Recently, I've heard people say that the Guqin is simple, while the piano is advanced. They think this because piano scores are densely packed with numerous notes and even multiple voices, whereas a Guqin score seems to have very few notes. This is their biggest misconception. What makes a master pianist truly great? It is taking a piece of extreme, human-limiting difficulty and reproducing it flawlessly. Take Liszt or Rachmaninoff, for example—playing ten notes with two hands, complete independence of both hands, ultra-high-speed fingerwork, a massive dynamic range, and terrifyingly formidable difficulty. Therefore, in the piano world, there is a profound admiration for conquering a piece. The harder the piece is, if you can still play it exactly as written without missing a single note, the greater you are. But for the Guqin, the logic is entirely different. With the Guqin, people rarely discuss how difficult a piece is. What is truly discussed is how deep you, the performer, are when you play it. Why has 'Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbar' (Pingsha Luoyan) been played for hundreds of years? The score itself is actually not complex; you could even say it's quite simple. What is truly complex is the person playing it. For the exact same note, when some people play it, it sounds like a beginner practicing; yet others can bring out the very sensation of the wind blowing. For the exact same glissando, some people just slide through it, while others can make you feel as if time itself is shifting. The most formidable aspect of the Guqin is that it doesn't give you too much. It even leaves blank spaces, forcing you, the performer, to fill them in yourself. When master pianists play, it's like having a palace that has already been built, and the master pianist sketches this palace exactly as it is, down to the finest detail. A Guqin master, on the other hand, might only be facing a rough sketch. The greatness of a Guqin master lies in their ability to build an entire world out of that single sketch. That's why many Guqin pieces, if played by an ordinary person, sound like just a few boring notes. But when handed to a top master, those exact same notes are suddenly transformed into the highest form of art.
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