Newyorker上一篇有趣的文章，题目很有意思，The Well-tempered Clavier是钢琴平均律，这个标题或许可以直译为网络平均律吧，文章的主要意思是网络虽然会摧毁流行CD的发行，但是却会帮助古典音乐的推广。这个按照我个人的体会也似乎如此，1995左右的时候我还只是依靠购买走私的打扣碟与磁带来听古典音乐，但是价格对于学生而言太过昂贵，而武汉的古典音乐节目时间也一再往后推迟，主流媒体更难有这方面的讯息，记得当时自己掏钱买的《CD圣经》有如天价，买后节衣缩食许久，这样的消费水平对于一般人而言实在难以维持，这也使得我在中途中断了几年的听乐。不过来上海后，打口CD价格要比以往便宜许多，10块就可以买到一张普通版的EMI系列，当然名盘就更贵点，但是一切都因网络改变，APE、FLAC直接使得下载CD只是个技术活而已，短短三年左右时间，我差不多积攒了450G的音乐库存，按照一张APE250M来换算，大概我也有1800张CD可以欣赏了，在古典音乐论坛里，也产生了APE下载强迫症患者，每天例行公事的上论坛下载，虽然这也是个极端，但是可见网络实在使得古典音乐的门槛大大降低，李欧梵能在香港一掷千金买切利比达克的全套CD，可是对于我而言，只不过是花几天时间和几G的硬盘而已，以前由于传播渠道与成本而形成的文化等级如今变成完全同质化，这篇NEWYORKER文章还发现大量古典乐迷还有了渠道去表达与分享对音乐的看法，甚至ITURNE下载古典音乐的人群与HIP-HOP甚至JAZEE一样多，如此看来，网络这个看上去是草根文化载体的东东，反过来还维护了古典文化的小众群体的延续。事实上国内的一些爱乐人的BLOG已经相当可观，假以时日，这个群体数量将与日俱增，或许技术的进步改善了我们的进入门槛，但是现代人的问题是，如何拥有足够的闲暇去理解这些作品，或许这才是古典音乐最难面对的问题吧。

The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music.
by Alex Ross
October 22, 2007

In the spring of 2004, I made the questionable decision to start a blog. I reserved a dot-com address, signed up for an Internet-for-dummies service called Typepad, and, to the delight of more than a dozen compulsively Googling insomniacs around the world, began adding dribs and drabs to the graphomaniac ocean of the Web.

Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in. Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with intelligence and verve, revelling in the chance to express ideas that had no other immediate outlet. Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines, and other mainstream media, its products deemed too élitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student’s ruminations on György Ligeti’s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question—Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler —was himself twenty-seven.

News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko; sales of classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise, first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, follow performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar tundra of the classical experience.

Chris Bell, the director of worldwide product and music marketing at iTunes, happens to be a classically trained violinist, and he has closely monitored the progress of the classical division. He told me, “An interesting fact I recently uncovered is that, when you look at different genres in terms of sharing and cross-pollination, there’s more dabbling going on than you might expect. We sell almost as much hip-hop to classical buyers as we do jazz. We’ve made iTunes a safe place to try classical music. It is easy to sample and the buying is low-risk.” Bell talked about the serendipity of listening on the Internet, where someone might come to the site looking for a souvenir of Pavarotti and end up with the Kronos Quartet playing pieces by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. He declined to discuss over-all sales figures or classical music’s percentage of the total market, but he did say that “classical music overindexes a great deal more over the figures commonly quoted for physical retail”—meaning that the figures are considerably higher than the two- or three-per-cent share to which the genre has generally been consigned.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisClassical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.

Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the “Snakes on a Plane” rule: things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming godsends for a kind of music that has always struggled to find its place in American culture. At the end of such bouts of giddiness, classical music somehow always winds up back where it started, in a state of perpetual fret. Nevertheless, the classical business is not doing badly at present—in August, the Metropolitan Opera sold more than two million dollars’ worth of tickets in a single day—and the unregulated openness of the Internet seems to have done it many favors. Perhaps no one should be surprised at this turn of events. If, as people say, the Internet is a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of the most opulently geeky art forms in history.

