Concentrating on Empty: the Music of the Guqin

Coming back to writing and steady habits after falling off the proverbial wagon

Orchid flowers are perennials. With proper care, they will rebloom every year. Or even quicker! (As usual, all photos are mine unless otherwise noted.)

I’ve been away from Substack for over a month at this point. In the first two weeks, my mother came up north here for a visit, an escape from the brutal heat at home down south. And then soon after she left, I ended up injuring myself at the gym. I’m not badly hurt (don’t worry!), but it’s taken a while to get the right care and start the healing process.

In the interim, most non-essential life tasks have fallen by the wayside. Including writing and translation. I’ve missed the tactile sensation of putting pen to paper, finger to keyboard. Of toying with words and meanings, connecting past to present. I’m glad to be back, at least for the moment.

Life, and the practice of life, is really just a series of cycles like this. We build habits, keep to our plans and schedules, and then something happens to throw us off-kilter.

The missteps and stumbles aren’t a big deal. What matters is getting our footing again and continuing to walk. Returning to a steady pace, again and again and again.

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A few more posts are in the hopper already, so we’ll be back to our normal schedule soon. Until then, I’m going to share some music in a more bite-sized post.

This is a recording of “Remembering an Old Friend” 憶故人 by Cheng Gongliang 成公亮, one of my favorite modern masters of the qin.¹

The qin is the instrument par excellence of balance and tension between the empty and the full, the Chinese aesthetic concepts of 虛 xū and 實 shí. (The first link is an encyclopedia entry, the second and third are to previous posts on this blog.)

As you listen to this song, don’t just pay attention to the strong, plucked sounds. Listen for the gliding tones that bend across pitches. Listen for the vibrating ornaments, the quick hissing oscillations, the back-and-forth wobbles. And listen for the empty spaces. The music is often written to allow space for sounds to linger and vanish into silence.

Each of these unique tone colors is an example of non-full sounds 虛 xū. Qin music is all about playing with tone, expressing what isn’t full or complete, and balancing sound with non-sound.

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Personally, I prefer to listen to qin music without visuals. It’s much easier to concentrate on the subtleties of the sound without interesting but distracting visuals.

That said, if you do want to watch the instrument being played, here’s a video of the same master playing the same song.

In this video, pay attention to the artist’s left hand. The left hand is responsible for most of the ornamentation, and it moves in many different ways to produce many types of sounds.

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You can see in this video how playing the qin multiple senses, more than some instruments. The eyes diligently watch the left hand as it moves. The ears hear fine gradations of sound. The nose smells the wood of the instrument and, often, incense burned during practice or performance.

And the body doesn’t not just feel the strings it plucks. The qin requires a surprising amount of strength to keep a string pressed tightly to the instrument’s wooden body as the left hand slides quickly up and down between pitches. All gliding notes should be smooth. Letting up just a little will completely and abruptly stop the sound.

Despite how easy Cheng Gongliang makes it look, playing advanced qin pieces quickly requires tremendous energy. When played with correct technique, the entire chain of muscles from foot to leg to buttocks to back to shoulder to arm to hand are engaged. The body roots into the floor, pulling mighty force from ground and releasing through a single finger. The pressure at the fingertip is immense, like a tensed bow waiting to release an arrow.

The experience of learning to apply the right amount of pressure through long slides and complex movements is somatic, not conceptual. It has to be felt and experienced through the body.

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Next week, we’ll return to the next chapter of The Extinction of Experience. Chapter 3 is about the experience of physical touch, especially the embodied experience of playing music, and asks us if we are growing out of touch with physical experiences.

If you’d like to review the previous post in the series, have a click below.

1. The qín 琴, also known as the gǔqín 古琴, is one of the oldest instruments in the world. It has seven strings, no frets, a range of about four octaves, and is played only with bare hands. People familiar with the instrument may call it the qín, but it is often safer to call it the gǔqín. (I will use both interchangeably.) Its longer modern name literally means “ancient qín” to distinguish it from all the other modern stringed instruments that are types of qín. Such as the piano (“iron qín” gāngqín, 鋼琴), the violin (“small hand-held qín”, xiǎo tíqín 小提琴), the viola (“medium hand-held qín”, zhōng tíqín 中提琴), or the cello (“large hand-held qín”, dà tíqín 大提琴). Chinese translations of technical terms in the modern era are often very blunt, unpoetic, and practical.