老外看老鼓浪屿--Amoy music

 Compiled by Bill Brown

       在中国，音乐是生活不可分割的一部分。对于中国人而言，音乐的力量已超出了西方人对俄尔甫斯神的了解范围，它还对保持万物均衡至关重要。音律的协调或不调，会影响世界的平衡；编制的音阶与音高是否精确，会关系到帝国的福祉。但是，唯有在音乐中能发现声音与形态的心灵，能创造奇迹的伟大心灵，才能产生音乐。

——麦肯兹·格丽芙， 1959年

    In China, music has been inextricably woven into the whole pattern of life... Music not only had the powers that West knew through Orpheus, but was held by the Chinese to be essential to the world’s equilibrium.

    Through his musical harmonies or disharmonies, man was responsible for the balance of the earth. The welfare of the empire depended on the correctness of the pitches and scales that he made. But it was in man’s heart that music was born, and “it is the heart that works the miracles, the great heart that in music finds its voice and form.”

    Music, the ancient Chinese believed, affected government and government affected music. Fourteen centuries before Christ, the psychological and therapeutic value of music was not only recognized but accepted as part of the apparatus of rule, as it was later in classical Greece.

    The Emperor Wu who lived in the first century B.C. created an imperial office of music, with special departments for the composition of the various kinds necessary, not to entertainment, but to ritual and to rule. -- Averil Mackenzie－Grieves， 1959