The Guangling master who gave a generation its sound
Liu Shaochun (1901–1971) was Mei Yueqiang’s fifth teacher. He was also, in Mei’s own musical life, the most important.
His personal name was Shao; Deyi was his courtesy name, and Shaochun his sobriquet. He was a tenth-generation successor of the Guangling School and one of the great synthesizers of the modern Guangling tradition.
That distinction is not about chronology alone. Mei Yueqiang studied with several great musicians, and each opened a different door. But Liu Shaochun led him deepest into the Guangling tradition: its changing rhythms, its full-bodied sound, its balance between strength and delicacy, and its belief that the qin was an instrument for transforming the person who played it.
Late in life, Mei travelled to his teacher’s native place to transmit the qin. It was an act of gratitude, but also an answer to Liu’s teaching. What Liu had placed in Mei’s hands could not remain private. It had to move onward.
A Salt Merchant’s Son from Shaanxi
Liu Shaochun was born in 1901 in Beilingbao, Fuping County, Shaanxi, into a family of salt merchants. He received a formal traditional education as a child.
In 1914, he moved south with his family. By 1915, the family had settled in Yangzhou, where his father operated the Yulongquan Salt Company. As a young man, Liu spent three years as an apprentice in the salt business, later handling copying and administrative work in the company.
He was born into a prosperous family, but prosperity did not make him hard-hearted. He was known for his honesty, generosity, and readiness to help relatives, friends, and business partners in difficulty.
After his father’s death, Liu proved unsuited to business management. The salt company failed in 1935, and the family had to survive by pawning antiques and household possessions. Liu did not seem bitter about the collapse of his family’s fortunes. Nor did years of instability make him cynical or defeated.
The qin had become his spiritual support. During the War of Resistance, when he went into the countryside to seek safety, he left other possessions behind and carried only one thing with him: a qin. Friends called him a “qin fanatic.” They were not wrong. The qin had become part of his life.
Yangzhou would become the place where Liu’s life, friendships, and qin practice came together.
Three Years with Sun Shaotao
In 1928, Liu Shaochun began studying the qin with Sun Shaotao, the ninth-generation successor of the Guangling School. He studied with him for approximately three years.
Liu later invited Sun Shaotao to live in his home as a tutor, teaching classical Chinese to Liu’s children. Liu himself continued to study the qin under Sun. This arrangement allowed the student to remain close to his teacher and to pursue the instrument with unusual concentration.
Qin was not Liu’s only passion. He studied kunqu, calligraphy, painting, bamboo carving, martial arts, the flute, the xiao, and Daoist methods of cultivating health. His circle of friends included musicians, painters, kunqu singers, martial artists, and scholars. Among his qin friends were Zhang Ziqian, Gao Zhiping, Shi Yinmei, Zhai Xiaopo, and Hu Doudong.
For Liu, the qin did not stand apart from the rest of culture. It belonged to a larger world of learning, friendship, physical discipline, and the shaping of character.
“Liu Qiaoge”
At the end of June 1936, not long after he had begun learning the qin, Liu travelled to Suzhou to attend the fifth monthly gathering of the Jinyu Qin Society. He offered a performance of Qiao Ge, “The Woodcutter’s Song.”
The response from the qin players present was immediate and enthusiastic. The performance also left a lifelong impression on Zha Fuxi, one of the founders of the Jinyu Qin Society and an important organizer of modern qin activities.
From that moment, the name “Liu Qiaoge” — Liu of Qiao Ge — began to spread throughout the regions south of the Yangtze.
The title was not a publicity slogan. It was a recognition that Liu had made a particular piece inseparable from his own musical identity. When he played Qiao Ge, listeners did not hear only an old melody. They heard Liu’s understanding of it: weighty, spacious, strong in the right hand, and alive in its changes of rhythm.
A Life Interrupted by History
In 1937, Liu worked as a librarian at the elementary school attached to the Provincial Normal School in Zhenjiang, supplementing the family income.
After 1942, he held a series of jobs: first with the Nantong Yuhua Salt Company, then as a department head at the Nanjing Civil Aviation Bureau under the National Government, and later as a quartermaster at Jiangxi No. 26 Teachers’ College.
These were not the circumstances of a full-time professional musician. Liu’s life was repeatedly shaped by war, political change, work, and financial necessity. Yet the qin remained with him.
In May 1949, he returned to Yangzhou. During the middle of the 1950s, he reconstructed the tablature for a number of pieces, including Jiu Kuang, Xiaoxiang Shuiyun, and Qiuyue Zha Maoting. To reconstruct a piece was not simply to recover notes. It was to reopen an old path and make it playable again.
