Chinese Music beyond Translation: A Multisensory and Transcultural Trajectory

“Playing the Qin in front of a cow” (Dui niu tan qin對牛彈琴) is a Chinese idiom that was used by Chinese scholar Mouzi (牟子) to illustrate the effectiveness of using Confucian expressions to explain Buddhist ideas to Confucian scholars. However, this idiom has generally became a metaphor of the situation of miscommunication or misunderstanding, entailing the vivid image of a cow chewing grass while giving no response to the delicate Qin musical performance. This idiom is usually rendered into an English expression with a biblical reference, i.e., “casting pearls before swine”, which also begs for a more nuanced reflections upon the translatability of words, values, and also music between humans and animals, as discussed by Doug Robinson: “Do affordances exist without animals?” In this presentation, we will use examples of Chinese musical performances in a transcultural context to further discuss the problems of musical translation as transmediation.