A tour of music’s new virtual realm might begin at www.schoenberg.at, the Web site of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, in Vienna. In a handsome twist of fate, the most famously difficult composer of the twentieth century is now the most instantly accessible: possibly no modern artist has such a large Web presence. On the site, you can read immaculate digital reproductions of Schoenberg’s correspondence, listen to his complete works on streaming audio, examine his designs for various inventions and gadgets (including a typewriter for musical notation), and follow links to YouTube videos of him playing tennis. Particularly touching are documents of Schoenberg’s California period, from 1934 to 1951. In one letter, the inventor of atonality seeks customer service for his new Ford sedan: “It happened today that the cooling system was without water, so that we saw the steam coming out and when we went to the next garage and he opened, boiling water was in.” Cannily, the Schoenberg Center, with the amiable support of the composer’s American heirs, has treated this monumental legacy as a kind of open source: in an era when estates, record labels, and publishers fight for control of copyright, Schoenberg, love him or hate him, is up for grabs.

Go next to Think Denk, the blog of the pianist Jeremy Denk, a superb musician who writes with arresting sensitivity and wit. The central predicament of Denk’s existence is that he is struggling to master the great works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries while meandering through a twenty-first-century landscape of airports, Starbucks outlets, and chain hotels. He relishes moments of absurd collision. While he is practicing the finger-busting fugue of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, his wearied brain discovers that the principal fugue subject matches the theme song of “Three’s Company”: “Come and knock on our door / We’ve been waiting for you. . . .” Denk also reports the well-meaning but deflating things that people say to him at post-concert receptions: “How ever do you fellas get yer fingers to play together?” Far less mundane is his account of what it is like to play the piano part in Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”:

 

Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a “mantra”: extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people’s eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring (“pouring over”) that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself—and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant . . . each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable . . . and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to “move yourself,” to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over. . . . When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.

 

from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisThis is a voice that, effectively, could never have been heard before the advent of the Internet: sophisticated on the one hand, informal on the other, immediate in impact. Blogs such as this put a human face on an alien culture.

Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco’s music director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Tilson Thomas and the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductor’s explanations of the particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented their instruments. Not since the fifties, when Leonard Bernstein walked across a gigantic blown-up score of Beethoven’s Fifth on the TV show “Omnibus,” has there been such a vividly intelligent introduction to some of the fundamentals of classical music. Tilson Thomas is Bernstein’s most faithful and hopeful follower, and with these programs he is performing radical acts of demystification.

If there is a man behind the curtain of classical music’s online realm, it is Klaus Heymann, the founder of Naxos Records. Heymann is a robust seventy-one-year-old German native who has long been a resident of Hong Kong; his first business venture was a mail-order operation delivering electronic gadgets to American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War. He shifted into the classical-record business in the eighties, purveying obscure repertory on the Marco Polo label; enthusiasts went to him for the symphonies of Havergal Brian and the operas of Franz Schreker. With the invention of the CD, Heymann saw a market for budget recordings of mainstream repertory; he launched Naxos in 1987, recording huge swaths of music, from Adolphe Adam to Zemlinsky. In the early years, he relied on the low-rent services of orchestras from Eastern Europe, and many of his offerings were of middling quality; as Naxos has gathered force, its standards have risen, to the point that its new Brahms cycle features the formidable Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic. In 2006, Heymann said, Naxos had revenues of eighty-two million dollars, and last August was the best-ever month for its U.S. division.

Heymann was among the first people to grasp classical music’s Internet potential. In 1996, he put his entire catalogue online, inviting listeners to listen to any track for free. It took years before technological advances made this service practicable for a wide range of users, and, by extension, profitable. “Honestly, until about two years ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby,” Heymann told me. “Only since 2006 or 2007 has there been a piece of return on the investment, through the digital.” Digital sales now account for twenty-five per cent of his revenues, and, because of drastically lower production and distribution costs, he makes much more profit on each sale. Hence the venue for our meeting: a forty-first-floor hotel suite overlooking Central Park.

