Watch as you read — the video of Mei Yueqiang playing Jiu Kuang:
In our first piece on Jiu Kuang, we met the stagger: the tipsy triple lilt attributed to Ruan Ji, lost for centuries and brought back by the reconstruction of the twentieth century. But the score is only where the story begins. One rhythm, five lives.
The Master's Hands
The video above is the quiet marvel of this collection. Mei Yueqiang, the Guangling master, left us twenty-two recordings — and Jiu Kuang is not among them. Footage of him playing it is the rarer for that. Watching his hands move through the stagger is watching the piece come back to life, exactly as it did in the reconstruction era.
The Singer
And the rhythm found a voice. John Thompson — the American qin player known in Chinese as Tang Shizhang — sings while he plays: Jiu Kuang in Chinese, and in English. A piece attributed to a third-century hermit, sung in two languages on a seven-stringed zither. The wall of wine has become a bridge.
The Rock Stage
The rock singer-songwriter Xu Wei heard the stagger and worked it out on guitar, in his song Shi Wai Tao Yuan — "Peach Blossom Land" — and carried it onto the concert stage. The young audience took it for one of his own inventions; his answer carried the pride of a whole civilization: this rhythm, he told them, was left to us by our ancestors. It is over a thousand years old.
The Dance
On Chinese television the piece became a dance. The broadcast work Shou Zhi Yi Qin pairs the qin with street dance: Ma Xiaolong and Zyko-Sarcelli, East and West on one stage. A rhythm written down in the third century now moves two dancers from two hemispheres — and the audience, like Xu Wei's, would be forgiven for thinking it was invented last week.
The Rhythm Returns to the Qin
Here, I play Jiu Kuang as transmitted by Mei Shijun, following the Yiyunzhai Qinpu:
The Stagger Keeps Walking
That is the joke the ancestors left for us. The oldest rhythm in the room is always the one the young audience thinks was invented yesterday. It has been played on guitar, danced on television, sung in two languages, and returned to the qin in my hands — and it goes at its own pace, the way Ruan Ji walked: steady, slightly tilted, never falling. The full story of the piece and its reconstruction is in our first article on Jiu Kuang.
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