"Art begins with misunderstanding." I don't know where I've heard this. Time has passed, and I can't even remember its specific origin.
But it reminds me of another saying: "Truth comes from misidentification." There is a tangible source for this statement – it comes from the French thinker Lacan. When I first read this, I couldn't help but laugh, because it was almost self-denial: if people are bound to misunderstand the truth, how can the phrase "truth comes from misidentification" itself be properly understood?
Maybe "right" is a wrong concept. Perhaps, history is one misidentification after another. Think of many good names in art history, but they are the product of the criticism of the time: the word "Baroque" originally referred to grotesque and distorted artistic creation, and the "impression" of Impressionism originally referred to ambiguity and detachment from reality...
However, if the phrase "art begins with misunderstanding" really exists—and is "correct"—then classical music should be its most eloquent proof. No art category has so far been so long dominated by a confounding concept. Was Stravinsky's music classical at the beginning of the 20th century? What about the works of Debussy or Ravel? Is Bach in the 17th century really classical?
"Beyond The Performance" by Zhang Haochen, Edition: Republic of china| Beijing Daily Press, July 2022
What exactly is classical? It is a concept that pursues refinement and perfection, a golden ratio of sensibility and intellect, or a nostalgia for tracing back to history... Today, the stereotype of the word classical, like the long-standing memories that music itself has left us, puzzles not only most people, but also the musicians themselves. So instead of dwelling on its true meaning, we might as well jump out of the trap of this concept – I would like to try to say: when talking about classical music, forget "classical music" first.
Needless to say: for thousands of years, music has gradually formed a three-point situation: folk music, art music, popular music. The so-called folklore, that is, the tunes and songs uploaded by history to the folk; Art and music belonged to the court church (of course, the two also drew on and complemented each other in history). Then, in the absorption and simplification of "art" and "folklore", we gradually formed what we know as pop music today—it is the product of the development of modern marketization and entertainment (that is, after music became an "industry"). These are the three pillars of music history.
Look through any professional dictionary and you will read: the real scientific name of classical music is "Western art music". You will also read: as a highly formal musical tradition, it has a complex and multi-terminal melodic structure, harmonic system, polyphonic counterpoint... The most significant difference between popular and folk music is its "writing"—it is an art that must be recorded on the score. Here, some people may ask: is it really accurate to define classical music by "notation"? As a way of recording, how can it summarize the evolution of Western musical styles over the ages—isn't there a more appropriate definition?
Not really. Instead, notation is the only possible way. For it is this seemingly general induction that captures the core of classical music's multitude of generalities: it tells us that in addition to hearing, there is another dimension of sound—a spectral, inaudible dimension.
Or is it not true that there is also a history of notation outside the West, such as subtraction notation in Chinese music, scale notation, and so on? Indeed, it is. But as a constantly complex and precise form of recording, notation has only gained a transcendent status in the process of Western music: it is no longer just a recording of sound, but directly promotes the creation itself. It is the existence of the spectral surface that enables music, a temporal art, to acquire the abstraction of space; It is also it that gives composers the possibility of weaving complex forms in the pictorial world. Just as navigators cannot grasp the whole picture of geography without a map, the stave itself is like a strip of longitude and latitude, and those tadpole-like notes are like the place names scattered in the map - "notes", as the name suggests, that is, the sound of symbols. It is in such an abstract world of symbols that the composer is able to invent a fascinating auditory narrative like a novelist; Like a designer, he was able to sketch out magnificent sound buildings...
There is probably no more symbolic example here than Beethoven. It can even be said that without the world of spectra, there would be no Beethoven. In the last period of his life, he was a reader of his own music, and only as a reader: he could not hear, and even no longer had to hear, sounds. The deaf "musician" has long begun to compose music ideas from a more spatial and architectural perspective. The reality of "deafness" touches on the very heart of classical music...
Beethoven House in North Westphalia.
Music, first of all, becomes the interpretation of symbols, and the second is the presentation of sound. Of course, this is the dilemma: in the face of a text full of complex information, a player can analyze and interpret the meaning of this, but can he really convey his interpreted message to the audience through performance? For example, in the face of a Baroque fugue, how can he make the listener clearly hear the independent beauty of each part? How does the conductor of a brahms or Schoenberg symphony make the audience understand the thousand changes in the music in it, all from the first few notes of the opening chapter—how to present the formal beauty of this "ever-changing"? And when Liszt, in his Piano Sonata in B minor, uses four different themes as metaphors for fate, struggle, the devil, and God, how can the performer convey the literary and philosophical meaning of these themes to the listener?