All the classical labels are eying digital sales as a way to renovate their business. Having wasted much effort in the nineteen-nineties trying to copy the pop paradigm of blockbuster hits—the singular phenomenon of Pavarotti was a will-o’-the-wisp luring them on—the labels now realize that they can make money by selling large numbers of releases in more modest quantities. Chris Anderson, the author of the contrarian business book “The Long Tail,” calls this strategy “selling less of more.” The “long tail” is the almost limitless inventory of CDs, books, movies, and other products that pours forth on sites such as Amazon.com. Some may sell or rent only once a year. Yet, Anderson says, “about a quarter of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 100,000 titles.” Classical music, with its thousand-year back catalogue, has the longest tail of all. In Naxos’s case, thirty to forty per cent of its digital sales in the U.S. come from albums downloaded four times a month or less. Thus, a not insignificant portion of the company’s revenue comes from titles that, by Justin Timberlake standards, don’t exist.

Yet Heymann is skeptical of the long-tail hypothesis as a long-term business model. Posting audio files on the Internet still costs money, he says, and if labels, orchestras, and radio stations glut the globe with archives of recorded material “the long tail will bite itself.” He doesn’t think that the CD is obsolete; in classical music, if not in pop, collectors still cherish high-quality sound, cover art, program notes, song texts, and other paraphernalia. Ultimately, though, Heymann predicts that many listeners will obtain recorded music by subscribing to a library and searching for the compositions they want. In fact, he already has such a service up and running. For $19.95 a year, you can have access to all the Naxos recordings that are online. The service has eleven thousand users, around half of them under the age of forty.

“This is the most promising model we have seen,” Heymann told me. “Downloads are limited. In the States, sales are not like this anymore”—he made an ascending diagonal with his hand—“but levelling off. In Europe, there is very little traction outside the U.K. Germany is a disaster. So I am looking past downloads to subscriptions.” He spoke about the possibility of selling preprogrammed MP3 players—say, a fifty-dollar unit loaded with fifty hours of Mozart.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisWith some amusement, Heymann took note of a recent story in the Times Magazine, by Lynn Hirschberg, about the record producer Rick Rubin, who earlier this year became the co-chairman of Columbia Records. In the article, Rubin looked ahead to a time when a listener could forgo the buying of individual CDs or downloads in favor of a subscription to a large-scale online musical library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month,” Rubin told Hirschberg. When pop moguls start taking tips from German classical-music producers, something new is under the sun.

The probable demise of the recording as a physical artifact is a frightening prospect for many people who got to know classical music through the gradual, painstaking acquisition of beloved LPs and CDs. The greatest studio recordings—such as those of Walter Legge, after the Second World War, with the likes of Otto Klemperer, Maria Callas, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf—achieved a state of glowing perfection that no live concert could match. And perhaps that was part of the problem. Concert presenters have long complained that many avid record collectors seldom venture into the concert hall. At the height of the hi-fi era, recordings seemed to become a kind of phantasmagoria, a virtual reality that threatened to replace concert life. James Levine thinks that recordings have played an outsized role in the modern era; they should simply be “souvenirs” of performances, he told me. MP3s and live audio streams, disembodied and often tinny in sound, are very souvenir-like; they don’t pretend to re-create an orchestra in one’s living room, and may actually lead listeners to exercise their imaginations as a way of making up for sonic shortcomings.

To a surprising and encouraging degree, recording in the digital era serves to reinforce live performance rather than supplant it. Some of the best new opera recordings are documents of live performances; thumping stage movement and rustlings from the audience add verisimilitude. Many opera collectors have shifted to DVDs as the preferred means of experiencing the art in absentia; Teresa Stratas singing and acting “Salome” blows away all audio-only competition. At the heart of iTunes’s classical division are its collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the latter’s Minimalist Jukebox festival in 2006 captured international notice because recordings were available via iTunes almost overnight.

Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music. Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away. Younger musicians, in particular, are using every available means to reach a potential public that is far larger than the one that already exists. They are not haunted, as older musicians often are, by nostalgia for a time when Bernstein appeared on the cover of Time and Toscanini was a star of NBC radio. Instead, they see the labyrinth of long-tail culture as an open field of opportunity; they measure success in small leaps.

