make for a magnificent fusion idiom. No details for now: what matters is that I cannot imagine this process was easy. Perhaps VLaksh did some pioneering stuff, and of course the violin was always a Western instrument anyway, so there must have been some degree of familiarity with Western bowcraft among some CM practitioners. But any attempts at explicit Westerly modification of Carnatic violin prior to the L brothers are trifling embarrassments by comparison. Much of LSub’s output has been of questionable value (I’m being generous here), but anybody who experiments consistently is going to put out a less-than-optimal product at times. (Nevermind career demands as opposed to purely artistic needs.)
LSub’s achievement is greater than Li Xiangting’s because the organic relationship of his music with received CM is clear, and the result is surpassingly flexible and articulate. Li Xiangting’s improvisations, while frequently solid and occasionally superb, suffer from a deep disconnect with traditional qin music. I have ranted about this at great length on facebook, so dig around there. It may be that the character of the respective traditions is the deciding factor here: the utter lack of any pedagogy for composing and improvising in qin-land means that all improvisation at this stage in the game must start with the individual. LXT’s development of an improvisatory idiom is a notable achievement, but he is the first of his kind, and still has effectively no contemporaries. LSub comes from a tradition where any musician unable to improvise is a cripple, and composition seemingly goes on every day. (The two aren’t exactly separable phenomena.)
One of the most memorable moments from my evening with Vivek and Sadhana came when she opined that one shouldn’t experiment on stage, and gave us examples of innovation within CM that she felt were more organically related to the tradition than L-style crazitude. During and after this exchange Vivek and I would occasionally get some deep non-verbal communication going about how this approach to innovation could never be our own. We just can’t let the tradition dictate how we are to innovate. Ganesh/Kumaresh on one side, the tortured theatrics of Wu Wenguang on the other. We want to create entirely new patterns, especially by way of importing pitch combination principles from other traditions—largely Indian classical in my case and electronic music in his. Congrats LSub, you win there. There is no one to emulate in qin-land, alack alay. If LXT’s example serves for any compositional principles, they do not go much beyond “do whatever feels right”. That I can do, at least so long as I am not too self-conscious and just “hit the strings” for a certain quantity of hours.
A truly large-scale and decisive development in my personality of the last 10 years is my deliberate narrowing of artistic activity. My middle school encouraged every artistic pursuit simultaneously, and my high-school ideology of “Scholar Warrior” (see previous entry) encouraged me to be ostentatiously diverse in my activities. Visual art was never a forte of mine, but music, martial arts, and creative writing I maintained strongly until my sophomore year of college. Creative writing fell by the wayside first, as I began to understand how deeply my need to write was driven by my musical needs—how all I ever wanted to do with words was capture my ecstatic absorption in sounds and thereby tell stories. Martial arts fell away by 2003 largely because I came to understand the depth of the commitment required to excel in them. Music concomitantly ascended as I discovered the “grounding tradition” that people like Vivek and Richard Wolf had been telling me I needed, which discovery seemed to fill the lacuna widened by my years of aimless experimentation. (I still continue the aimless experimentation, but at least I can now insist that I’m a proper qin-player!) As I began playing qin I think I became so focused on excelling in that one venue that I have deliberately avoided the possibility of investing my artistic energy elsewhere. Despite the language just used, I don’t think this was a bad move per se. As long as I relax and keep things in perspective, my practice of focusing rather than dispersing can continue to provide optimal benefits.
The past year has been exceedingly complicated for me, and in recent months I have yearned for some kind of public, immediate way to express my feelings that would not ridiculously simplify a complex situation. I have sometimes wished I were a poet so I could do this with words, but my powers of verbal evocation are more centered on sententious aphorism than on any genre less intrinsically annoying (thanks, pre-Han tradition). I can dream of penning long reflections on 2008 that would lead my fascinated readers through a world of possibility and limitation and discovery and turmoil, but the imagined font invariably shows up as monotype corsiva, the first sign that the subject is fantasizing about literary talents he does not possess. Turning to my preferred art form, I also fantasize about composing shockingly beautiful, rending, elusive pieces with numbskull-obvious titles, but this is also beyond my current abilities. (“No Other”…I really only fantasize about one kind of piece, the kind named after a certain category of person. “Hoang Mai” anyone? Properly translated into Chinese, of course, so nobody who reads Quoc Ngu will know what I’m talking about. But rest assured, “No Other” is WAY more epic than its predecessor fantasies. If you’ve never inspired me to fantasize about writing a piece named after you, you’re ahead of the game.) I can splurge on the qin for hours, maybe get good compositional chops going for periods of a minute or less, but…that LSub track from that movie might be years beyond me.
