The great sound is faint: why the qin aims at what cannot be heard
The Laozi says that the great sound is faint, that the greatest music cannot be heard. The guqin made this line the core of its aesthetics: Xu Shangying's Xishan Qinkuang gives a whole section to faint sound, and Tao Yuanming simply played a qin without strings. This article traces where the phrase comes from, Zhuangzi's pipes of heaven, how players put it into their hands as lightness, distance and faintness, and how a quiet instrument turned quietness into its standard.
An ongoing record of guqin study, technique and digital notation.
Translated from the Chinese original.
A piece has just ended. The last note was a harmonic, very light. The player does not lift his hands. His left hand still rests on the string, his right hand hangs in the air, and his whole body is still.
The note is fading. One second, two seconds, three. The listeners hold their breath. By the fourth second it can no longer be heard at all, and still the player does not move. Only in the fifth second does he slowly lower his hands.
For those five seconds, there is no sound coming from the instrument. Yet the piece is not over. Qin players have a name for those five seconds: xisheng, "faint sound".
The guqin, the seven-string Chinese zither, is the quietest of the instruments in common use. Players have never treated this as a weakness. They have turned "small" into "great", and they speak of the absence of sound as part of the music. The root of this lies in a single line of four characters.
The Laozi
The Laozi, also known as the Daodejing, is the foundational text of Daoism, traditionally attributed to Laozi and compiled around the fourth century BCE. Its forty-first chapter says:
The great square has no corners. The great vessel is completed last. The great sound is faint. The great image has no form.
The word translated "faint", xi, means rare, thin, scarcely audible. Laozi does not mean that there is literally no sound. He means that the most fundamental thing does not lie at the level the senses can grasp. The more definite a sound is, the less it is the "great sound".
These four characters began as philosophy, not as a statement about music. Laozi was talking about the Dao, the Way, which cannot be seen, touched or heard, yet from which all things come. "The great sound is faint" is an analogy for the Dao, not a remark about the qin. But qin players borrowed it, and they used it well.
The Zhuangzi: three kinds of pipes
The Zhuangzi, the second great Daoist classic, compiled from the fourth century BCE onward, opens its chapter "On Making All Things Equal" with three kinds of sound. Nanguo Ziqi sits leaning on his armrest, gazing up at the sky and sighing, as if he had lost his own self. His student asks what has happened to him. He answers: you have heard the pipes of man, but have you heard the pipes of earth? You may have heard the pipes of earth, but have you heard the pipes of heaven?
The pipes of man are the sounds people make by blowing flutes and reed pipes. The pipes of earth are the sounds the wind makes as it passes through the hollows of hills and forests: holes in trees, cracks in rocks, valleys, each sounding in its own way when the wind blows. And the pipes of heaven? Zhuangzi never says outright. He says only that they "blow through the ten thousand things, each differently, and let each be itself". They are whatever lets every thing make its own sound.
This offers one way to read "the great sound is faint". The pipes of heaven are not a sound. They are what makes all sounds possible. They cannot be heard, since they are not "a" sound at all.
How qin players took it over
From the Wei and Jin dynasties (220–420) onward, players began to describe the qin in these terms.
Xi Kang (223–262), in his Rhapsody on the Qin, says that the qin can "stir the heart and will, and release hidden feeling". He is already speaking of something beyond the sound itself. The sound is the means, and the heart and its hidden feelings are the end. Tao Yuanming (c. 365–427) went furthest of all. His qin had no strings. As he put it, "If you know the delight within the qin, why trouble with the sound on the strings?" (see the stringless qin). He turned faint sound into a piece of furniture.
In the Tang dynasty (618–907), Bai Juyi wrote, "When the heart is still, the sound is plain; between them there is no ancient or modern" (see the qin in Tang poetry). Plainness, dan, is one step on the way to faintness. First the sound grows plain, and one step further down it becomes faint.
In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Xu Shangying's Xishan Qinkuang ("Qin Aesthetics of Streams and Mountains", 1641) organized all of this into a system. Among its twenty-four qualities of qin playing are stillness, clarity, distance, plainness and faintness. Of distance he writes:
Sought on the strings, it seems not enough. Found beyond the strings, there is more than enough.
And of faint sound:
What is called faint is the very limit of stillness. It reaches into the remote and dim, and passes out of being into non-being.
The five seconds in the opening scene are exactly this passing out of being into non-being.
These sentences sound mystical today, but in the hands they are concrete.
In the hands
On the qin, faintness comes down to three things.