From Yangzhou to Nanjing
In June 1955, at the invitation of his fellow disciple Zhang Ziqian, Liu travelled from Yangzhou to Shanghai to take part in a Jinyu Qin Society activity and met other members of the society in Nanjing.
In Nanjing, a three-person interview team including Zha Fuxi recorded Liu playing the qin. The encounter changed the direction of his later life. Liu remained in Nanjing.
In 1956, he was invited to take part in the national survey and recording of qin players organized by Zha Fuxi and others. He recorded important pieces from the Guangling repertory. Later, through the arrangements of Zhang Zhengyin, Liu stayed in Nanjing and taught qin to young people at the Nanjing Music Society. He received only a modest monthly payment, enough to provide a small support for daily life.
Among the students who learned from him were Mei Yueqiang, Lin Youren, Zhang Zhengyin, Deng Wenquan, Gong Yi, Li Changbai, Shi Shizhen, Wang Gangqiang, Zhou Jingmei, and Liu Wei, Liu’s beloved youngest daughter.
In 1958, through the recommendation of Gan Tao, a professor of traditional music, Liu began teaching in the Music Department of Nanjing University of the Arts.
For Mei Yueqiang, this was not simply a place to attend lessons. It was where a major branch of his musical life took shape.
The Guangling Truth in His Hands
Over the centuries, qin schools formed through differences of region, repertoire, transmission, and playing practice. The Guangling School came to be recognized by a particular combination: changing and dramatic movement, exquisite delicacy, a balance of strength and softness, and a richness in both sound and resonance.
Liu Shaochun preserved these qualities with unusual completeness. His playing was generally spacious and unhurried. Notes joined one another naturally, without losing their individual life. His right hand could be firm and vigorous; his left hand was careful with yin and rou, the subtle vibrato and pressing movements through which a note continues to breathe after it has sounded.
Listeners described his yin as deep and lingering, the result of a kind of patient, water-worn refinement. The right hand concerned itself with changes of weight and strength; the left distinguished the finest differences between fullness and emptiness, pressing and releasing, motion and stillness. His rhythm could be free and changeable, sometimes seeming to break and continue at once, sometimes to continue while already breaking away.
In Liu’s playing, the Guangling style did not become a formula. It became a living temperament.
One Lineage, Two Masters
Liu Shaochun and Zhang Ziqian both studied with Sun Shaotao. Yet their mature styles were markedly different. It is possible to speak of one Guangling lineage and two masters.
Zhang Ziqian was more outward, more vigorous, and less willing to remain within fixed habits. His playing was known for its bold movement, concentrated yet expansive fingerwork, and strong contrasts of rhythm, force, and color. His representative piece, Longxiang Cao, earned him the name “Zhang Longxiang.”
Liu Shaochun, by contrast, was more inward and restrained. His representative piece, Qiao Ge, made use of long slides, subtle rubbing, and forceful yet controlled touches. The music seemed to rise from a mountain forest: spacious, high, quiet, and unhurried. This was why people called him “Liu Qiaoge.”
The difference did not mean that one musician was more faithful than the other. It showed how a tradition becomes individual. A school is made by a group of musicians, but the character of a school becomes audible through particular people. One might speak, quite precisely, of Liu Shaochun’s Guangling and Zhang Ziqian’s Guangling.
Zhang himself once recognized the change in his own playing. After many years of performing the repertories of different schools, he wrote that his fingers had changed without his noticing. Liu’s observation that their versions of Qiao Ge and Longxiang Cao had begun to differ, he admitted, was well founded.
Another musician later asked Zhang why he had replaced some of Guangling’s small, inward vibratos with larger ascending and descending gestures. Zhang answered with unusual frankness. Years of performing in Shanghai, often alongside louder instruments and with inadequate amplification, had encouraged him to make the qin more forceful and immediately audible. What began as an adaptation to the stage had gradually become a habit.
Liu took another path. Apart from brief periods of public teaching, he spent most of his life studying for himself, in small gatherings and private rooms, with little desire to accommodate the demands of a theatrical stage. He therefore preserved more of the quiet, inward character of the tradition he had received from Sun Shaotao.
The Quiet Geometry of Taoist Thought
Liu was close to Buddhist and Daoist practitioners. Whenever he had the opportunity, he carried his qin to temples and Daoist monasteries, where he exchanged ideas about music with monks and priests. He practiced Daoist methods of cultivating health throughout his life and placed great importance on stillness.
