musicians of old

Chapter 952 Report on Snails

The New Year's atmosphere in San Porto is like syrup being slowly simmered, growing sweeter and warmer each day.

Fan Ning spends some time walking through the city's streets and alleys every day. Of course, he usually doesn't refuse invitations to go out together, just as he doesn't refuse the "one hundred minutes" allotted to him each day for receiving visitors.

He wandered through the city's cheap apartment district, the knobs of radios tuned to specific frequencies of certain music stations, the music playing softly, and invisible flashes of light floating and drifting in the corridors and balconies.

At the moment when a variation reached its perfect climax, an elderly man living alone steadied his trembling hand for a moment, and wrote out a classical word on the letter paper that was prone to error clearly and forcefully. The old man's brows relaxed slightly, and a trace of calm recollection flashed in his cloudy eyes, as if he had been soothed by invisible warm water.

"Comfort"—Fan Ning noted this phenomenon. The ripples on the path were stirred imperceptibly, smoothing out the subtle wrinkles in his soul, but he always thought more and extended his thoughts further. This was a positive feedback, just as sunlight makes plants turn, but if the sunlight is too uniform, will it also make plants lose the motivation to find their own unique direction?
He wandered on the edge of the slums in the lower city, where the New Year decorations were shabby yet stubborn, mostly made of snowflakes cut from old newspapers and ribbons picked up from the ground. Several sallow-faced, thin children squatted under the mottled walls and scribbled with chalk.

The crooked house, the three-headed sun, the winged fish—the lines are childish, but the colors are surprisingly bold: indigo next to orange-red, emerald green colliding with purple.

Fan Ningjing watched quietly for a few minutes.

Without teacher guidance or art textbooks, these children's use of color reveals an instinctive harmony amidst conflict.

It can be guided towards an academic direction, or it can delve deeper into the primitive and intense expressionism that springs from life's own struggle for survival.

The chaotic blocks of color symbolizing "home" drawn by a little girl, with its composition and color proportions, are surprisingly touching because they are intuitively divided.

“Gifts” – Fanning records again. The “path” leads to beauty and expression, allowing even the humblest soil to bloom with extraordinary flowers. This is the grace of creativity. But if everything is not from profound experience and practice, but is simply a gift from “what ought to be,” then will the roots of the flower be too shallow?

Lepwich, a quiet, poetic, and beautiful town located 60 kilometers southeast of San Porto, was where Fanning appeared in front of a building with beautiful arched windows and red brick walls within a few dozen steps.

Sometime later, he sat on a bench against the wall in the side rehearsal hall, standing out clearly under the lights, but no one found it strange.

They are rehearsing a New Year's concert for a youth orchestra under a music aid system.

Fan Ning watched as the conductor waved his arms, guiding the orchestra to play a technically brilliant overture. His eyes were filled with satisfaction, both for the accuracy of the expression and for the innocent spirit revealed in the performance of the young boys and girls.

But during a cadenza in the middle of the piece, Fanning suddenly frowned. For a moment, the pitch of the entire orchestra rose very slightly, by about one-sixth to one-eighth of a whole tone, before quickly falling back down.

This was definitely not part of the rehearsal design, nor was it a conductor's requirement, and it couldn't even be categorized as "out of tune." It was as if the inspiration of all the musicians was elevated a little at the same moment by some invisible force, and then gently set down.

After rehearsal, the boys and girls chatted while wiping their instruments, their tone relaxed, and the conductor nodded in satisfaction.

"Is it an abnormal synchronization and ascension caused by the instability of the nascent world's will and appearance, or by the incomplete connection with the 'path'?" For the first time, Fan Ning used a long string of words, not necessarily accurate, to characterize his own record. Later, when he went to a piano examination center in Puntua County for a "practical demonstration of the assessment standards," Fan Ning stayed for nearly an hour with great interest.

Several local judges, including artists and clergy, actually started arguing on the spot.

A spreadsheet on the table showed the scoring criteria for a not-too-difficult Mozart piano sonata, broken down into more than twenty scoring points: grasp of style and period (±3 points), intonation (±3 points), rhythm (±3 points), dynamics (±2 points), ornamentation (±2 points), clarity (±2 points), phrasing breath (±2 points), and pedaling (±2 points). The lines matched the score, and each point was followed by a "typical deduction example," such as "vague ornamentation, -1 point," "unnatural phrasing interruption, -2 points," and "mixing harmonic pedal and tremolo pedal, -1 point."

One side arguing in the venue believes that music examinations nowadays attract a great deal of social attention, and the standards must be detailed and objective enough to reduce subjective differences among judges and ensure fairness.

They even suggested submitting a proposal to headquarters, recommending the introduction of a "blind recording review system" in higher-level examinations to more rigorously determine bonus and deduction points.

Another group argues that this turns living music into a morbid dissection, stifling individuality and the spark of improvisation. They cite the Turner Colleges grading guidelines' statement that "artistic expression is the highest pursuit" to criticize the refinement faction for putting the cart before the horse.

But when the first group pressed for details, asking, "Which standard do you think is unreasonable? Is it pitch, rhythm, dynamics, or pedal? Please give a specific example. If it's unreasonable, we can consider simplifying it," the latter found themselves speechless.

Days passed, and the day before New Year's Eve, Fan Ning once again stood on the rooftop of the villa, gazing at the distant beam of light that pierced the horizon.

His movements were more practiced than yesterday, and the barely visible threads or channels twisted slightly, drawing out something deeper from his body that "regeneration could not keep up with consumption."

As she lowered her arm, Fanning's shoulder trembled almost imperceptibly.

But nothing more; he unfolded the documents in his hand.

Excerpt from Walter's "Preliminary Observation and Statistics on Snails and Related Ecosystems in Cinema Districts".

The report uses precise language and is rich in data, but a sense of confusion permeates the text. Its main conclusions are as follows:

First, in the regions around the world surveyed this time, the distribution of snail numbers and densities should not have changed much compared to previous years.

Second, the overall proportion of individuals infected with *Dictyophora incisum* (i.e., those visually exhibiting swollen antennae, bright colors, and excessive crawling) is low, ranging from one percent to one thousandth. Their distribution is random and unevenly distributed, and once discovered, they are likely to cluster together. However, there is currently no clear evidence that the infection rates are higher in the places Fanning previously specifically mentioned to be aware of—such as official knowledge organizations' outposts, historic church or public school courtyards, the vicinity of the former residences or monuments of the Crescent Moon musicians, and plazas and gardens where large-scale musical performances have recently been held.

Third, infected snails do exhibit clear phototaxis and acrotropism. On sunny, sunrise days, they crawl towards the sun, and even on cloudy days, they will try to reach the end of a plant branch, the place where they are most likely to encounter the "danger" of birds feeding on them.

Fourth, there are some rare records of plant anomalies: on some ancient trees (oak, linden) at individual clusters of infection sites, extremely tiny growths resembling insect galls or fungal nodules have been found, but they are hard in texture, translucent amber in color, and have channel-like veins inside, unlike any known plant disease.

At the end of the report, Walter, who had been diligently carrying out the task, finally wrote down a personal question in pencil: "Teacher, what do these data and phenomena point to? We are actually not very professional in this area internally. Shouldn't we invite a group of real biologists or botanists to take a look?"