When Philosophy Begins to Sing

The question that brought me to Weishan wasn't really about music.

Over the past year, I've spent a lot of time reading philosophy and psychology, and one thing has always bothered me. Many of the most insightful ideas about grief, identity, meaning, or how to live seem to stay inside books, lectures, and universities. You know, academic institutions. Yet the people who face those questions most directly often don't encounter them there. They rarely turn to philosophy when someone dies or when life becomes difficult. Instead, they turn to music, religion, literature, art, ritual, or simply the traditions they grew up with.

That made me wonder whether philosophy has always looked the way we imagine it does. Perhaps it isn't always something written down. Perhaps, in some places, it is something people sing.

That question eventually led me to Luo Chaoqin.

"The Lives of Yi People Are Held Together by Songs"

Luo Chaoqin apologised for her Mandarin before we had even begun.

"If you ask me to sing, I'm fine," she laughed. "If you ask me to explain...that's much harder."

She told me that after winning a gold medal in a prefecture-wide folk singing competition, she was invited to teach as a representative inheritor of Yi traditional music. She carefully prepared notes beforehand, hoping she wouldn't forget anything.

"When I stood there," she said, smiling at the memory, "my mind went completely blank."

One of the local officials later teased her.

"You sing much better than you speak."

I spent the next hour discovering why. 

Before coming to Weishan, I had watched an interview where she said something that stayed with me.

"The lives of Yi people are held together by songs."

It sounded beautiful but also strangely metaphorical, so I asked her what she actually meant. To my surprise, her answer wasn’t poetic at all.

When babies are born, mothers sing lullabies. Children grow up with nursery songs. Young people sing to express affection towards lovers. Songs accompany people while herding sheep, collecting firewood, working in the fields, celebrating weddings, and eventually mourning those who have passed away.

"There are songs from the moment you're born, until the day you return to the earth," she told me.

Listening to her, I realised she wasn't describing music as a performance or even as entertainment. She was describing it almost as a language people carry through life. Every important stage already has words, melodies, and rituals waiting for it.

Luo Chaoqin performing in traditional Yi clothes

Songs Grow Older With People

One moment from our conversation stayed with me more than anything else. I asked whether there had ever been a song she didn't understand until adulthood. She immediately thought of The Song of Heaven and Earth (天地之歌), one of the oldest Yi songs about the creation of the world.

"My mother taught it to me when I was little," she said.

Back then, she only knew how to imitate the melody. The song tells the origin of the world: how heaven came into being, how the earth appeared, why the sun, moon, stars and rivers exist. As a child, she couldn't understand why it mattered.

"It also has turns that can't really be written into musical notation," she explained. "You have to hear it from someone else."

Years later, after getting married, raising children, and experiencing the ordinary difficulties of life, she found herself hearing the song differently.

"Every song has a story," she said. "When I was young, I simply wasn't old enough to understand it."

I found that idea unexpectedly beautiful. The song had not changed over those years. She had. It reminded me of returning to a favourite novel years later and discovering an entirely different book. 

Why Do We Sing Instead of Speak?

One question continued to puzzle me. If the songs express love, grief, gratitude, or remembrance, why sing them at all? Why not simply say those things? She thought for a while. 

“This is how our ancestors passed it down."

To be honest, I initially found the answer unsatisfying. It sounded almost circular. Then she continued talking. 

She told me that young men and women often worked on different hillsides while collecting firewood or tending animals. "You couldn't simply whisper," she explained. "The other person couldn't hear you." So they sang. The melody travelled farther than ordinary speech.

Over time, that practical habit became tradition. I liked this explanation because it reminded me that culture rarely begins as symbolism. People first create ways of solving ordinary problems. Only generations later do these practices begin carrying deeper meanings.

Perhaps the same is true here—the songs endured because they were useful. What they eventually preserved was something much larger than convenience.

A Conversation That Continues After Death

Naturally, our conversation eventually arrived at funerals. Before coming to Weishan, I’d always associated mourning with silence. 

The funerals I knew were filled with long pauses, quiet almost to a point where it’s unsettling. White chrysanthemums lined the hall. Incense drifted slowly through the air. Family members stood quietly beside a framed photograph while visitors filed past, bowed, and left after offering a few soft words of comfort. The room was never empty, yet it always felt still. Even crying was often restrained, as though grief became more respectable the less visible it was.

Yi mourning traditions follow a very different logic.

Family members sing directly to the deceased. They tell them not to worry about those left behind; they promise to take care of the family; they speak about unfinished thoughts and lingering love.

When I asked whether these songs help people accept death, she gently corrected the premise of my question. To her, these songs are not simply music. They are a form of communication.

Death ends ordinary conversation, but singing creates one last opportunity to say what still needs to be said. 

I honestly don't know whether music objectively makes grief easier; psychology has spent decades trying to answer questions like that. What struck me was something slightly different.

Communities have been answering the same question for centuries, through practices instead of theories. Whether or not they describe it as psychology, philosophy, or neuroscience, they’ve developed rituals that allow grief to be shared rather than carried alone.

Philosophy, Except It’s Not Called Philosophy

Near the end of our conversation, I asked whether she worried these traditions might disappear. Luo Chaoqin smiled. She admitted that, indeed, fewer young people speak the Yi language fluently, and that many customs are changing. But she wasn't interested in making grand predictions.

"I can only teach what I know," she said.

She wants to teach her daughters. She teaches students who genuinely want to learn. She passes on embroidery alongside songs because, to her, they belong to the same way of life.

Before we finished, she said something that quietly stayed with me.

"I don't know whether I'll preserve everything," she laughed. "I can only do my best."

It is a remarkably modest sentence for someone carrying so much of her community's cultural memory. When I first came to Weishan, I thought I was interviewing someone about folk music for the purpose of ethnomusicology. I left thinking much more about philosophy.

Not philosophy represented by an elderly white man in a portrait with an impressive beard, as bookshelves filled with canonical texts by Plato or Kant or Nietzsche, as dense readings with more footnotes than sentences, or essays that begin with "Suppose you are standing beside a railway track...", but philosophy as something people practice without ever calling it philosophy. Philosophy that’s embedded in lullabies, love songs, funeral chants, and the ordinary rituals of everyday life. A community may never use words like existentialism, meaning-making, or collective memory, yet they continue asking many of the same questions philosophers have asked for thousands of years.

Perhaps that is why Luo Chaoqin kept insisting that she wasn't very good at explaining. Some ideas lose something when they are reduced to explanations. They were always meant to be lived first, and only understood later.

As I packed away my notebook and thanked her for the interview, she suddenly reached for the guitar resting beside her.

"I'll sing one for you," she said.

There was no introduction, no analysis, no attempt to explain what the song meant. She simply began to sing.

I couldn't understand most of the Yi lyrics. I didn't know the melody's history, its place in ritual, or the stories hidden inside its turns and pauses. Yet none of that seemed to matter in that moment. The song carried something that translation couldn't quite reach. It wasn't information I was receiving so much as an experience I was being invited into.

Only then did I truly understand what she’d been trying to tell me all afternoon.

She wasn't struggling to explain Yi music because she lacked the words. She was struggling because words were never the medium that tradition had chosen.

Luo Chaoqin never really answered my question.

She sang it.