Tien, Adrian (2016). Not so fast: Speed-related concepts in Chinese music and beyond. Global Chinese, 2(2), 189-211. DOI: 10.1515/glochi-2016-0008
While speed as a sonic and musical experience may be a universal phenomenon, concepts referring to kinds of speed are language-specific and culture-dependent. This paper focuses on the notion of speed in Chinese and concepts associated with speed in Chinese, especially in relation to music. Five speed-related concepts in Chinese are subjected to scrutiny: kuai, ji, su, man and huan. These concepts are scrutinized in traditional musical, contemporary musical and general contemporary contexts. The musical genres in which these concepts present themselves are the music of guqin (a seven-stringed zither) and Peking Opera. Semantic analyses adopting the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach are utilized in order to explicate these concepts. Preliminary findings demonstrate that, unlike in some other musical traditions in which one might expect the capacity to play at markedly contrastive speeds in a musical performance to be aesthetically desirable or even essential, as the meanings of the speed-related concepts in Chinese reveal, the ability to play fast is not necessarily aesthetically praiseworthy in at least traditional Chinese music, nor is speed necessarily a major consideration as one executes speed in a Chinese musical interpretation.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