Listening is enough for now.
I had a paradigm-shift of greater than average moment today, and am struggling to pen all my thoughts in—not pin them down, as seething activity is precisely what matters most at these junctures. Whether in academics or music, I habitually find myself falling into the abyssal interstices between customary expectations, or trying to float above or around them, or seeking actively to unseat them. I cannot fix on “a discipline” to call my own, nor a canon, nor a modus operandi, nor even a routine, however much I struggle daily to adhere to one, another, the next, or the last. I am as always distrustful of the Daoist elbow-to-the-ribs to just forget about all this strident categorization; somehow I have managed persistently to ignore or denigrate what may in the end be the only real point of the corpus I am alleged to value above all others. I think the time is right to step back and pace myself through some of my history and current disposition as these relate to my academic activities.
I’ll start by enumerating some of the formative influences that have driven my love for Chinese thought, my disciplinary preference for philosophy, my contextualizing preference for history, and my perplexing (to absolutely everybody) need to aesthetically experience other times and places in search of an epistemic privilege on their cultural products. I’ll start by tracing the impact of Asian thought on my developing years (mainly high school) and then work backwards to deeper factors.
This is part 1 of who-knows-how-many.
1. My best friend in middle school and high school was very interested in a vision of Indian culture deriving from Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and got me deeply fascinated with the kinds of things one finds in the Mahabharata and Bhagavat Purana when interpreted through that focus. By 9th grade I considered myself more interested in the religious and philosophical ideas of this episteme than in any others, such that even my first forays into Daoism I wrote about as a “brief flirtation” that stole me but briefly from the gopis and their sandalwood kaTAkSas. I still revere the Mahabharata more than any other literary work, and have tended to associate Sanskritland ever since with teeming, pluriform idylls of the imagination. (In other words, for me it was kAvya-land long before it was shAstra-land.) My continued companionship with Mr. Gaudiya Vaishnava long after I started shifting China-ward often led me to feel like the ancient and the foreign constituted an ideal lodging-place from which to criticize and distance myself from the mores surrounding me. In appealing to a vast world of thought more or less inscrutable to my peers, I afforded myself an instant argument from authority; the literary power and praxical specificity of an ancient but living religious tradition, meanwhile, offered me perfect avenues for escape from the mundane.
2. Starting in 9th grade I was introduced to Daoism in ways I later came to consider unfortunate. It all actually began when I picked up Cleary’s translation of the Art of War and fantasized about each of the commentarial strata hailing from a different character in the Mahabharata. (The autobiographical rabbit-holes that beckon here are too extensive for even an essay of the present scope. Bhishma/Cao Cao masters Sun-tzu, then Krsna deliberately plays the fool, outsmarting the outsmarter? I played all of this out on RTS games, of course.) Cleary mentioned briefly in his introduction that “Taoist thought” focused extensively on yielding the greatest result with the least effort. Hey! I thought, That sounds great! Some time thereafter, I cannot remember how long, I got the Legge translations of LaoZhuang—which I never read, but which had great 19th-century tables of transcriptional conventions as an appendix, from which I tried to derive the very correlation between phonology and semantics on whose non-existence all modern linguistic theory is built. (Ah, the glory days…never mind that I continued trying to derive meaning from sound as late as 2002.) Much more importantly, I got Deng Ming-Dao’s book, Scholar Warrior. This book was absolute crack for me, “what I had always been looking for”, the perfect match. It depicted a world of solitary or monastic self-cultivators—typically haughty when solitary and subserviently serious when monastic—dedicating every fiber of their being to the superb development of all human faculties. I remember that somebody once chatted with me online, seeing “Daoism” in my interests, and asked me what Daoism was all about. My reply I remember verbatim: “it’s about being DAMN GOOD at EVERYTHING”. We’re talking kung fu movie overdrive here, but with added cultural excellences (the “Scholar” part of the book’s title). At some level, every interpretive difficulty I have experienced, and every research avenue I’ve explored in early Chinese thought is driven by the persistence of this and related models in allegedly capturing some essence of Daoism, or Chinese religion, or the summit of excellence, what have you.
