Kung-Fu Music

[yutyeesam]

Taken from the first Kung-Fu Hustle Thread:

A superior fighting skill of Kung-Fu is indicated to be Music, and restructuring sound in a focused manner. The tunes were probabally hints as to the attacks. I should go study the classics more...

This is really cool! Many martial artists and Kung-Fu masters are also musicians, or have musical ability. I just thought this was an incidental correlation, but it appears that there's more to it...does anyone have any further insights?

On a strictly superficial level, I can weave parallels between my form performance and in general, things like combat drills or hitting the bag, with my compositioning, in terms of dynamics, rhythm, etc. ...but that's purely on an external level.

I'd be curious to know anything about the internal aspects, if anyone has any insight into it.

-123

[JohnnyMnemonic]

If you read about the old time kung fu guys, they always recommend "scholarly pursuits" such as music, calligraphy etc.

It seems obvious that if you can gain a grasp of rythym thru music, you could apply that knowledge to martial arts. There are the chinese stories of many martial artists also being members of opera actors in old time china.

I think the idea of music opening up a different part of the brain might be just as important. Different subjects use different parts of the brain. If all you do is fight, you only ever use the fighting part of your brain. If you play music or learn other things, more of your brain opens up and you can apply that to the kung fu.

Music has psychological effects that are obvious so a knowledge of that might be good for kung fu. If you know which music evokes fear or paranoia, you could imitate those sounds to invoke fear and paranoia in an opponent. That is how some people "psych out" other people. They use their voice like a musical instrument and play whatever "music" evokes the desired emotion in the other person.

[PangQuan]

If you go back to Confucian times you will find that within that system of thought, and others I might add, music was believed to come from the heavens.

When a musician is creating song, it is said that the sounds flowing from their creativity stem from the heavens and gods themselves.

It is also said that you can tell the state of a culture based upon the popular musical trends.

Look at modern society, mainly large cultural areas, USA, Canada, Japan, China, Germany, England, and so on, this is not excluding other areas, but in general our new musical trends are thus:

Very violent, sexually obsessive, and overall depressing.

The state of our modern cultures, if viewed from a Confucian musical standpoint, are in a state of constant violent flux, intermixed with confused desires of earthly pleasure.

In other words, we are going down hill and falling further out of reach with the heavens.

Music is an interesting thing. Find one who is truly at peace with themselves and listen to the music they will create. It will be a harmonious melody of joy and loving peace with often a tint of sorrow for the fellow man.

[paper_crane]

performance AND chinese drums sums it up for me. the two combined heightens both the spirt and engery levels, especially when doing animal forms like tiger....its like a pep squad or something HAHAHA. :D