The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from the farmlands of Allendale, Michigan, provides a case study in how new technology is playing to classical music’s benefit. Last year, part of the group travelled to New York to attend Steve Reich’s seventieth-birthday festival at Carnegie Hall and participate in a workshop. The Grand Valley’s director, Bill Ryan, wrote a firsthand account of the visit for the Web site NewMusicBox, introducing his ensemble to a wider audience. In June, they performed Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” at Bang on a Can’s annual marathon concert in downtown New York; their time slot was five in the morning, but, for reasons that no one could quite understand, some four hundred listeners showed up to hear them play. The ensemble’s recording of “Music for 18” is being released this week on the Innova label, its arrival heralded by a striking video “trailer” on YouTube, which ingeniously contrasts Reich’s hyper-urban music with shots of rolling cornfields. The Michigan musicians play with glistening precision, yet they also bring out the variously jubilant and wistful emotions beneath the surface of Reich’s score.

The result is a vibrant recording that deserves to leap from the new-music ghetto onto the mainstream charts. In these unsettled times, it might have an outside chance of doing so. After all, for a little while the other day, a surprising name appeared at the top of Amazon.com’s Top MP3 Artists, outperforming even Kanye West: Richard Wagner. ♦

         昨夜在大剧院终于听到了麦斯基，听他部分当然是他本人的鼎鼎大名，部分也是因为罗斯特洛波维奇，毕竟这位老罗的弟子琴声细腻，颇有其师风范，无缘得以亲睹罗氏风采，也可以从MAISKY那里感受一下俄罗斯大提琴学派的余味吧。

         不过大剧院三楼二排实在不是一个理想的位置，虽然可以俯看全场，但是看着乐池，满脑的“纵身一跳”的奇思乱想，结果曲未起，心已惧。以后去大剧院，一定不选太高的位置，否则心悬在空中，整个就是不塌实。麦斯基出场时全场鼓掌，毕竟在世而且有些传奇色彩的大提琴家，所剩无多，今天的演奏家，大多都是按部就班的科班训练，对世间的残酷无常，少有真切的感知，想当年，麦斯基因为偷买苏联禁止的进口收录机，而被监禁两年，1972年他就移居到以色列，迟到1995年才回到莫斯科，这种经历，如今已经相当稀缺，直接的后果是对音乐的理解似乎单薄不少，时代的不幸造就艺术的伟大，或许这本身就是一个无法回避的悖论。

        DVORAK的大提琴协奏是个常演曲目，拉的人不少，DU PRE、ROSTROPOVIC都很棒，MAISKY当晚的演奏相当细腻温润，但是总觉得和其师相比，他的气魄少了许多，ROSTROPOVIC演奏此曲时，乡愁与激情水乳交融，也曾赚取过我的几许泪水，可是MASIKY的演奏似乎过于温暖，而少了DVORAK那种有时候显得腻味的愁绪，而在表达沧桑的意味方面也似有不及。不过身处三楼俯看他的运弓，感觉他的浪漫主义情思似乎更适合一些气道小点的作品，DVORAK对于他而言太粗糙太宏大了点，舒伯特或许刚刚好？最近刚好也在反复听他的MEDITITATION专辑，里面的小品演绎的相当精致舒缓，是属于那种能直入人心的演绎，如此看来，或许听他的重奏作品，应该更适合一点吧。

       昨夜观众的反应有点让我始料不及，鼓掌激烈之程度，比起十七大丝毫不逊色，结果害得MAISKY返场N次，鞠躬鞠到腰板弯，我还戏谑说，鼓掌的整齐程度，还以为是开奥运会了。在热烈的掌声中，安可开始，他说了一段话，我没大听的清楚，只是模糊的听到‘PLAY A SPECIAL PIECE“云云，邻座的猪头同学说似乎听到了ROSTROPOVIC的名字，或许是纪念其恩师而演奏吧，曲目则是<巴西风格巴赫>,这个曲目我从未听过，而且是与上交8位大提琴手共同合作，感觉十分不错，不过上交大提琴的伴奏似乎没有营造出一种神秘主义氛围，这或许是我苛求了吧。在全场热烈掌声要求之下，他又加演了BACH无伴奏SUITE的PRELUDE，拉的十分欢快，也十分讨巧，全场气氛也达到了顶点。

