Understanding Music and Understanding Significance: on the Criticism Model of “Understanding Music” in Wenxin Diaolong

Tao Litian

The criticism model of “understanding music” is one of the four criticism models proposed in Wenxin Diaolong (Dragon-carving at the Heart of Literary Writing). Through a semantic analysis, it can be known that “understanding music” have both intuitive/perceptual characteristics and analytical/rational characteristics. Through a review of the materials and ideological background of the story “understanding music”, it is seen that existing representative works all ignored the meaning that the story was embedded in a story of “understanding significance” when recorded by Lüshi Chunqiu (Lü’s Annals). In the record of Lüshi Chunqiu, Zhong Ziqi not only “had an ear for music”, but also hold a set of theory consistent with the basic ideas of Confucian music thought in the piece “Yue Lun (Discourse of Music)” in Xunzi and the piece “Yue Ji (Record of Music)” in The Book of Rites. And the theory of “six observations” concluded in the piece “Zhiyin (Understanding Music)” in Wenxin Diaolong is inseparable from the texts of music theories such as the piece “Yue Ji” and Ji Kang’s “Music Has No Grief or Joy”, because they provided analysis of how to understand music. Applying the concept “understanding music”, Wenxin Diaolong not only discusses that literary criticism owns the connotation of valuing intuitive aesthetic experience, but also reflects the critical method of “understanding significance” being compatible with the method of “six observations”. The criticism model of “understanding music” contains not only the meaning of objective criticism of text details, but also the critical idea of holistic experience and comment that values the great “taste/significance” of the works; and this critical spirit and method is implemented throughout the entire book.