Post by SCWGuqin on Aug 28, 2006 1:02:00 GMT
As the forum has probably figured out by now, I'm not really a sentimental person. I like my qin music intense, transcendent, and preferably weird.
Thus I've traditionally expressed little interest in pieces like Yangguan San Die, Yi Guren, or other "emotional" pieces. These pieces get played all the time and so I've learned to respect them as compositions (and the skill of the people who play them)--but they've rarely if ever "grabbed" me.
That changed today. Very soon I'll have to begin "missing" someone very important (traveling away for a year), and suddently I got the urge to play YGSD. I played it a few times through and it was very cathartic, perfectly expressing the ideal of "ai er bu shang", i.e. pain but not too much, tempered by hope and more tender/melancholy than grief-stricken. For me the piece conveyed not only the proximate feeling of parting from friends, but also the more general feeling of not being able to re-live wonderful experiences. You can savor them in memory, but it's not the same, and your life keeps on hurtling forward...
Anyway, one insight I feel like I got from playing YGSD today was--it's almost not suited to performance. Why on earth would you want to "perform" this piece? I can think of only two reasons to play it: either you're feeling those feelings and need to work them out, or you *want* to experience those feelings. (I can't fathom why anybody would want to do the latter.) Anything else is kind of false. Usually when I hear this piece I feel like the player is "faking it" or being empty--performing to perform, without really feeling the substance of the piece. Because to feel the substance of the piece is to be genuinely *moved*...
Anyway, just some thoughts. Anyone think differently?
Thus I've traditionally expressed little interest in pieces like Yangguan San Die, Yi Guren, or other "emotional" pieces. These pieces get played all the time and so I've learned to respect them as compositions (and the skill of the people who play them)--but they've rarely if ever "grabbed" me.
That changed today. Very soon I'll have to begin "missing" someone very important (traveling away for a year), and suddently I got the urge to play YGSD. I played it a few times through and it was very cathartic, perfectly expressing the ideal of "ai er bu shang", i.e. pain but not too much, tempered by hope and more tender/melancholy than grief-stricken. For me the piece conveyed not only the proximate feeling of parting from friends, but also the more general feeling of not being able to re-live wonderful experiences. You can savor them in memory, but it's not the same, and your life keeps on hurtling forward...
Anyway, one insight I feel like I got from playing YGSD today was--it's almost not suited to performance. Why on earth would you want to "perform" this piece? I can think of only two reasons to play it: either you're feeling those feelings and need to work them out, or you *want* to experience those feelings. (I can't fathom why anybody would want to do the latter.) Anything else is kind of false. Usually when I hear this piece I feel like the player is "faking it" or being empty--performing to perform, without really feeling the substance of the piece. Because to feel the substance of the piece is to be genuinely *moved*...
Anyway, just some thoughts. Anyone think differently?