What the Scholar Warrior vision gave me was a way to root myself in the ancient and inscrutable that was not burdened by the promiscuous metaphysics and apparent dogmatism of the Gaudiya Vaishnava stuff. Of course one man’s dogmatism is another’s plain fact, and the rabidly selfish and insecure “Daoism” I picked up from Deng Ming-Dao made me, I’m sure, slightly more insufferable during my high school years than was absolutely necessary. The subsequent books I devoured with titles like “The Tao of Sex, Health, and Longevity” did not help things. It has taken me years to peel back the layers of the Scholar Warrior edifice and figure out what it gets from whence in the Chinese tradition. Obviously it’s mainly a Daojiao (“Religious Daoist”) edifice, but the religiosity of its origins was obscured by Deng’s metaphysical parsimony and strident individualism. American Daojiao? I barely understand Daojiao at all because as soon as I realized how god-ridden and generally embarrassing it all is, I lost interest in it completely. But Daojiao claims to root itself in LaoZhuang (or at least Lao), and the ethos of unceasing self-cultivation I soon realized was core to most Chinese thought of any description. So the entire aesthetic universe I was first introduced to in 9th grade has been very hard to shake.
3. Right around the time I discovered Daoism, my father for his own reasons was discovering Zen. Or at least some American version of Zen which participated fully in the “disenchantment of the world” and which thus falls under what I call “Protestant Buddhism”. You know, the kind which features a Wittgensteinian duck-rabbit on page 3 (though no quantum physics, thank god) and then explains that Zen is about sitting for a really long time and “just seeing”. My father’s interest in Buddhism has been long-standing, and he has tried his hand at various traditions of it (notably Chan and Tibetan), but has generally found the “religious” elements of it embarrassing and of no interest. He has consistently sought in Buddhism a regimen for attaining a state of mind that is calm, non-specifically interesting on its own merits, and…wait for it…the source of foundational epistemic justification. I’ll talk more about that in a moment. Once I became more educated in Buddhism starting around 2007, I started hammering him on how little his goals had in common with the entire intellectual universe in which Buddhism actually operated, and he appears to have lost interest in the latter. He explained to me that the main inspiration he had found in Buddhist cultures lay in Japanese handicrafts and interior design, which had always struck him as “perfect”, and I assume that in Buddhism he was seeking something evocative of that perfection in religious or philosophy-of-life terms. For the moment I have to cough “CHINA” heartily into my fist, as the metaphysical parsimony and aesthetic focus my dad sought in Zen appears (as far as this half-educated witness knows) to derive very directly from ye olde Warring States. And Zhang Yimou (2002) will be damned if he lets us forget it! But my dad also won’t let us forget that the Chinese may have pioneered it, but “perfection” resides in Japan.
During my high school years I often sought my dad’s advice about things, as I came to see him as a source of wisdom. Over time I formulated, more or less unconsciously, several axioms about normative living which I think were heavily influenced by his version of Zen:
a. Most (all?) suffering is self-imposed and can be gotten out of by right thinking.
b. There is a state of mind available to us, describable as “still” and “empty” among other things, that offers unique access to fundamental truths.
c. Those fundamental truths are anything but verbally formulable, and can only be experienced in the mode of aesthetic engagement.
d. As a matter of fact, all of life is best lived in a state of elevated aesthetic perception, because nothing is more fundamental than anything else—the profound and the ordinary are exactly the same.
I think this is a suitable place to stop for the moment.
Level Sands – Descending Geese
I will be gradually improving on this translation of Ping Sha Luo Yan. I often think I can improve, at least subtly, on mainstream translation of qin titles. Hence Xiao Xiang Shui Yun might render as “Mist on the Rivers” without incorporating the river names themselves, irrelevant to a foreign audience. The commonest translations of PSLY, often scanning to something like “Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank”, better render Yan Luo Ping Sha; in the present version I try to foreground the sands as they are foregrounded in the title PSLY. Level (beach) sands constitute quite an evocative image to me already, even before the geese begin their fitful attempts to land. I do think that the role of the sand as resting-place, and the question of whether the geese desire to rest or not, are crucial to the meaning of the piece.
In the poetic world that generated PSLY, birds migrate southward, the direction of escape and exile. Pieces like Qiu Hong explicitly meditate on the freedom of these birds to do as they please, to process stately across the skies while you and I remain stuck where we are no matter how much we may wish to follow them.
