3/29/2017

May we get closer to the perfect world

It is still pretty cold here in the morning everyday. It takes me a few weeks to start planting vegetables in the garden farm. I have already purchased a few kinds of seeds of vegetables. In amateur radio, a big solar flare has been going on for a few days. It makes operating radio less attractive now. As a result, I am spending more time with cello.

Music has been a good friend of mine for years. In every practice session, I start with scale from C major, C minor, D major, D minor and so forth. For 4 octaves. For a couple of years, I have been using a tuner, which had corrected my scale so much. I have been feeling guilty to have played it with such incorrect scale for years. I was unwilling to go after such "a machine". In addition, exactly speaking, it is only the well temperament which is not suitable for string instruments performance. Of course, my scale was premature before discussing the subtle difference in tuning. It has been a pleasure for me to complete each scale even in well temperament. I regret I should have used the tuner long before. Telling myself, however, that it is never too late, I would go on practicing with it.

I believe there is a perfect ideal world of music, which must be an apriori existence in the universe. The auditory function in our brain/auditory organ must be like an interface between that perfect music and ourselves. It is really mysterious that there are different kinds of temperament, Pythagorean for melodies, pure temperament for chords and so forth. As you may know, there are subtle and still definite differences between those temperaments. We hear the very high range of audio lower than its actual tone while the low range higher. They say we should play the higher tones a bit higher than the accurate tones. The same thing goes for the lower tones. This complexity in scale may reflect, in my view, the imperfect presence of the world. The theoretical existence of music itself is completely closed in perfectionism. Our auditory function, imperfect itself, may make the actual music sound imperfect. I really hope, some day when I leave this world, I might be allowed to listen to music in perfect form.

Dreaming of such a thing, I again start struggling with cello.

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