Qiu Sai Yin is a piece built around one of the most enduring stories in Chinese history: Wang Zhaojun, the Han dynasty court lady who was sent beyond the frontier to marry a Xiongnu chieftain, never to return.
Transmitted by Xia Yifeng, the piece unfolds in nine sections. It does not tell the story directly. Instead, it inhabits the feeling — the long road outward, the autumn wind across the steppe, the grief that is too vast to be called grief and so becomes something quieter: a sustained, winding sorrow that the score describes as “mournful and graceful, told in a winding way.”
The fingering throughout makes full use of gun yin (rolling tone), ruan chuan (soft glide), and gun fu (rolling return) — techniques that give the melody its characteristic quality of something always moving, never arriving, like a caravan that has forgotten where it was going.
Wang Zhaojun left. The music stayed. That is what Qiu Sai Yin is about.
Recorded by Mei Yueqiang. Part of the ongoing series presenting his complete surviving recordings.
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