秋高气爽，风静沙平，云程万里，天际飞鸣
Autumn is lofty, the air clear; the wind quiets, the sands level. Clouds stretch for ten-thousand miles, while cries wing the horizon.
Recently I have begun to believe that my perceptions of this piece were unduly inflected by the stark aggressiveness of Guan Pinghu’s version, transmitted by Li Xiangting. The Guangling version is much gentler and more given to yearning, and these latter feelings play more directly into the poetic core of the piece that I wish to develop. For now, at least. The Mei’an version, like so much about that school, remains sideshow clowning. If only Wu Ziying hadn’t rendered the first part so compellingly…it shares a resentful percussiveness with the Guan version, and this element may get re-injected into my rendition in the fullness of time. But for now, SCW wants to yearn without resentment.
I can just imagine taking students to Promontory Point before introducing them to this piece. Circumstances have intervened for several days running, preventing me from going down to the lake and trying out all the seasonal associations of autumn on my qin. I was struck today by just how much I love overcast windy autumn days, the sense they inspire of gathering in, bracing, settling with the acceptance of things to come, the overwhelming feeling of the earth transitioning. Is it really the most melancholy season? Something comforts me about the anticipation of warmth after setting the cold at bay.
Maru Bihag
Just now I was recalling one of the more interesting moments of the legendary “lakeside conversation”, in which some speculative theses were advanced for why I was not more interested in observing and contemplating psychological complexity. My interlocutor having traditionally taken such to be a hallmark of a “literary” personality, I was led to think about my own (post-childhood) creative writing, which dates almost entirely from the period 1998-2003. Incidentally, a few months ago I read much of that writing for the first time in years, and found it even more lacking than I remembered. The entire effort of creative writing was, for me, born out of my need to understand how music affected me: I transcribed my reactions to it in real-time and left the results raw for “future reference” and reflective incorporation into more polished work. Such polishing occurred only once, and yielded a poem rather than the epic narrative that I fancied would form the ultimate framework. My abandonment of creative writing roughly coincided in time with my abandonment of martial arts (the key year being 2003), as my activities “funneled” toward the current emphasis on music at the expense of other pastimes. In any event, my writing certainly never featured meditations on the complex psychologies of characters, tending to dwell more on intense but relatively simple feelings. During my middle- and high-school years I cultivated a fascination with an “intensity” so intense that I would prefer to capitalize it, if not for the fact that I never thought of it a distinct entity in need of a name. “Intensity” had very little content by itself, and was rather a sort of catalyst I would inject into my emotional responses to situations involving grandeur, nobility, strangeness, ecstasy, absorption…in short, the emotions I still cultivate and explore in my music to this day.
Bairagi
I no longer fetishize intensity nearly so much, prizing instead various kinds of formal sophistication I have absorbed from the classicizing ethos across various cultures. But if grandeur, nobility, strangeness, ecstasy, and absorption continue to loom large in the emotional spectrum I explore, what does that say about my dis/interest in “psychological complexity”, past and present?
One thing I was never particularly interested in was the consideration of various individual human minds as fully individuated specimens for prolonged probing and understanding. Of course I do prolonged probing, and attempt understanding, with people I meet and get to know, and I am less dense than some people I know in understanding what is going on behind the eyes of others. But I have never thought of this activity as an inquiry in itself, as something that can drive artistic expression. One might say I am interested in the human psyche, but not in human psyches.
If I am interested in the human psyche, though, it is not as a self-contained environment in which various purely psychological processes teem. My age-old emphasis on “exploration” gets somewhat at the ultimate object of interest for me; by the lakeside and again last weekend at the Art Institute, I solidified a new verbal formulation: “environment”, and the exploration thereof. I am most interested in the way subjects interact with their environments…in subjects and objects, as it were. I typically experience introspection not as the inspection of various things inside “me”, but rather as the exploration of an internal environment by an “I” that is almost entirely without content, a sort of roving perspective.
Bhatiyar
This definitely has something to do with Warring States China, as both cause and consequence of my interest in systems of thought that are about navigating a perplexing environment rather than other characteristic religio-philosophical activities. It also reminds me of the conventional-wisdom-distilled-from-developmental-psych-data claiming that males find structures more interesting than persons. If we keep this in mind, there seems little need to resort to the more extravagant explanations aired by the lake.