Obviously, as such an abstract art, many of the meanings in musical texts cannot be effectively put into reality.
In Mu Xin's "The Journey of SuLu", there is an essay entitled "The Subject of Music". He wrote: "A piece of music that once gave a wonderful impression is always above the pleasant sound of a master's pop-up—how important it is to be played so much." Earlier, when I was in college, a professor also told me: "The only perfect performance is the score itself." "From the player to the philharmonic, I must have become accustomed to and even agreed with such a view. They all point to the deep-seated idea that the musical score itself is the "subject of music."
But we can't imagine a piece of music that is only manuscript and has never been "heard." In the past, performance and composition have not existed independently of each other: Bach and his contemporaries, Baroque composers, almost never marked on the score indications of dynamics, speed, mood, etc., which were essential for the presentation of music; Even Mozart in classical times tended to mark only the key skeleton notes in certain passages, leaving the rest of the "unfinished" notes to the improvisation of the player. In their time, playing intervened in the creation, and the creation was handed over to the performance, and the two were in a symbiotic relationship. Needless to say, this "tradition" is long gone. But it provides a questioning historical message: is the score a finished product, or is it a process to be generated?
Everything is closed. However, the "voice" is always open. According to the playing habits of Beethoven's time, the long chords on the piano are often not played in unison, but should be decomposed arpeggios. This is unthinkable today: Beethoven did not mark the score to decompose the arpeggios. But if played on the piano today, the effect is often paradoxical: the sound of the modern piano is already different from the sound quality of the ancient piano two centuries ago- the change of the instrument will lead to a change in the sound, and the change of the sound will lead to a change in aesthetics.
The greatness of music lies in the continuous transformation and lack of its "subject": all symbols have yet to be realized, and all realizations will bring about change. Music begins with generation and is always in generation. This is the meaning of the playing: it uses its own "imperfection" to shake the fate of the text again from the silence, to force it into a new life that frightens itself. In this way, the work overcomes its own death again and again. It's a two-way journey: countless moments of rebirth that constitute our imagination of what is gone—an imagination of some kind of "perfection." And what about "perfection" itself? It dwells only in those unknown corners of our experience. It is not on the score, but only in the moment of listening, as if illuminated by a sudden piercing light, evoking inexplicable feelings in the depths of our consciousness - related to music, not related to music - and then disappearing, sinking into the field of our memory. In those moments, sound is lost to us: leaving only an imaginary distance, extending the end of all hearing endlessly. Music not only exists at such a distance from us, but it is this distance that protects itself.
The imagination of what is gone is the truth of "listening". At both ends of it, the text of history, the present, is open to each other. "The only perfect performance is the score itself"? No— the score points to its own absence. In this way, the player can make a very different and reasonable interpretation of each note. The text does not, nor can it bind the gaze from the performer: on the contrary, it opens them.
German composer Brahms.
Isn't the same true for the listener? When we hear a certain wrong tone in the play, don't we also imagine the correct tone? When the conductor is waving freely on stage, are we not also imagining the connection between those visual languages and sounds? And the truly broad imagination, when closed eyes and listening—puts an end to the visual intervention of the performer, eliminates all external factors in the scene, and we are left with only the distance of the sound itself: imagining the possibility of each sound pointing, imagining all the meaning that cannot be heard. In those moments, everyone has a copy of their own text in their heart. It is precisely outside of hearing that it is open to us. What is the "subject" of music? The music is speechless, and all we can check is the "me" at that distance. An inaudible scene is like this, delaying our final arrival at it: the sheet music waits for the gaze, the eyes expect to listen, what we are going towards, but always on the way. But because of this, the meaning of sound will not be consumed after all. For what we are looking forward to is the "inaudible" other than "hearing." Are there any traces left here? Needless to say, the truth is always fading. What remains is the supreme imagination of the hearer—precisely because of you, above the score, in that inaudible scene, the "truth" is eternally free and free.
This article was excerpted with permission from the section "Imaginary Distance" in "Beyond the Performance". Images courtesy of the publisher.
Original Author/Zhang Haochen
Excerpts/Zhang Ting
Introduction Proofreader/Wang Xin