Jian Response 3: Why World Music?

I love music! I agree with Brain Eno, who states: “One of [the reasons] is the increasing ability of people to listen to songs without being concerned to know what they mean: the language barrier…. People are listening to music now, rather than specifically to songs” (165). It rings true to me. When I listen to music, I am more responsive to the sound waves, which can penetrate my skin deeply, than words. Yes, I am very sensitive to sound, as I have said in one of my affirmations.

Eno emphasizes: “I believe that in the process of being moved by Nigerian music, you begin to empathize with another view of the universe, another picture of how thing work and how they fit together. And in noticing how you have the capacity to empathize with that, perhaps you take a further step and begin to suppose that the cultural values are also ‘possible’ for you” (166). Eno is not saying just Nigerian music that can affect you, but other foreign music as well, like Mongolian music. I am not Mongolian but I enjoy listening to traditional Mongolian music. One particular album of Mongolian music I like is: The Sound of Grasslands by Snag Cuo Jian Can. I don’t understand what the singer is singing but his doleful voice has power to draw me into his world. I appreciate and value Mongolian music. One of his songs (sorry I don’t know how to translate the name in English) has driven me to produce a piece of craft and make me transform music into my own writing. One might ask How can you transform music into writing? Well, with the combination of Can’s sad voice and instruments, such as drums and Mongolian violin, since there is anger seated deeply inside me already, mainly because of my car accident, I can transform my negative energy to a positive one onto the page, just like releasing your worries and negativity.

Here is one of the rough pieces from my memoir I produced while listening to Mongolian music.



All three—trumpet, gong, cymbal—die.

He, chanting, flings a handful of white rice at each of the eighteen soughing peach trees that leaned against craggy mountains and that surrounded the four-legged stone table, his steps slow and relaxed but making a line of burning incense sticks glow along the table base, smoke gyrating up toward his long white queue, which brushed the golden embroidered dragon and phoenix on his black silky-cheongsam back, which now and then gleams in the full moon. He stops at the head of the table, on the left corner of which sits a bowl of white rice with a burning incense stick and an immaculate uncooked egg, and over the opposite of which he hurls another handful of grain, then to the left side then to the right, his kung-fu shoe stamping immixed dirt and pebbles. Like an horizontal eight, two small porcelain bowls of rice and grain osculating at the rim and pendent from his left crooked forearm rub against the side of his loose cheongsam by the outer thigh, in his hand a pole that pounds the rough earth three times, some rice and grain leaping out of the bowls and raining on his shoes, while he chants.

But his abstruse but soothing chanting hardly echoes in the ears of the faraway five disconsolate white-clothed watchers, two of whom with a hood on, and none of whom were permitted to be near the stone table, so they watch through the barely visible gaps of the peach trees, standing side by side on the knee-high grassed earth surrounded by half-dome graves, in their hands each with three incense sticks waiting to be burned at any moment. The chanting stops. Blast of firecrackers punctures the nocturnal silence and rouses the odd-looking rapacious bird on the apex of a ginkgo. As it watched the cheongsam man down blow, a few gingko nuts pelt down on the ground near where he stands, chanting again.

Each step he, the nipple button atop whose hat poke-poke-poking the moon, walks, he flings paper money into the air, down down it slowly whirling in a light breeze, the trumpet blaring, the gong gonging, cymbals clashing, all three behind one of the peach trees and exciting that waiting croaking fluttering bird. But the waiting is not long. Just when the man snatches the white cloth away from the naked corpse on the stone table and dashes toward the bereaved watchers, the voracious bird plunges down and, with its sharp beak, lacerates the blister-scarred knee, cacophonously croaking as the fast walking feet of the watchers and the gong and trumpet and cymbals all cease, fifteen incense sticks burning on the grassy earth. The ravenous featherless-headed putrid bird flutters its wings and jumps to the naked chest, with its beak taking another violent plunge at the chin, then at the closed mouth which opens instantly and lets the moon peek in and catch a sight at the shining silver coin; two pieces of paper money covering the eyes flap as the beak strikes the mushy neck. Glinting in the paper-thin light in the eastern sky, serpentine blood soaks the scattered rice and grain on the table, trails to the edge, drips onto the gleaming pebbles, onto an acuminate lanuginous leaf, leaches into the adust soil.





I know this piece might be inaccessible to some of my readers. But it is in the rough stage and I will leave it as it is for now. I believe that music is one of the powerful tools we can use to produce an effective piece, which also has the ability to make our readers experience differently by teaching them how to appreciate music more in a universal way that we can break the “language barrier.” Without listening to that song, I don’t think I would have produced a piece of craft like that, which makes my readers feel, while reading it, the physical movement of the cheongsam man in the scene, with their eyes darting back and forth.

I am sure everyone has a preference in music, whether Attenative Rock, Blues, Broadway & Vocalists, Children’s Music, Christian, Classical Music, Classic Rock, Country, Dance & Electronic, Folk, Gospel, Hard Rock & Metal, Indie Music, Jazz, Latin Music, New Age, Opera & Vocal, Pop, R&B, Rap & Hip-Hop, Reggae, Rock, and World Music, etc. My question is: Can we use music as one of the tools to teach our students to transform it into writing? I know I am going to use it to teach my creative writing class in mid-March because “understanding, like a knife, has many uses” (167).