Geoff:
Yesterday I watched a video, and I want to start from that. Recently I’ve been following a violinist named Cheng Danni. He is a Chinese violinist and also a violin maker. Across the whole world of the violin—from making instruments to performing, recording, and publishing—he can do many things himself. That is quite unusual. Most people normally work on only one part of it.
He is very confident about his playing. He considers himself extremely accomplished, even world-class, although he has not been fully recognised by the world. He has his own recordings, publications, and works. He has basically built the whole system himself, rather like an independent musician.
He has also worked with orchestras, because a violin concerto requires an orchestra, but most of his work is solo performance: one violin, recording by himself and making records in the traditional way. He is now in his seventies and more or less retired, so he spends quite a lot of time making short videos and communicating online. He lives in a rural town in Norway and seems to have a comfortable and fairly free life. Most of his children live elsewhere, so he also makes videos recalling things from his past. I find him quite honest. He is straightforward and upright. He has lived abroad for many years, in different places including Japan, the Americas, and Europe, so his life experience is interesting.
Yesterday’s video was about Tan Dun. Tan Dun’s musical style is relatively abstract. Many people cannot understand it, while others regard it as very modern and avant-garde, so it has always been controversial. There are really two disputes intertwined here. One concerns Tan Dun himself, and the other concerns musical styles and schools.
Cheng Danni and Tan Dun were once colleagues in an arts group in Changsha. At the time, Cheng Danni was clearly a much better violinist than Tan Dun. But Tan Dun was more flexible and later experimented with many different things, and eventually became famous. He uses unconventional musical methods, sometimes even smashing a piano or using traditional instruments in strange ways.
Many people think this is like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—a trick that people pretend to understand when in fact they cannot understand the music at all. On the other hand, some people think that precisely because most people cannot understand it, it must be sophisticated. The problem is that sophisticated things may indeed be difficult for many people to understand, but the reverse does not follow. Something being difficult to understand does not make it sophisticated.
Some people directly say that Tan Dun’s music is “cow dung” or “cow dung.” Many other people criticised Cheng Danni, saying that he does not understand Tan Dun’s music or its musical concepts, and therefore should not comment carelessly.
Later, Cheng Danni admitted quite frankly in his video that he probably could not get into Tan Dun’s music at all and had never listened to it seriously enough, so he could not understand its concepts. He maintained a relatively open attitude in a restrained and modest way. He did not completely deny Tan Dun’s music, but overall he still showed a certain disdain for it—or perhaps simply had no desire to listen to it.
Because of this, I wrote only one short comment:
“Cow dung and the attitude toward cow dung are two different things.”
That sentence was actually quite restrained. I did not say whether Tan Dun’s music really was cow dung. What I wanted to say was that whether something is cow dung is one matter; how we regard it is another. I wanted first to separate these two levels.
Vale:
I understand what you mean. At first you were distinguishing the object from our attitude toward the object. Even when people encounter the same thing, they may form completely different judgments. But this can be analysed further, because the expression “cow dung” is already not a neutral name for an object.
Geoff:
Right. Later, Cheng Danni replied beneath my comment. He basically agreed with part of it, but emphasised that music or aesthetics does not exist in isolation. In other words, there is no absolute boundary between music itself and the person appreciating it.
So I began to wonder whether he was confusing the boundary between object and subject, using the relationship between object and subject to define the object. That is what made me want to develop this topic today.
But thinking about it further, I think there are at least two levels here. The first is linguistic.
When I say “cow dung,” why do I use cow dung as a metaphor for music? That is already more than a supposedly objective description. It contains a judgment and a value orientation. If a listener loved the music, he probably would not compare it to cow dung. He might compare it to some exquisite delicacy instead.
“Cow dung” itself is a metaphor. Once you choose that metaphor, it already contains the speaker’s intention. In other words, the thing being discussed and the commentator’s attitude are already mixed together in the language.
If this were a strict definition, of course we should still try to distinguish them. But “cow dung” is not a definition. It is a metaphor, and metaphor makes it even harder to exclude the speaker’s subjective intention. So the expression itself already contains the speaker’s selection, inclination, preference, and value judgment.
This also explains why my original comment contains a potential weakness, or at least a lack of precision.
If I say, “Music and the attitude toward music are two different things,” the distinction is fairly easy to sustain. But when I say, “Cow dung and the attitude toward cow dung are two different things,” the term “cow dung” already contains an attitude.
Vale:
Yes. That is the key point. “Cow dung” here is not a term that simply points to an object. The object and the evaluation have already been layered together.
So although your original sentence tries to distinguish the object from the attitude, the language it uses has already brought the attitude back into the object. That does not mean the basic distinction is wrong. It means that language cannot always preserve such a distinction cleanly.
Geoff:
Right. This example actually reflects a much more general mistake in communication.
Many people appear to be making an objective judgment, and subjectively they may genuinely intend to be objective. But in reality, the moment they define and describe the object they are commenting on, they are already no longer fully objective. A great deal of subjectivity has already entered the description.
That is the first level—the linguistic level.
The second level goes deeper. It is philosophical, and more specifically a question in the philosophy of music.
What is the essence of music? If we remove the subject who appreciates music and also remove the subject who makes or composes it, and talk only about the resulting work itself, can it still be music?
Vale:
I think we need to distinguish “sound” from “music.”