He described the movement of the left hand as round and continuous, like a large circle containing smaller circles, moving from the patterned harmony of taiji toward the unbounded stillness of wuji. The aim was not to make every gesture smooth for its own sake. It was to soften the hard corners of sound and allow one tone to grow naturally into the next.
His playing also depended on the balance of emptiness and fullness. The empty could stand in for the full; the full could reveal the empty. Sound and silence were not opposites, but partners.
This aspect of Liu’s art also belongs to the older history of the Guangling tradition, which absorbed Buddhist and Daoist thought and repeatedly attracted monks, priests, and musicians who chose a life at some distance from the world. Liu’s quiet, rounded, inward style carried that older spirit forward.
He did not imitate his teacher mechanically. He absorbed the tradition, allowed his own character to enter it, and returned it in a form that still sounded like Guangling.
The Meaning of His Playing
Liu Shaochun understood the qin as an instrument for cultivating the self. He pursued two things at once: moral refinement and artistic depth. To play the qin was to seek a kind of spiritual freedom beyond the noise and pressure of ordinary life.
Lin Youren, one of Liu’s students and later a researcher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, remembered Liu at the instrument:
When Liu Shaochun played, he was completely concentrated. If someone came to visit, he did not get up to welcome them; when they left, he did not see them out. He was, quite literally, unaware of everything but the qin.
Twice in his life, Liu experienced displacement and hardship. Whether he was hungry or full, cold or warm, he continued to play every day. His spirit remained fresh, his mind at ease; his gaze was focused and his thoughts quiet.
During the war, when he went into the countryside to escape the fighting, he carried no belongings except one qin. Friends teased him by calling him a “qin fanatic.” The name was accurate, but it was not an insult.
His mind was free of vulgar distraction, and his fingers were free of restless display. His tone could be clear, bright, and rounded. In quiet passages, it emerged like mist rising from a distant valley; in rapid passages, it could be like a waterfall breaking over stone.
His playing was deep and tranquil, fine-grained and restrained. His right hand was firm and vigorous; his left hand was delicate, rounded, and full of subtle movement. He drew from the strengths of different regional traditions, and even in the difficult passages of free, surging rhythm, he found a natural balance.
Above all, Liu did not merely devote his life to the art of the qin. He also sought to live out the philosophical ideas contained within qin learning.
The Recordings That Remain
In 1956, Liu recorded eight pieces for the national qin survey:
- Qiao Ge, “The Woodcutter’s Song”
- Pingsha Luoyan, “Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank”
- Shanju Yin, “Song of the Mountain Abode”
- Longxiang Cao
- Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme
- Wu Ye Wu Qiu Feng, “Autumn Wind Dances among the Parasol Leaves”
- Mozi Beisi, “Mozi Mourns the Silk”
- Liangxiao Yin, “Song of a Good Evening”
In 1960, he also recorded Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme for the Central People’s Broadcasting Station. His reconstruction of Jiu Kuang, “The Drunken Madman,” was another important part of his surviving legacy.
The eight survey recordings were later gathered on the 1987 Hugo laser release Guangling Qin Yun, Volume Five: Liu Shaochun. The 2001 Longyin release The Qin Art of Liu Shaochun added the 1960 recording of Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme and his version of Jiu Kuang. The quality of these historical recordings is not always ideal, but their importance is difficult to overstate.
In 1983, the score of Liu’s Qiao Ge was included in the second volume of Collected Qin Pieces. Liu also wrote on the history and transmission of Guangling qin learning, including The Origins and Development of Guangling Qin Studies.
Today, when we hear Qiao Ge, Pingsha Luoyan, Shanju Yin, Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme, Wu Ye Wu Qiu Feng, or Mozi Beisi, we are not hearing an abstract description of the Guangling style. We are hearing a musician who carried it through war, work, poverty, friendship, teaching, and time.
Teaching the Music, Shaping the Person
Liu’s contribution did not end with the sound he made. He trained a generation of musicians and artists. During his years at the Nanjing Music Society and the Nanjing University of the Arts, he taught Mei Yueqiang, Zhang Zhengyin, Lin Youren, Gong Yi, Zhou Jingmei, Shi Shizhen, Li Changbai, and others who went on to shape the modern qin world.
With Gan Tao, he compiled Guqin Teaching Materials in 1959. In the 1960s, he worked with Wu Jinglue on a curriculum outline for qin instruction in higher education. These were early efforts to bring the teaching of the qin into professional institutions without reducing it to a mere technical exercise.
