Chapter 44 Bai Juyi/The confidant of "It is better to listen to others than to play by yourself"

Bai Juyi (772-846), courtesy name Letian, nicknamed Xiangshan Jushi and Mr. Zuiyin.His ancestral home was Taiyuan, and he moved to Xiabang (now Weinan, Shaanxi).In the sixteenth year of Zhenyuan (800), he was a Jinshi.In the second year of Yuanhe (807), the official Zuo picked up relics, and was later demoted to Sima of Jiangzhou. In the second year of Huichang (842), he became an official as Minister of the Ministry of punishment. Bai Juyi was a famous poet in the middle Tang Dynasty. The "New Yuefu Movement" advocated by him and Yuan Zhen is of great significance in the history of Chinese poetry.He is also a musician who is proficient in temperament, loves music very much, and can play the piano himself.Especially in his later years, after he settled in Luoyang, he basically lived a life of singing and dancing, wandering around the mountains and rivers.

Bai Juyi's music thought is relatively conservative.On the one hand, he emphasized the role of music in social education; on the other hand, he respected the so-called elegant music and opposed the so-called "vulgar music" representing folk music, lamenting that "human feelings are so important to the present and how cheap the ancients are" ("Wuxiantan"), lamenting " The ancient sound is insipid and tasteless, and it does not call today's human feelings" ("Abandoned Qin").In "Pipa Xing", he satirizes the local "folk songs and Qiang flute" as "vomiting and mocking and making it difficult to hear".

Bai Juyi has a very high appreciation of music. He said in the poem "Ask Yang Qiong": He made a sharp criticism of that kind of aesthetic performance, pointing out the aesthetic requirement that music must be full of sound and emotion. He also has a poem "Listening to Youlan": It puts forward the principle that "both body and mind must be quiet" in music aesthetics. Bai Juyi is also a master at describing music in poetry.Originally, it was very difficult to describe with words, but Bai Juyi was able to use very vivid words to describe music vividly.He wrote a large number of poems describing music, the most famous of which is "Pipa Xing", which was widely circulated at that time, and even spread to minority areas.After Bai Juyi's death, Tang Xuanzong said in the poem "Diao Bai Juyi": "The boy can sing "Eternal Regret", and Huer can sing "Pipa Chapter". It can be seen that its influence is great.Let's take a look at the passage in "Pipa Xing" that describes the music exquisitely:

This paragraph of text can be called the masterpiece describing music in ancient poetry.