Personal
Music
"At this moment, the absence of sound is better than its presence" -- In "Pipa Ballad", a Chinese poem by Bai Juyi (772-846)
In his article "On the Absence of Sentiments in Music (Shengwu Aile Lun)", Xi Kang (223 - 262) said that sentiments are absent in music
"[T]he arising of music is born in the hearts of men." In Record of Music, a Confusian classic translated by Scott Cook (1995)
--a measurement of the amount of information by the Father of Information Theory, Claude Shannon (1916-2001)
--a formula of conditional probability, Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702-1761)
I wish I had more musical talents. I am, however, having lots of fun playing the erhu everyday. I am greatly indebted to my erhu teacher Wang Guowei.
| A picture of the erhu (Source: www.musicfromchina.org) |
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Contrary to what many people think, the erhu is used not only for sad and touching tunes but spirit-lifting and dramatic ones. It is widely performed in traditional as well as modern compositions. If you are curious about how it sounds, please check out the audio and video clips on this site I helped develop: http://www.musicfromchina.org. To buy one, you might want to visit http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/instruments/erhuist.html (Note: I have not bought one from there but the prices are not too bad if you are in the States).