His teaching began with fundamentals. When Mei Yueqiang asked to learn Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme, Liu first told him to go home and practice the long suo passage. He had to play it correctly thirty times in a single breath before Liu would teach him the piece.
When students tried to collect too many pieces too quickly, Liu would say, “Half of Pingsha Luoyan can take you across the world.” The point was simple: the number of pieces matters less than the depth of one’s work.
He required students to repeat a piece again and again. But once a piece had become familiar, he required them to return to the tablature and play it character by character, so that habit would not slowly distort it. He called this “playing a familiar piece as if it were new.” Familiarity could produce skill, but it could also produce oiliness. Only renewed attention could keep the music alive.
Liu also encouraged calligraphy, painting, kunqu, and martial arts. He taught through connections between arts. The pressure of a brush that goes through the paper could become the force of a finger pressing into the string. In teaching Mei Qiao Ge, he drew on martial images: the palm moving like wind, the finger striking like lightning, fast as thunder and slow as running water, always able to gather and release.
For Liu, technique was never separate from character.
A Teacher Who Wanted the Music to Survive
Although he spent much of his life as a private, nonprofessional musician, Liu considered the preservation of Guangling music a personal duty. In a letter to the qin player Ma Ruji, he wrote that he possessed a version of Qiao Ge unlike any other in the country. It used an unusual nine-note scale, he said, and if there was an opportunity, he hoped to teach it to Ma.
At the time, Liu himself was living through forced unemployment, instability, and material hardship. Yet his concern was not his own comfort. He was already thinking about how to pass on a piece that might otherwise disappear.
He also believed that music should transmit virtue. When teaching Cai Binxin Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme, he repeatedly used the plum blossom as an example, insisting that a player needed something of the plum blossom’s character in order to play the piece well.
Lin Youren remembered that during the more than a year he studied with Liu, he never heard his teacher make a grand declaration. Liu never complained that his abilities had been overlooked. He did not speak like a man building a public reputation.
He simply played.
In Liu Shaochun, the qin tradition becomes more than the transmission of repertory or technique. It becomes the transmission of a spirit: modest, inward, disciplined, and unwilling to trade depth for display.
His Legacy in Fuping
Liu Shaochun’s native county has not allowed his memory to fade. The Liu Shaochun Memorial Hall stands in the Zhonghua Jun Cultural Tourism Scenic Area in Fuping, Shaanxi. It was formally completed on September 29, 2020, with the qin scholar Tao Yi serving as honorary director.
The museum preserves a chronology of Liu’s life compiled by Chen Jie, along with manuscripts and other documents. Its holdings include Guqin Teaching Materials, compiled by Liu Shaochun and Gan Tao, as well as Cheng Wujia’s Pipa Teaching Materials.
In 2023, the museum received a freely donated replica of the Northern Song qin Longyin. It is not the original Song-dynasty instrument whose story was told in the preceding essay, but its presence in Liu Shaochun’s memorial museum creates a meaningful bridge between the old qin and the teacher’s native place.
In 2018, Fuping hosted a qin concert in memory of Liu Shaochun. On March 28, 2023, the Liu Shaochun Qin Practice and Study Base was inaugurated, and the Weinan Normal University School of Music began working with the memorial hall to develop practice teaching and intangible cultural heritage education.
On March 15, 2025, a Guangling School concert and the donation ceremony for an oil portrait of Liu Shaochun were held at the Liu Shaochun Music Hall. Together with the Huangdi Shrine and the Liu Shaochun Music Hall, the memorial hall now forms part of the cultural landmark group of the Zhonghua Jun scenic area.
The Fifth Teacher
Liu Shaochun returned to Yangzhou in 1963 and was appointed a member of the Jiangsu Literature and History Research Institute. He died in Yangzhou on November 20, 1971, at the age of seventy.
His life moved between Shaanxi and Yangzhou, between business and art, between displacement and rootedness. He was a salt merchant’s son who became a master of the qin; a man who could study painting, martial arts, kunqu, and Daoist cultivation, yet return every day to seven strings and a single sound.
For Mei Yueqiang, Liu was the fifth teacher. But the number does not express the weight of the relationship.
A teacher gives a student more than pieces. He gives a way of listening, a way of placing the hand, a way of enduring difficulty, and sometimes a way of remaining inwardly free when the world is not.
That is what Liu Shaochun left in Mei Yueqiang’s hands.
0 comments