Yuè Jì 樂記: On Grief, Memory, and Transformation

The below essay is included in Yuè Jì 樂記.

Yuè Jì (樂記) is a multidisciplinary project comprising a record album, a live performance, and a publication that stem from a personal encounter with loss and unfold in a broader meditation on ritual, mourning, and the harmonizing power of music or sound. It was conceived following a visit to the MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale in the summer of 2024, where I encountered Chinese funerary artifacts from the Han and Tang dynasties. Once integral to ritual practice, these objects now reside at a temporally remote distance – imbued with a quiet, contemplative presence. They invite us to consider how ritual, even when displaced from its original context, continues to shape our understanding of grief, time, and transformation.

In Taiwanese culture, death rituals draw deeply from Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions, encompassing centuries of philosophical and spiritual inheritance. One of the most significant practices is the 49-day mourning period, during which a series of prayers and ceremonies guide the soul through the afterlife – facilitating not only a smooth spiritual passage, but also emotional closure of those left behind. These rites are often complex and carefully structured, echoing a long tradition of metaphysical thought.

Yet, within my own family, these traditions were met with ambivalence – at times regarded as overly theatrical or disconnected from the emotional reality of loss. When my father passed away, we honored his wish for a ritual-free funeral. We did not observe the 49-day mourning period. Each of us grieved in our own way – quietly, privately, and without a collective structure. In that absence, I began to question the function of ritual and how it might manifest outside religious frameworks. French philosopher Roland Barthes once suggested that ritual and ceremony function as enclosures – structures that shield us from the abyss. Mourning rituals act as a membrane, protecting the skin from the searing rawness of grief. In moments when life’s own scaffolding collapses, these rituals can become vital forms of psychic and emotional containment. So, when we face profound loss, what kinds of transitional spaces can ritual create to help us process upheaval, renegotiate our roles within family and society, and reorient ourselves in a world that has been suddenly altered?

Within this context, Yuè Jì turns to music as a medium of inquiry. The project takes its title and conceptual grounding from the Confucian text Yuè Jì (Record of Music), one of the chapters of Lǐ Jì (禮記, Book of Rites), which posits ritual (lì) and music (yuè) as two of the Six Arts essential to the cultivation of humanity. In Confucian philosophy, ritual governs the external world– structuring relationships, regulating conduct, and sustaining social harmony – while music nurtures the internal world, aligning emotion with the greater cosmic order. Together, they form the means through which individuals and societies navigate existence.

This philosophical foundation informs the works of the three artists featured in the project, each of whom uses music, or sound, as a means of traversing grief, memory, and transformation. In “Previously Owned”, dj sniff engages with sonic remnants in the wake of his father’s death. While sifting through the vast amounts of personal effects and artifacts his father left behind, he explores the material characteristics of mementos and their relationship to the act of remembering. James Hoff follows with a reflection on his long-term struggle with tinnitus, earworms and depression. In “Everything You Want Less Time”, from his recent autobiographical album “Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands” (2024), Hoff reconfigures fragments of pop songs that have haunted him, reclaiming them as a gesture of resistance against the psychic erosion brought on by capitalism. His work navigates the dissonance between psychological disorder and structural disarray, seeking a form of sonic liberation. Lin Chi-Wei instead investigates the transformative potential of collective sound-making. In “Tape Music”, an ongoing performance project he began in 2004, participants pass a ribbon score from hand to hand, reading the text aloud as it flows. Lin assembles participants into a “machine of sound”, blurring the boundaries between performer and audience. If society functions as a machine, what possibilities arise when temporary gatherings give way to fleeting yet potent sonic communities? Here, ritual is not static or singular, but polyphonic – resonating as both a social mechanism and a communal force.

Yuè Jì begins with a personal encounter with death, using it as a point of departure for considering how music – particularly in its ritualistic dimensions – can serve as a method of recalibration in times of rupture and collapse. Death, as a universally shared experience, becomes a framework for exploring the invocation of ritual and the ways in which we are conditioned –consciously and unconsciously – by its systems. As we confront the personal and political fractures of our time, Yuè Jì invites us to consider how music, as a ritual practice, might offer a means of attunement – not only within ourselves, but in relation to one another.