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He Xirui: Legends of a Carpenter
 His first violin did take him but one month to complete.
Being rather proud of himself, he came to Chengdu
after a 10-hour-trip by train. "I visited an old professor at Sichuan
Conservatory of Music, eager to know his opinion about my violin. He didn't
give me a single word; instead, he took out his own violin from a worn-out box -
the handcraft, painting, sounds and resonance were so amazing and beautiful - I
was overwhelmed by its breathtaking charm. Evidently it made such a world of
difference from mine that I could find no place to hide myself for shame." He
Xirui recalled.
From that moment on, he determined to make a better one. And that dream has
lasted 39 years. After a lot of reading, he gradually came to understand why the
violin has been so popular in Europe for centuries; how the magic four strings,
which produce the most beautiful sounds of human beings, have made so many
violinists and producers suffer pain, defeat and frustration. The title of "the
Queen of Musical
Instruments" is not a fabrication, nor exaggeration." The violin is a vast
learning. It is not only essential to accumulate the cultural and historical
backgrounds of its appearance and development, but also necessary to know the
structures of the instrument and wooden materials, together with the kinds of
trees, places of growth, sunshine, soil, geographic features, etc." He explained
to me. "I think that a good violin producer must be a craftsman, musician,
physicist, chemist as well as a humanist. To put it in a more fashionable way,
he should have three-dimension-knowledge. Of course, only knowledge is far less
than enough. Arts also depend on one's feeling and comprehension. That's why
there are so many styles and versions of arts. Arts suffer no sameness;
otherwise we'd better call it 'products' instead of 'works'. I couldn't help my
acclamation. "The more violins I produce, the more difficulties I have. No
termination -there is never the best one - that's exactly the charm of arts."
A touch of his architecture - it seems to me much easier to build a
house than make a violin."
Due to the specific history background, He Xirui used to demolish a lot of
buildings, mostly temples, when he was a village carpenter. He was always very
devout whenever he pulled them down, because in his point of view, all the
buildings accumulate thoughts, times and humanities. The more he learns about
the structures of the buildings, the philosophies of the traditional ideology,
such as "Fengshui", "Wuxing", the more he understands how broad and profound the
Chinese culture is with its 5,000 years of history which has covered all the
existence of human beings. That is exactly what he is going to focus on
lecturing at SWJU.
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