     下半场是上交的BRAHAMS的第一交响乐，我对这个曲目听的不多，总觉得他有点拾贝多芬的牙慧，虽然不错，但是始终难激发出我的兴趣，今天白天翻出猪头推荐的伯恩斯坦的版本聆听了两回，还是感觉贝多芬的气味随处可寻。上交的演绎我难以置喙，不过明显弦乐强于管乐，在一些管乐独奏部分尤其明显，而弦乐齐奏则相当有气势，身在三楼悬空处境之下，看万琴奔腾，宏大气势喷薄而出，不可谓不崇高，但是否美，或许还需要细细思量。

       

 

原载于《南方都市报》

卡尔•弗莱什：《弦歌生涯：卡尔•弗莱什回忆录》，筱章 孙予 译，文汇出版社，2001年5月版，定价：22元　 　　成庆　　 　　 　　卡尔·弗莱什对于业余爱乐者并不算太熟悉，因为作为演奏家而言，他并没有留下太多的录音。事实上，他当年曾经和发明第一台留声机的爱迪生合作过40余张唱片，其中不乏热卖之作，但是他对这些录音并无好感，他认为它们并不能代表他的真实演奏水平，只不过是应付唱片工业的产物，这也使得我们并无太多机会亲自感受弗莱什的演奏魅力。 　　从另一方面来说，他的名字对于音乐学院的科班学生而言，简直有如一座奥林匹斯山，让人敬畏，这则归结为弗莱什在教学方面留下的丰厚遗产，他所写的《小提琴演奏艺术》、《小提琴指法概论》至今仍然是音乐学院小提琴技巧的经典读物。 　　作为一个音乐教育家来说，弗莱什不仅留下了经典教材，培养的学生也是名满天下，比如哥尔德堡、谢林、哈西德以及内弗等等，包括如今大红大紫的苏菲·穆特也曾短暂地受教于弗莱什门下，何谓桃李满天下，弗莱什可谓当之无愧。 　　这本回忆录时间到1928年为止，他虽然目睹了第一次世界大战的结局，却未能看到二战的落幕，而且他更不会知道，他的得意女弟子内弗会在1949年赴美途中因空难而丧生，而就是这位法国女子，在1935年的华沙维尼亚夫斯基国际小提琴比赛上击败了后来雄霸小提琴世界的“大卫王”——奥伊斯特拉赫。笔者曾听过她录制的西贝柳斯小提琴协奏曲，乍听之下，就有惊艳之感，可惜天不假年。 　　作为音乐教育家和演奏家兼一身的弗莱什，他对那一个时代中的许多音乐家都有相当直率的点评，而且并非是泛泛之论，而是从那些人的性格、教育经历、演奏技巧等方面来分析他们成功或失败的症结，虽然这些分析有时候让我不免有些厌倦，毕竟以“成王败寇”的逻辑来评价艺术家未免太过残酷，但是弗莱什的高度自制力也使得他总能以一种同情性的理解去观察他的前辈、同侪及后辈。比如他对克莱斯勒长达8页的分析，让我在仰望之余，也得以客观了解到克莱斯勒的演奏与个人生活的细节，这种分析有可能让我超越简单的崇拜，从而有可能从这些名家身上获得一些对自身有所助益的东西。 　　这种审慎节制的性格让他不仅在演奏方面能广采各家之长，而且对于他的学生，他也是相当的小心，因为在他的成长过程中，他曾目睹了师长们随意毁掉了无数颇有天资的学生，也看到了奥尔这样的只能培养天才的教师在方法上的缺陷，因此当在教授内弗时，他只在纯粹技术上给予帮助指导，而不在性情与天赋上强迫其改变。这形成了弗莱什相当独到的教学见解，也就是发现每个人的长处与短处，从而以不同的方法去改善演奏。 　　虽然对于演奏小提琴的朋友，这本书无疑可以提供一些音乐成长的经验，对于笔者而言，弗莱什笔下所描绘的维也纳、柏林、巴黎、阿姆斯特丹的音乐氛围，则更为让我着迷。他让我们了解到克莱斯勒、蒂博、卡萨尔斯、尼基什在一个精英文化开始衰落的时代中的风采，他也早早预料到福特文格勒的远大前程，而这只不过是因为在1910年，弗莱什曾和他合作过一曲勃拉姆斯的协奏曲而已。 　　回忆录中让我最为深刻的一段是他对当年德国革命的描述，革命浪潮风起云涌，弗莱什没有头脑发热，而是敏锐地察觉到布尔什维克主义对艺术带来的影响，他说：“在我看来，多少世纪来一直依靠超一流的天才们注入生气的音乐文化将要屈从于一股呼吁平等的狂潮，屈从于一种每况愈下的趋势，这种趋势将使任何出类拔萃的事物无立足之地。” 　　感谢弗莱什，说出了我欲说而不能的心里话。