Last weekend I discovered that the exhibit most absorbing to me in the Art Institute was one filled with three-dimensional distorted textured sculptural environments, exploring which filled me with a level of profound exhilaration I experience only a few times a year. No cultural richness, let alone sophisticated exploration of distinctly human realities, filled me with as much raw excitement. My imagination set loose on voyages into the unknown, a love for which the consideration of persons over structures seems ill-suited, at least to me.
Lately I’ve been struggling with the Laozi, and in particular with the disconnect between the richly textured (boy do I like those words) aesthetic and praxical ways of life that people typically consider “religious” (or just “meaningful”) and the austerity not only of the text’s core ideas, but of the text itself. The text floats in an aesthetic and praxical void so long as we cannot reconstruct the lifestyles its custodians wove for themselves. In the past few days I have been entertaining thoughts that I would have dismissed as fatuous in previous years: that I, as a human, require variegated sensory experiences and desire to craft an environment for myself that is aesthetically pleasing as well as evocative of values I espouse. I have admitted at least the values part in the past, but then I hit the problematic point that my texts either don’t advocate any kind of aesthetic/art-object environment, or they advocate in ways I disagree with or that are irrelevant to contemporary society. Absent SCA-level fixation on antiquarian reconstruction, there’s nothing Kongzi or Mengzi really have to say about the kind of apartment you should keep—they might indeed say “an apartment consonant with the cultivation of virtue”, but that just opens the door for me to be evasive and say “well that could be anything”. (More abstract consideration of the real constraints imposed by this discourse are shelved for now.)
Darbari
The Laozi has inspired a great deal of aestheticized living among historical Chinese, but most of this inspiration has seemed quite indirect to me, if not mediated by downright silly eisegesis of the immortality cult and magic. While the text brims with imagery that one might take as visual artistic inspiration, artistic expression and the crafting of environments has no role in the text’s discourse itself. Among the less productive readings of the text are those that would say, “don’t care about your environment,” “craft an environment in such a way as to evoke your not caring about your environment”, or “be as austere as possible” in the simplisitic (SCW pre-2008) sense of having no possessions, furniture, or other comforts. Yet some kind of pleasing simplicity and spiritual power has diffused from the Laozi into the achieved level of hyper-refined Chinese aesthetic culture, and I’m struggling to understand how one might justify such a transference. Not how it actually occurred, mind you, but how it could be justified.
A thought I had just today was that humans need aesthetic stimuli to “remind” them what simplicity is like. The Laozi generally doesn’t provide concrete examples of what it takes to be a simple lifestyle—most probably because its central concern is government, against the private self-cultivation culture within which I’m reacting—and uses evocative or even metaphysical imagery without explaining how a human can most effectively employ it in daily life. Not that we should begrudge this, of course: the Laozi functions optimally within the rhetorical context of Warring States shi culture, no problem. What interests me here is the project of justifiably drawing recommendations for private aesthetic environments from the text alone, and a promising key concept does appear to be that aesthetic objects can portray simplicity in a directly appealing way that serves to calm, focus, and prompt the human subject. To the objection that this claim is obvious and banal, I reply that it is more interesting for what it denies: that humans can reliably think about and employ concepts like simplicity and emptiness without aesthetic help.
Silence
What you’ve just witnessed is something that goes on a great deal in my head. Life presents me with obvious solutions to non-problems, and I thereby craft problems that will be satisfied only by tortuous solutions. How many people would be inclined to entertain all of the following theses at once?
1. I should craft my aesthetic environment to reflect and cultivate my core values.
2. I am utterly unaware of what those values should be. What they actually are is irrelevant.
3. The only rigorous way to figure out what my core values should be is by figuring out what a succession of ancient authors think they should be.
4. Unfortunately, even if those authors persuade me to adopt their core values, they may still neglect to instruct me on how to realize them aesthetically, and so I am still left without guidance.
5. Natural or unstructured reactions to the core values I have adopted, whereby those values are translated into an aesthetic environment in a way not provided for by the ancient authors who provide the values, are unacceptable.
The depth to which I have allowed life to be philosophy-guided, rather than philosophy life-guided, is truly remarkable. Further discussion will have to wait; here I can only register my shock at how weird my thinking is on this and similar matters. As well as my shock at the fact that recognition of how shocked I am seems to provide no motivation to abandon it.