Slowness. Qin pieces are generally slow, slow enough that the full decay of every note can be heard. The decay is the faint part of the qin's sound. The attack, where the string is plucked, is being. The ringing tail that follows passes gradually into non-being. Most notes on other instruments are pure being. A piano has its sustain pedal, and a violin can hold a note as long as the bow moves. The qin is different. Every note it makes is already dying, and dying quickly, in two or three seconds. What players practise is listening to the decay all the way to its end and not playing the next note before it is gone. Qin music is slow because it is waiting.
Plainness. No forcing, no loud attacks. The Yushan school's ideal of "clear, subtle, plain and distant" (see Yan Tianchi) is four words all pulling toward the small. The vibratos yin and nao must be narrow, for if they are too wide the pitch wanders. The fingers must strike lightly, for if they strike too hard the sound turns harsh. The Xishan Qinkuang has a quality called lightness, and says: "What is neither light nor heavy is the sound of balance and harmony. Yet within lightness there is roundness." Light, but with something inside the lightness.
Emptiness. The qin has a great many notes that are not plucked by the right hand at all but are drawn out by the left hand moving along the string: sliding up, sliding down, sliding up and back, sliding down and back, and the left-hand pull-offs. These are much quieter than plucked notes and are called "empty sounds". In any piece, solid and empty sounds alternate, and the more empty sounds there are, the closer the music comes to faintness. These moving notes are unique to the qin. A note is plucked, then the left hand slides along the string; the pitch changes, but nothing is plucked again, and the sound grows fainter and fainter until it cannot be heard. This is the great sound is faint in technical form: one note travels from being to non-being, and the whole of it is process.
All of these techniques are collected under the left-hand sliding techniques in the qin technique index.
How small became great
Put all of this together and you can see that the qin did something clever. It is quiet. That is a physical fact. It explained its quietness as faintness, linked faintness to Laozi's great sound, and in this way the small became great.
This is not sophistry. The quiet of the qin really does offer an experience other instruments do not. You must come close, you must be silent, and you must be alone or with a few others. Once a qin concert has an audience of more than two or three hundred, amplification becomes necessary, and with amplification the thinnest part of the decay is lost. This is why older players disliked large stages. A small sound filters out the inattentive listener. Someone whose mind is elsewhere simply cannot hear what the qin is playing. Those who remain hear the stretch of sound after the attack, slowly vanishing, and that is precisely the passage out of being into non-being. On the qin, Laozi's four characters can be checked by ear.
The opposite of the faint great sound is the loud sound: gongs and drums, bells and chimes, a full ensemble. Those sounds are made for many people to hear. They belong to ritual and announce something. The qin announces nothing. It is simply there. One person plays and one person listens, or one person plays for himself. Its greatness is not that it carries far, but that it reaches deep.
A counterexample
Not every qin piece moves toward faintness. Guangling San is loud, with passages of pent-up anger and the sound of combat (see Guangling San). Jiu Kuang ("Drunken Ecstasy") sways, its beat lurching from side to side (see Ruan Ji). Liu Shui ("Flowing Water") has a long passage known as the "seventy-two gun and fu", in which the right hand sweeps back and forth across all seven strings in imitation of rushing water. It is anything but quiet.
The existence of such pieces shows that the great sound is faint is a direction, not a prohibition. In the last sections of Guangling San the violence drains away and only a few harmonics remain. In Liu Shui, after the sweeping, the water recedes into the distance, and the piece also closes on harmonics. Every loud sound falls back, in the end, into faintness.
There were also players who rejected all this. In the Ming and Qing some complained that the Yushan school was too plain to say anything. The Wuzhizhai Qinpu, a qin handbook of 1722 associated with the Guangling school of the Qing dynasty, is full of elaborate vibratos and free, shifting rhythms, a taste quite different from the plainness of the Yushan style. Faintness has always been argued over in qin history. It is only that the winning side wrote it into the theory. A learner today should know this. The pursuit of faint sound is the mainstream, not the only way.
For people today
Most music today is loud. Earbuds, speakers and stadium concerts all push toward more volume. The qin offers the opposite experience: a sound so small that you have to go looking for it.
Learners usually aim first to play clearly and in tune, and that is right. But at a certain stage the teacher begins to say "lighter", and then "lighter still". That is the point at which you start moving toward faintness. There is a simple exercise. Play one open string and do not move. Count the seconds until the sound disappears. Tomorrow, play it again and see whether you can hear it for one more second. That extra second does not come from the instrument. It comes from the ear, which has begun to hear smaller things. In the end you play a note and sit listening to it vanish, as the player did in those five seconds, and what you feel then is probably what Laozi meant.
It cannot be heard. But it is there.