 

 成庆 请勿转载

 

     哲学家在时人的理解中，是一个相当模糊而暧昧的名号。对于公众而言，哲学家或许是那些身居学院，传授不同哲学观念的教授们；对于哲学稍有感觉的朋友，会觉得哲学史家与哲学家之间，仍然存在着明显的差别。前者只不过在学院里给学生讲解历史上不同哲学家的观念而已，而真正的哲学家则应是对人类的一些基本处境的议题持续不断思考的人。
    按照后一种理解，哲学家的数量将会变得非常稀少，因为今天学院里的哲学教授们，对于什么是人类的基本处境，已经缺乏了敏感和投身于此的心志。但是如果我们仍然还认为苏格拉底（或者是柏拉图笔下的苏格拉底）是西方历史上的第一位哲学家的话，那么今天仍然以柏拉图作为今日典范的哲学家，恐怕已经相当难寻。毕竟现代主流哲学观念如此的深入人心，康德、黑格尔、马克思、维特根斯坦、德里达才是现代哲学家的的典范，柏拉图如此看来，似乎只是一个遥远的哲学传说而已。
      罗德之(James M. Rhodes)，这位美国马凯大学(Marquette University)政治系的退休教授，或许并不认为现代哲学的方向是正确的，他反而认为，当代最为重要的政治哲学家并不是哈贝玛斯和罗尔斯，而是斯特劳斯(Leo Strauss)和沃格林(Eric Voegelin)。为什么他有这样一个判断？在他的哲学脉络里，他以柏拉图的沉默(Slience)作为区分哲学家的关键词，那什么是柏拉图的Silence?
柏拉图的沉默乃是指，他笔下的苏格拉底不仅宣称自己无知，而且他还认为，对于人类的灵魂经验，有一些是无法言说的，人们只能用各种不同的象征符号表现这样一种灵魂的经验，就如同苏格拉底所谈论的EROS（爱欲）一样。
      在这样一个脉络里，从亚里士多德到康德、黑格尔，甚至到当代的剑桥学派，对于柏拉图的这种沉默（Silence）并没有清晰的认识，而另一条充分意识到柏拉图的“沉默”的线索则又分为两条源流，隐微写作和显白写作。从普鲁塔克、圣奥古斯丁到莱辛和尼采，直至当代的斯特劳斯，都将柏拉图的写作理解成一个隐秘写作的文本，认为柏拉图在试图遮掩他们所理解的真理，但是施莱尔马赫、克尔凯戈尔以及当代的沃格林，却认为柏拉图是一个明白无误的显白作家。
     罗德之教授(James M. Rhodes)在北大讲授柏拉图哲学时，曾诙谐的将自己比拟成沃格林这一条脉络中的一员，他说自己可能在里面是个小人物，但是他却认为这样一个传统是一个正确的方向。事实上，从直接师承上，他当年在圣母大学的导师是美国上世纪四、五十年代的著名保守主义知识分子Gerhart Niemeyer，而正是Niemeyer，将他从化学工程师的道路上拉入了“爱智”的哲学生涯中来。而Voegelin，虽然不是Rhodes教授的正式导师，但是他在斯坦福大学收集博士论文材料时，与Voegelin开始了长达数十年的问学生涯，得以了解Voegelin哲学中的核心观念。而关于另外一位重要的哲学家斯特劳斯，Rhodes教授也因在芝加哥大学选修课程而得以旁听斯特劳斯的课，不过那是一段糟糕的经验，因为斯特劳斯的课堂上只允许他的学生发言，旁听者只能闭嘴。
     但是尽管如此，在Rhodes的《爱欲、智慧与沉默---论柏拉图的爱欲对话》一书的序言中，他对斯特劳斯及其弟子表示敬意，尽管他并不同意斯特劳斯有关隐微写作的观点，但是他仍然认为，斯特劳斯学派值得重视。
     在现代主流哲学中，大部分哲学家已经不再讨论灵魂的经验，而认为涉及到灵魂，要么就把它们放置到宗教中去，或者认为那不是哲学应该处理的问题，典型者如维特根斯坦，认为语言哲学本身可以解决哲学本身的问题，于是日常语言的分析成为哲学的主要任务。而后现代哲学家，如罗蒂，认为真理根本就是一个迷思，只有有限知识的不断增进，根本没有所谓真理这个东西。对于这些西方哲学中的主流理解，Rhodes教授有他自己的看法，他承认，人是一个有限的造物，人类也可能注定无法认识到那整体化的真理，但是人的灵魂经验却可以让人有可能看到真理的某些片段，让人可以超越一个欲望的自然人，进入到一个超验的层面中去，而哲学家的任务则是体验并且用不同的象征符号去表征这样一种灵魂的体验，就如同沃格林在其巨著《秩序与历史》中所做的那样。
     这样一种看法，我相信一定会激起很多反对的声音，我也无意为这种哲学理解作太多的辩护，但是只是想指出，不管这条哲学的路径是否正确，现代哲学中将人与存在疏离的路向带来的问题已经是一个明白无误的事实，不管是现代的语言哲学与存在主义哲学，在沃格林看来，都是现代性所带来的人与存在的分离造成的心灵的失序，人们对灵魂的经验越来越陌生，而将人类依赖在一个外在于自己的客体上，从而忘却了，人的灵魂本来可以和世界可以获得一个和谐的状态，就如同BACH音乐中所表达的那种和谐一般。