Manomanjari
I have always been bewitched by the idea of a banquet with hundreds of guests that takes the entire night (by torchlight of course) and features music more sumptuous than any delicacy, poetry that explores with wine what cannot be talked of by day, and outpourings both communal and soloistic of just what a special experience it all is. For discographical reasons, I tend to locate these fantasies above all in Moorish Andalusia, and classical systems impacted by classical Islamic civilization seem uniquely appropriate to “this fine evening” scenarios. A new thought I had tonight was that Hindustani music presents a kind of repast to the listener, as leisurely as the night is long, as warm or searing as the torches that light it, and as mysterious as the shadow-plays that dance across the courtyard. Leisureliness is indeed something I find lacking in my home tradition as well as in Carnatic music, and the sheer duration of Hindustani performances places them beyond all competition in this area, at least from my listening experience.
Patdeep
What does it mean to take one’s time with music? Some time ago I recognized that the reason Carnatic repays close attention for me moreso than Hindustani is that its durations are closer to those of qin music. Qin is obsessed with compact detail, getting the most out of every breath and gesture of the music—and it takes that detail to levels that are simply beyond the ability of anyone but the player to appreciate. Much of the experience of qin playing is carried out at levels other than the sonically perceptible; I have yet to consult with my Indian music friends on whether this holds true for their systems. Carnatic music also fetishizes compactness of communication, famously holding single-phrase raga recognition/recognizability as an expression of high discernment. As one friend put it, “why do in ten minutes what you can do in two?” To which I suppose the qin answer would be something like “why do something you don’t have to at all?”, but by then we’ve already gone off the deep end.
A few months ago I noted “the sangati principle” as something I might want to explore in qin music. “The sangati principle” denotes the systematic, or at least progressive, variation of a musical line so as to bring out its possible facets. Its use is most obvious in the performance of Carnatic kritis, but progressive variation in general is essential to disciplined modal improvisation of the Indic sort. Progressive variation has no place in traditional qin music, which tends to be through-composed to such a high degree that phrases barely repeat at all. Perhaps what I should foreground in my next round of experiments (that would be round 4,810,129—I’m nothing if not persistent, however unyielding the brick wall may be!) is enabling qin music to “take its time” through progressive variation. This falls under the age-old category of “allowing qin music to develop by means of its own phraseology” rather than importing Indic phraseology; in general I think this intuition should be respected. The problem has always been how to allow qin phraseology to express itself in improvisatory form. But for now I’d like to avoid the notion of improvisation and focus on relatively fixed composition instead.
The piece in my head has been Dongting Qiu Si, which has a good claim to being my “second most-polished piece” after Oulu Wang Ji. I’ve personalized it quite a bit from Zha’s initial version. Zha’s conception of this piece already has a pleasingly leisurely, deliberate character which divides the melody up into clean, relaxed, proportional sections. Maybe step 1 can be inserting sangatis into this basic framework: fixing on a few phrases I think are exceptionally good and hammering out variations of them to deliver in sequence. I think I should hone my ability to do this before attempting anything more ambitious.
If the rules of raga are inviolable in India, the meaning and precise evocative qualities of qin pieces are inviolate to the literati. It took a long time for my views to come into alignment with the traditional conception here, and willingness to back away from Indian models as the be-all and end-all of music played a major role. If the literati want to make their music about meaning and evocation, then so be it: China has no other classical option, and must define its classical music identity this way. The key for a formal experimenter, then, is to understand just how far the form can be modified without detracting from the evocation, with the ultimate goal (in Sinitic terms) of evoking even better than the traditional version of the piece. That means that however we take Oulu Wang Ji to function in human life—and I have a fairly rich conception of that by now—we must sangatify it in ways that strengthen or intriguingly modify that function without abandoning its essential points.
Misra Mand
In the past year I became very self-conscious about the brick-wall-banging quality of my musical explorations, the very gradual and uncertain progress they made; comparisons abounded to my Xunzian obsessiveness about re-treading the same intellectual ground. I recognize that having to listen to my “1 step forward, 2 steps back, 3 steps sideways” experiments with qin music may frustrate people with appetites for a quicker and more diverse succession of musical experiences. That is why I think it best to keep these experiments largely to myself, or at least (as this attests) to work them out in blog form rather than wearying human interlocutors. Hopefully the same will not hold for my philosophical work, which has rapidly become more exoteric and dialogue-friendly. But there remains my need to imaginatively experience cultural products in chronological order, which need is perhaps most baffling of all to everyone other than me, and which I need to keep a rather firm lid on at least in company.
