Without recalling if by accident music and its sound is written in the shape of rounded symbols, we often forget or fail to perceive that silence decorates the edges of a melody—and every one of its rounded notes in between—in each and all sides or limits of its circumference.
Music, it can be said, travels on the shoulders of pebbles dropped into ponds of still water.
What a melody can be, what beauty the melody can invoke, has often less to do with the strategic linear connection of sounds, and more to do with the allowance our ears can give to the gentle circular contraction of stillness and silence. The beauty we hear, is often the explanation we construct to replace the coincidence that occurs between a receding silence and the sounds that leak into it.
Photography by Xiang Tiange
As a school teacher, composer, and photographer, I try each day to carry less interest in the things I already know, and more fascination for what I decide to do about the things I don’t know.