 

          虽然火车路过昆山无数次，但是从没有一次下车逗留的意图，不过要是从上海暴走，昆山似又是一个极好的选择，不远而且并非偏僻之地。临时决定在30号与花生夫妇一起暴走昆山，50公里的路程花了约12个半小时，这也打破了我单日行走最高记录，想想在家中出门即是山，想找这么多平路走，也不容易。

          从大渡河路出发，整个上海段简直是让人遭罪，不仅车辆行人如流，而且公路绿化很差，四人基本上都是埋头走路，少有说话，好不容易走到安亭，吃了午饭，歇息了片刻，众人精神已有溃败之势。但是一过安亭，进入江苏境内，简直是天上人间，不仅路况好，而且行人道还有绿化带与车道隔离，灰尘极少，众人兴奋，走走停停，精神好了不少。不过毕竟50几公里是要靠脚走的，终于在晚上六点半时，由于某人已近崩溃，在其余人苟延残喘时，由某人提议，众人附议，大家在离市区3公里的地方打到的士，直奔旅馆。

        想想动车18分钟可以到达上海，步行却需要12个多小时，这种时空感，现代人越来越难以察觉到差异了，小时候父亲总和我说以前去武汉要坐上几天几夜，在县城之间走路也要好几天的距离，我常常觉得那只不过旧时代的自我怀念，不过如今却隐约觉得，这种时间感与空间感变化的背后，还有一种对生命过程的理解，现代人以速度为标准，因此在消费、生产乃至人心建设上也不例外，而这样一种时间感，使得浮躁成为现代文化的一个重要特色，审美也越来越表面化，想想谁还愿意花费数十年的时间，去做一件可能无法有回报的事情？生意可以短期见效，人心却不可以，从这个角度而言，我可以理解当年19世纪末期欧洲文化人的困局感，一方面是资本主义的高歌猛进，一面却是文化的粗鄙化与庸俗化，如此境况，莫非是人类难以逃脱的宿命？