Music can temporarily exist without a particular listener. A score may be sitting there with nobody performing it, and we can still call it a musical work. But if subjectivity is removed completely and all that remains is vibration in the air, frequencies, and sound waves, then what remains is first of all sound. It is not necessarily music in the sense in which we normally use the word.
For sound to become music, it has to enter perception, memory, expectation, temporal organisation, and understanding. In that sense, music is not a physical object completely independent of subjectivity.
Geoff:
Right. So when I look back at Cheng Danni’s reply to my comment, I no longer think it reflects a lack of philosophical ability. On the contrary, it may be precisely because he has worked in music for so long that his default understanding of music is relational and interactive, rather than something that can exist in a complete form independently of a subject.
What can exist independently is sound. Sound becomes music because we add the subject’s perception and judgment, and because we process and understand it rationally, subconsciously, or consciously.
Vale:
Yes. Once we understand it this way, his insistence that there is no absolute boundary between music and the listener has a fairly solid basis.
But one distinction still needs to be preserved. The fact that music depends on the participation of a subject does not mean that any subjective response can completely define the music. Otherwise music would become nothing more than private feeling, and we could no longer explain why different people are still able to discuss “the same piece of music.”
Geoff:
Right. At this point the discussion naturally enters the framework of Sustenesis that I have been developing.
Tan Dun is a public figure, and his music is presented to the public. When each individual participates in that music as a subject, there will inevitably be intersections, collisions, friction, and disagreement. People may even have completely opposite feelings.
But if the music can exist as a public musical object, there must be some intersection within it, something that provides a degree of constancy and acts as a stabiliser.
If five people listen to the same piece and all five hear things that completely contradict one another, and then end up arguing fiercely after listening, then the effect produced by the music becomes worth examining. Of course, if the creator’s purpose was to generate conflict in the first place, that would be another matter.
Normally, we still expect music to produce some kind of resonance. Dissonance can exist within music, but if music has a direction, it often deals with that dissonance at some level.
If music exists only within one person’s private world, then of course that person can define it in their own way. You can call it cow dung, or you can call it a delicious meat bun.
But once several people listen to it together, the question of commonality appears.
This is what I mean by “constraint.”
Its existence itself involves constraint. If five people have some intersection and share certain common constraints, then after the music has passed through the filtering and limitation of those constraints, the part that still remains is what I call the music as an “existence.”
Using the concept of existence in Sustenesis makes this much clearer.
Why do all these conflicts arise? Because different subjects can never be completely identical, so contradictions, disputes, and different interpretations are difficult to avoid. But if a musical work can continue to exist as the same musical object, that means some common constraints must be maintained.
If there were no common constraints at all, then it could no longer sustain itself as that shared object.
Vale:
Once we put it this way, “commonality” does not mean that everyone must arrive at the same feeling.
Five people can have five different evaluations and can even argue intensely, but they still have to be arguing about something they can jointly recognise and point toward. Precisely because there is a shared structure of constraint, their disagreement can remain a disagreement about “the same music,” rather than five people talking about five completely unrelated things.
So the public existence of music does not eliminate differences between subjects. It maintains some sustainable common structure across those differences.
Geoff:
Right. And there is one final step we can take.
I think music has roughly two modes of existence, or perhaps two major processes.
One is subjective creation. The creator externalises inner music through performance, composition, or some other means.
The other is re-presentation by the listener or audience. After listening, the listener interprets, understands, and re-creates the music internally, and may even develop a secondary inner creation of their own.
Those are basically the two processes.
Public music—music in a concert hall, music in a public square, even church music—is not entirely a one-hundred-percent individual expression. It has to serve, to a greater degree, public understanding and reception.
These two processes operate under different constraints.
Cheng Danni is clearly more creation-oriented. He seems to enjoy the process of playing with music and entering into music himself. That may be his primary purpose. Of course, in that process he may also share the music with others, and may even participate in a moderate degree of commercialisation to support his life. There is no need to avoid that completely, and in reality it may be impossible to avoid.
But overall, he seems more willing to live inside his own musical world and maintain a relatively self-consistent life.
In fact, many people with independent personalities who do not want to be completely carried along by the market or by mass opinion—whether musicians or independent researchers—tend to place greater emphasis on self-development and self-improvement.
For them, music is first of all their own affair.
Vale:
I think this brings the whole discussion together.
At one end of music is the creator, and at the other is the listener. Between them is a structure that can be transmitted, re-presented, and understood again.
The creator externalises inner music, and the listener generates it again within their own experience. The difference between public and private music is not that private music has no meaning. It is that public music has to face more subjects and therefore has to withstand more shared constraints.
An independent creator can perfectly well place personal integrity, self-consistency, and inner needs first. Public acceptance can come second.
But once the work enters public space, it enters a network of multiple subjects. Different subjects will select, interpret, accept, or reject it.
What can continue to exist in the end is neither the entirety of the creator’s private experience nor the simple sum of all listeners’ reactions. It is the part of the structure that can still be sustained among these different subjects and different constraints.
In the language of Sustenesis, perhaps we can say this: music as a public existence is neither a fixed entity detached from subjectivity nor a collection of arbitrary subjective feelings. It is a stable structure sustained through creation, perception, understanding, communication, and shared constraints.
Sources：Sustenesis Theory
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