Jhinjhoti
I just spent a moment thinking about what a sangatified Oulu Wang Ji would sound like. It struck me that I wouldn’t necessarily enjoy it. The music has a certain formal completeness already that might resist tinkering. Will the measure of how much I enjoy a particular piece be the extent to which I can sangatify it to satisfaction? This may seem like a bizarre thought, but just consider what it means for a piece to resist sangatification: it has no phrases or ideas of sufficient interest that I wish to play around with them, show up their various facets, and present all of those to myself and the audience in a certain order. Is amenability to progressive variation a measure of how much interest intrinsically resides in the musical line?
Alhaiya
My room looks clean and salubrious after this weekend’s yaji. Today I have been able to navigate the spaces, settle down in spots both familiar and unfamiliar, and even dream of what it might be like to have a “proper” place—like one I visited today, complete with a view, broad and welcoming furniture, and a forest of tenderly cultivated plants spread along the windowsill. I also had the thought, for one of the first times spontaneously, that other people my age who are not grad students are making appreciable amounts of money, while I and my ilk seem constrained to live in hovels for the ever-receding next few years. As I was drifting through Facebook today, I also came upon some pics of a happy family just increased by one new member, and yearned to be married with a child. This has been an oddly emergent pattern just in the past few days: the yearning to be older by decades. I have even wanted to be elderly. I think I associate later decades of one’s life with more security in profession, social circles, and family than I currently enjoy. I also feel like I have aged ten years in the past twelve months, so here’s to speeding the journey to the grave!
Hindustani music has become an increasingly constant companion, ever since I discovered the radio feature (i.e. infinite randomized playlist of relevant genres/artists) of last.fm. I have said for years that I believe generically North-Indic music is the kind I appreciate most intuitively; previously I listened to it most in late high school and early college. Then guqin and Carnatic took over, and they have gotten the lion’s share of attention since about 2002. To the considerable consternation of my company in the last year, my thoroughgoing preference for Carnatic resisted even highly connoisseurial buffets from the north. Now that I am listening to more Hindustani than ever, I can make a few observations: (1) My preference for instrumental and especially string music remains in full force, despite my reflectively accepting the superior virtues of vocal over instrumental khayal. For a period (say, this summer) I discovered I could no longer enjoy the old artists who headlined my Hindustani experience—Ram Narayan and Vilayat Khan, for example—since their sangeet seemed so pervasively, if subtly, deficient relative to the vocal greats. Perhaps the most natural explanation for my confident resurgence in “string love” is simply that I have always been a string player and don’t intend to change: you identify with sounds like those you produce. I am also drawing confidence from an opinion I encountered in August (thanks Sadhana) that there just ain’t no good reason to suppose that instrumental is inferior or less worthy of active interest. Whether instrumental is ultimately adequate or not in the broader Hindustani context will have to await my own reflective engagement with the entirety of the tradition, with which I remain in important respects unacquainted.
Jhinjhoti
(2) I prefer Hindustani as “background” music, as superbly mood-setting music for the accompaniment of other mental and emotional tasks. This is distinctly different from my typical experience of Carnatic, which I take as supremely demanding of attention. I listen to Carnatic with due respect for the searing rigor with which I have always identified it, but with Hindustani I can kind of switch that off and just enjoy. I know that Hindustani has plenty of its own rigors, which I appreciate in my less-than-systematic way—especially microtonal distortions, in which it seems unsurpassed. (As opposed to straight-up microtonal scalar intonation, at which Arab-Turkish music excels.) Some time ago I characterized Hindustani music as optimized for the enjoyment of people with lots of time on their hands, i.e. a certain vision of pre-1949 aristocratic elites. To the extent that I have lots of time on my hands these days, at least as much as dissipated R F Burton human opium-clouds, I find I can easily while away entire days with my court musicians humbly prolonging their 30-minute vilambit gats so as not to distract too much of my attention from important activities like musing, mulling, and machinating. At present my feeling is that this is listener’s music at least as much as performer’s music, a feeling I have never quite gotten from Carnatic. Quite the opposite, of course, prevails in qin-land.