       此次在昆山逗留了三日，经朋友介绍，吃了不少美食，不过当地的奥灶面实在一般，让人略为失望。昆山的第一感受是城市建设不错，人流也大，仔细观察，这些年轻的面孔基本上在昆山打工的外地年轻人，昆山区区小城，不可能产生这样大规模的Baby Boom,我们在昆山境内一路走来，工厂是接踵比邻，称之为中国经济的动力源，或许并不过分，不过一想到内地农村中只剩下老幼妇孺，不知道这又意味着什么？或许这一波外出潮要经数十年才能尘埃落定，内地方能经营出一种稳定的社会结构，如今，内地的空心化已成不可扭转之势，“去沿海”已经演变成一个无法逃脱的魔咒，不仅是因为钱，而且还因为那代表了一种希望，而内地与农村注定要让这几代人来告别，当然，我只不过也是这个潮流中的一员而已。

      在亭林公园走了走，里面已经被经营成一个游乐场，操着不同乡音的年轻人在这里摩肩擦踵，也难怪，假如把这里开发成一个雅致的文化遗址，这又哪能满足这些如潮年轻人的游乐欲望呢？城市的主体就是如此，已经无法苛求政府在公共文化建设方面的作为了，有时候接受或许是最好的解决方案。尽管如此，江浙一带在如今的文化链条上仍然并不落后，我们在路上偶遇的一个打折书市，里面的图书质量并不太差，甚至有一些在上海都已难寻的书，上海的附近无论如何，仍然在一个大的文化辐射圈中，不象内地，新书一年多仍然未换，那里的文化生产，基本上是一个停滞的状况，无法拥有读书的种子，比其经济上的落后，文化的落后或许是内地最为痛心的发展。我们曾经的老师，由于历史的原因，来自于北大、武大这些昔日的名校，也为我们耳濡目染了些许文化的只言片语，今日扩招后的大学毕业生，水平不过尔尔，已经不愿归家，而那些当地的孩子们，或许注定只能又为下一次逃离家乡而通宵达旦，苦读无聊的教科书。

      常常感觉很幸运，当年能痛下决心，辞职离开家乡，这主要是因为在如今的局面下，内地已经无法有经营人生意义的空间，并不一定是因为上海有更多的钱赚，虽然性情不好竞争，但是却被抛入沿海残酷的环境中，沉落有时，喘息至今。从另一个角度来看， 自己并不幸运，因为承载着童年记忆的家乡，却在每次归家中感受其破败，这种破败感并不是经济上的，而是一种潜伏在家乡土地上的氛围，不再朴素塌实，而是充满了各式欲望，如同打开了的潘多拉盒子一般。

     2号的晚上是和一帮喜欢户外的朋友在阳澄湖边露营，为花生夫人庆生，自然也少不了大闸蟹与烧烤，后来还加入了两位搞乐队的朋友来助兴，想想我当年读大学时，民谣歌手是主流，今天酒吧才是新生代歌手的摇篮，一个20岁的小伙子，唱出的是浓浓的酒吧味，我不好评价个中优劣，只是隐约觉得，我们都在一个体制内生存，被剥夺走一些本应更原始更淳朴的想象，也让我们的各种表达沾染上一些莫名其妙的东西，无法褒贬，却感到遗憾。这也是我第一次在野外露营，感觉还不错，不过辽阔的祖国大地上，驴友密布，想要找一个清净的地方去露营，还真不是件容易的事情，要不，去欧洲？

PS：To Wanzheng:不好意思，最近出门，未有回复，我刚刚在BLOG上传了Casals在贝多芬故居演奏的BACH第一组曲，但是发现我以前使用的WEB空间已经作废，只好改日MSN上传给您，或许能弥补您国庆的一丝缺憾。