I know very little about music, and I don’t listen to much of it either. But that is not to say that I seldom have music on. In fact, whether I’m reading or writing, online or wandering about, I generally have music playing. In terms of time spent, I certainly don’t listen to music less than other people. The thing is, I often only need to listen to a few pieces over and over again; they rarely grow tiresome, and I’m often too lazy to switch them out. I may well spend months repeatedly listening to the same set of music, so all told the number of pieces I’ve listened to is actually quite small. Back in the days when I was crazily into Buddhist sutras and mantras, I eventually realized that I could recite from memory the long chant versions of the Heart Sutra and the like—without ever deliberately memorizing them. It was all just through repeated listening.
The reason is that, for a long time, the most important purpose music has served for me is to improve my reading efficiency. You should know that in fact the vast majority of music reduces reading efficiency. Bad-sounding music certainly won’t do, but music that is too “good,” too dazzling, is not good either. And if one changes music frequently so that it feels novel, that too can be disruptive. On the contrary, if one repeatedly listens to certain calm, plain pieces until they become thoroughly familiar, they can create the best atmosphere for reading.
So I almost never listen to “songs.” If I do listen to songs, I’ll listen to ones in languages I completely don’t understand, because if I can understand the lyrics, the part of the brain responsible for language and reason will inevitably be drawn in, which is a hindrance to immersing myself fully in a book. That is why I don’t listen to pop music—not because I have any special aversion to it. Although I undoubtedly prefer classical music, I’m not particularly bothered even by popular, or even vulgar and restless, music; I simply hardly ever listen to it.
When I was in middle school and even younger, I didn’t listen to music for reading purposes. My impression is that back then I seemed to quite like rock. But rock is generally rather stimulating, and obviously not suited to reading, so later I stopped having much contact with it.
At that time, aside from the very occasional listening to CDs and the small number of MP3s I downloaded, I mainly looked for MID files to listen to. Back then there was quite a lot of MID material online; now, perhaps because the internet has generally sped up, MP3s have become the world’s ruler. In fact, MID is still pretty good—very pure~
When I first entered high school, I became fond of flute-and-xiao music, mainly Chinese bamboo flute and dongxiao, though at the time I didn’t pay much attention to distinctions among instruments. Any flute whatsoever—Western flute, piccolo, recorder, bagpipe, I accepted them all. As long as a piece had flute in it, from ancient times to the present, from China to abroad, I would take it all. But at that time I still didn’t have MP3, and the network was slow, so I didn’t listen to much.
In high school there was also a period when I especially liked Chinese folk instrumental music; in another period I was also very taken with American country music. I remember that the fellow sitting to my right back then kept talking about American country music all day long. I went to find out what it was all about, and it turned out to be not bad—anyway, much better than what he sang… But those styles were not really suitable for reading, so later I didn’t have much contact with them either.
After entering university, I didn’t really listen to music for a while at first. Perhaps the heavenly sounds of Weiming Lake were already enough for my needs? But not long after, I bought an MP3 player and found a kind of music especially suited to reading—religious music. More specifically, Buddhist music and music in a Christian style. Because I found an excellent Buddhist music website, in the end I still mainly listened to Buddhist music. Buddhist mantras are quite interesting. Sometimes the accompanying music itself seems to make it hard to be at peace, but after the repeated, opaque, utterly incomprehensible mantra-text is added, somehow it can actually help me concentrate.
A little later I turned to classical music. In fact, as early as the MID-music era I already liked classical music quite a bit; somehow, later I forgot about it. Once I remembered it, I immediately bought and downloaded a great deal of it to listen to. I feel that classical music is a kind of miracle, a summit of music that is now all but impossible to surpass—just like Tang poetry. Later generations may seem able only to open up new paths for development, yet can no longer reach the heights of Tang poetry on the same plane. The classical age is gone and will never return, but classical music is surely an eternal classic.
Around that time I also began to encounter new age music, though at the time I didn’t know what it was called, only that it was labeled “nature music,” “light music,” “pure music,” “background music,” and the like. Only later did I discover that these all counted as “new age music.” I still haven’t really figured out what exactly new age music is; roughly speaking, it seems to mean a type of music that is neither classical nor folk nor pop, yet somehow incorporates certain features of all three? Aside from downloading all sorts of odds and ends online, I have bought a set of CD’s by the Bandari orchestra, and copied a set of George Winston CD’s from my cousin; both are not bad,
As for instruments, my favorite is first and foremost the piano—that really deserves to be called the king of instruments. Next is the cello, the handsome man among instruments. At the same time, I like almost everything with the character “qin” in its name: violin, guqin, morin khuur, harp, and so on. Of course, my fondness for flute-and-xiao instruments is still retained as well.
Recently, after changing to a 1GB MP3 player, the amount of music I listen to has increased noticeably. Moreover, the time I spend listening to music without doing so for the sake of reading has also increased, and I’ve begun trying to explore all kinds of music.
Considering that leaving the blog’s background music unchanged all the time makes it seem monotonous, I’ve now decided to update the music in the form of separate posts. When a piece sinks to the second page of the blog, I’ll put up a new one.
Since the names of the sections on my blog are all in the form “XX——XX,” what word should correspond to music? After thinking it over and over, only poetry seems worthy of it. In fact, although I know absolutely nothing about poetry, I’ve always been quite interested in it. Back in the day, when I had just entered the Second Attached Middle School and still hadn’t been admitted to the all-science class, our Chinese class required us to do small-group research on literature. The theme I chose was poetry. But perhaps our group leader was too formidable and I was too weak, because I was assigned almost no tasks. From then on I never again tried to study poetry. Still, since this section has now been set up, sooner or later I’ll write something here. Please stay tuned~
0:49, April 13, 2007
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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