Commentary

• Published in: Music theory online Vol. 30; no. 4
• Main Author: Martin, Nathan John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago Society for Music Theory 01.12.2024
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Grief; Modernism; Music
• ISSN: 1067-3040
• DOI: 10.30535/mto.30.4.17

[1] I was reminded, in reading the opening chapters of 黎青主 Li Tsing-chu’s 音樂通論 in Edwin K. C. Li’s elegant English translation, of my experience, in the late spring and early summer of 2018, of visiting Hong Kong for the first time—how that city’s built environment, natural setting, mixture of cultures, babel of languages, range of foods, and so on could seem (to someone born and partly raised on the west coast of Canada—not irrelevantly, in this context, another former British colony) at once profoundly familiar and exceedingly strange. An autonomous region, for instance, is one that makes its own laws (is self-legislating or self-governing), rather than being subject to some outside authority (whether in the form of an external power or a distant central government). [...]talk grounds, for instance, the distinction German musicologists sometimes liked to draw between “functional music”—music that exists to be danced to, or as an aid to devotional practices, or to tell the infantry to advance—and “art music” proper. The rapid survey of European views on music that follows leads him quickly back to the authority of the Greeks (in this, he was clearly a keen student of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture, and picked up on its phil-Hellenism), and to the conviction that “the Greeks considered Music to be a form of language” (希臘人要把音樂當作是一種的語言), and in particular a kind of “language of the soul” (一種靈魂的語言).