When we usually listen to music, what are we listening to? I don’t know if you have thought about it. Besides the guqin, what are we listening to when we listen to other music, and do they have anything in common? How should we appreciate Guqin music, or appreciate Guqin music?

Quoting Alan Copeland's theory, he divides listening to music into three stages:

1. Aesthetic stage;

2. Expression stage;

3. Pure music stage.

This theory also applies to Guqin music.

The easiest way to listen to music is purely for the pleasure of the sound, and this is the aesthetic stage.

To give a simple example, when I first started to get in touch with the guqin, I liked the song "Falling Wild Goose on Pingsha" very much. But when listening to the song, I always start to think about my own thoughts while listening to the song, sometimes even ignoring where the song is placed. This is a phenomenon that often occurs when I am in the first stage.

Listening to music at this stage does not require any kind of thinking. When we open the music software when we are doing other things, we are unconsciously immersed in the sound atmosphere.

Surprisingly, many people develop bad music listening habits at this stage. They go to concerts to forget themselves and use the music as a form of comfort or relief. They enter an ideal world in which people don't need to think about the realities of everyday life.

Of course they didn't think about music either. Music allows them to leave music and takes them to a realm of fantasy that is caused by music, about music, but they don't listen to music very much.

The second stage of listening to music is the expression stage. All music has the ability to express, some are stronger, some are weaker, and all the notes have some meaning behind them, and this meaning constitutes the content of the work after all. Music has meaning, but it doesn't seem to be able to clearly express this meaning in specific words.

At different moments, the music expresses emotions of serenity or overflowing, remorse or triumph, anger or joy.

It expresses each of these emotions, and many others, in countless nuances and variations, and it can even express a meaning for which no proper word can be found in any language.

In this context, professionals like to say that music has only pure musical connotations.

But no matter what the professionals say, most music beginners still have to formulate clear words about their response to music.

Just like when the ancients compose music, the name of the music usually expresses a specific intention or emotional state. Within this framework, everyone will understand the expression of the melody relatively well. This is a shortcut, but another limitation.