No. 6 · Qiu Ye Du Yi — Reading the Book of Changes on an Autumn Night
Transmitted by Xu Tonghua; notated from Mei Yueqiang’s Guqin Teaching Materials. Three sections. Also known as Wei Bian San Jue — the binding worn through three times.
The piece takes as its subject Confucius in his later years, reading the Book of Changes so obsessively that the leather binding of his copy wore through three times. The melody moves with the cadence of a scholar reading aloud — measured, unhurried, alive with quiet thought. Lively yet serene.
It opens and closes with a rolling flourish — the guqin technique known as gun-fu — binding the three sections into a single arc, like a lamp lit at dusk and extinguished at dawn. Between them: the stillness of an autumn night, moonlight cold and clear on the page.
Some music describes a scene. This piece describes a mind at work.
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