My previous company would be happy to know that I seem herein to be developing an “appreciator’s taste” in addition to the “performer’s taste” that I have imbibed most fundamentally from the qin ethos. This is largely enabled by my recognition of Indian music as the profoundly foreign, self-coherent body of musical options that it is relative to the Chinese music ecumene: my days of trying to fuse them are far from over, but in the haphazard daily fluctuation that constitutes my musical opinions, the current kick has been toward appreciating Indian music as Indian, Chinese music as Chinese, and the music of lost civilizations as lost.
The last refers to my inquiries into ancient Greek music, which have percolated for a few weeks and brought me a lot of satisfaction. I’m raiding M L West’s magnum opus on the subject, familiarizing myself with all the surviving melodies, kulturkritiking available performances, and trying to render enharmonic modulations on the qin. The primary effect of the surviving wealth of detail—unprecedented from other BCE-early CE civilizations—has been to dramatize the depth of loss in the irrecoverability of music whose fascinations we can glimpse a hundred times over but whose sound and ethos have gone as ash to the wind.
Purvi
The effect of Byzantine cantors doing chromatic Bhairavi in shifting anapaests is remarkable and pleasing, but chimerical. Byzantine vocal technique is awe-inspiring (hi Alex), the chromatic Greek scales preserve interesting phrasal ideas, but Indians do Bhairavi better, and those shifting anapaests exemplify the binding of music to poetic meter which Momin suggested might be a signal point rendering any musical system less interesting to us two. (Of course there were alaps in Olympia, but no notation survives for that kind of stuff.) So go study Byzantine music, Hindustani, Greek poetry, and have fun modulating on your piano—it’s not ancient Greek music, and you will never hear anything like what the real stuff was like. Of course my need to hear what it really might have been, even at platonistic levels of abstraction, remains, and will need to exhaust itself over a matter of weeks or months. Suffice it to say that, right now, evidence on the sheer microtonality of Greek scales (we’re talking 1/3 steps etc.) has dimmed my hope that any of the modern reconstructions capture their qualities, whether in notation or performance. West is shelved for the moment, along with Plato, and both musically and philosophically I’m back with the gymnosophists.
I’ve always found classical Greek philosophy baffling, for the reason I find every canonical corpus baffling—I can’t see why it ought to be canonical. (An about-face from the post-New Orleans Gilgamesh talk. Progress. I has it.) Seriously forcing myself through a good part of the Platonic corpus (with forays into the Aristotelian and elsewhere) over the last month has been immensely instructive and I think has already helped my ability to think intelligently about my own texts. One problem that arises when you hang around Confucians for too long is that you start to take their intuitions of normative-culture monogenesis seriously: the canonizing ideological instinct runs so deep in early China that it becomes hard to imagine that free debate and engagement with a variety of shifting and challenging circumstances could yield more wisdom and insight than always returning like a schoolboy to terrain already-traveled. (cf. Xunzi chapter 1, my life for years.) Immersing myself in 4th century Athens, my head simply swims with how free the entire culture seems to be: in the immortal words of Bruce Brooks, “despicably out of control”. There is plenty of freedom and non-canonical thinking in early China, but it tends to be lodged in texts that are themselves so weird and counter-intuitive that even I have difficulty dealing with them, despite professing their ultimately superior wisdom: Laozi and Zhuangzi. Whatever my protestations of loyalty, I’ve lived a much more Confucian inner life since college, and there is little more distinctively Confucian than the belief that ultimate wisdom has already been found and is accessible in a defined corpus of cultural materials, provided you strive long and hard enough to access it. In Athens there is a much more observable chaos of competing positions, which furthermore have the luxury of actively contending for century after century—since there was no clampdown into anti-philosophical state orthodoxy until very late in the “classical antiquity” game.
Misra Gara
Perhaps it takes centuries of chaotically competing positions for the idea that positions should compete to become itself a cultural orthodoxy. The bottom line is that forcing myself into Athenian philosophical garb has helped me understand philosophy as an unending grapple with intrinsically confusing situations, to which even the most brilliant solutions will stagger under oversights and simplifications. The idea that philosophy should be life-driven, as opposed to life philosophy-driven, has taken on a new valence for me. While I have always been solicitous of the “real-world” consequences of what I study and teach, that has tended to mean seeing what happens to a life when the ideas of select texts are forced onto that life. I have taken “insider experience” to be such a criterion of understanding that I have denied my own ability, nay right, nay duty! to shuttle among possible positions and understand them all in light of each other. While my perspective on philosophical texts has been getting distinctly more sophisticated over the past year, it has taken recent events to really get me out of my self-made mystical headspace.
