Originally written by Shi Hong. Translated and published with respect for the original author.
When scholars today discuss the tuning of the guqin, they tend to focus on relatively fixed pitch values. In many people's minds, each note in a qin melody should have a stable, measurable frequency — and beyond that, the debate reduces to minor differences between Pythagorean tuning and just intonation. Some have even suggested that students first train their ears on the piano before learning the qin, claiming this will "double the results with half the effort." This amounts to forcing qin music to submit to the constraints of equal temperament.
Master Mei approached tuning from an entirely different angle. For him, the question of pitch had to be understood from two distinct standpoints: sheng (tone) and yun (resonance).
Every school speaks of sheng and yun, of course. But in practice, many players today treat yun as nothing more than a physical bridge between one note and the next — a highway connecting cities with fixed coordinates, where the road may curve but the route is determined. In this view, yun may be more or less, but it always stays "within bounds." This effectively ignores the foundational aesthetic principles of Chinese traditional culture: the interplay of empty and full, hard and soft, motion and stillness — the whole system of contrasts and mutual generation that underlies the art.
From the perspective of Chinese traditional aesthetics, sheng and yun are like bone and flesh. The bones of an adult have relatively stable dimensions; but flesh is always in flux — growing lean or full, smooth or rough, young or aged. Yun is born from sheng as flesh adheres to bone: within the relatively stable framework of sheng, it is the elastic, living quality of yun that breathes life into the music. Master Mei placed great emphasis on the formal distinction between these two elements, and on the way they complete each other.
Setting aside the open and harmonic string tones, we may say that once a stopped note sounds, the sliding movements that immediately follow constitute the yun — the circulation of breath and blood. This yun takes two further forms.
The first form consists of ornaments such as yin and nao — vibrato and oscillation — which have no fixed pitch of their own and exist purely to color and diffuse the sound. Whether their range is smaller than a single pitch position or extends to a full position or beyond (as in the wider dang, you, and yin ornaments), they are not bound by the fixed physical pitches of qin tuning. Most players accept this. But how many go further and notice that these ornaments do not merely escape the constraints of fixed pitch — they actively and deliberately destabilize it?
Master Mei paid close attention to this "living pitch" function of yin and nao. When he moved his fingers across the strings, it appeared to onlookers effortlessly free — but in his own mind, every detail was precisely considered: where to use yin, where to use nao, where neither was permitted; which type of vibrato to choose at a given moment; whether to center the oscillation on the pitch position, lean left or right, keep it round or angular, begin loose and tighten, begin tight and loosen, begin wide and narrow, begin narrow and widen — all of this was perfectly clear to him. Yet however the yun transformed, the underlying skeleton of sheng within it remained relatively stable. By contrast, some players, lacking a clear understanding of the nature of yin and nao, shake the string arbitrarily after sounding a note, with no principle at all — a practice much to be avoided.
The second form involves sliding movements that contain actual melodic intervals. Here, many players today are reluctant to "overstep" the fixed pitch positions. And so when some listeners heard Master Mei play, they concluded that his intonation was "imprecise." What they did not understand was that each of those small "imprecisions" contained Master Mei's own singular understanding of qin resonance.
From a purely theoretical standpoint, the individual pitch units in music should be relatively ordered and stable. But in Chinese traditional musical practice, the art lies precisely in introducing elements of disorder within that order — in using apparent irregularity to animate and propel the ordered unfolding of the music.
For example: after sounding a note, the fingering techniques of jin fu (advancing and returning) and tui fu (retreating and returning) should theoretically land precisely on the adjacent pitch position. But in Master Mei's playing, there were frequent moments of deliberate overshoot. In his mind, each pitch position was not a point but a sphere — a solid with volume and radius. When jin fu carries the finger past the upper pitch position, it creates a kind of radius in the listener's perception: the further the overshoot, the larger the radius, the greater the centrifugal force of the moving note, and the greater the elasticity of its return. These varied degrees of "overstepping" summon a richer, more three-dimensional, more varied listening experience. The sense of tension that listeners often feel in Master Mei's playing owes much to this quality.
The passage in Qiao Ge mentioned earlier is an extreme example. But similar elastic pitch treatment appears throughout his repertoire. In the climactic seventh and eighth sections of Meihua Sannong, for instance, there is a phrase — "kneel fifth-sixth, pluck-flick sixth, separate to the large fifth, cover sixth" — which in modern solfège reads as Do Re Do Re. According to the score, the first note of the "separate" movement should land at the fifth hui position. In recordings of Masters Liu Shaochun and Zhang Ziqian, it does exactly that. But in Master Mei's performance, he carries it all the way to between the 4.4 and 4.6 hui positions — dramatically heightening the contrast and the empty-full relationship between the two Do Re pairs. Remarkably, although the actual interval between the first two notes has expanded to somewhere between a major third and a perfect fourth, the ear still hears them as Do Re rather than Do Mi or Do Fa. The effect is far more vivid and three-dimensional than a "standard" Do Re Do Re — one almost hears the petals of a plum blossom opening.
Another example: in ordinary sliding passages, the natural decay of the string's vibration causes the volume to diminish, which in turn creates a psychological sense of the pitch dropping. The subsequent sliding notes can feel unclear or flat. By deliberately adjusting the actual pitch position, Master Mei achieved a kind of auditory correction — making the notes in a sliding melody sound more precise and luminous than they would if played "correctly." In such moments, intonation was determined entirely by the ear, not by the eye.
Beyond this, Master Mei further distinguished between sheng-qian yun (pre-tone resonance) and sheng-hou yun (post-tone resonance). The examples above all belong to the latter category. But Master Mei held that ornaments such as chuo and zhu — which approach the note from below or above before settling — produce sheng-qian yun, a resonance that precedes the tone. This more dialectical understanding fuses sheng and yun into a single, inseparable pair of complementary forces — the two poles of a living musical whole.
So much for how Master Mei treated the tuning of yun. But even in handling the more "fixed" tuning of sheng itself, his approach was never rigid. He believed that the relationship between notes in time and space is always relative — and that it is precisely this flexible relativity that makes a melody organic rather than mechanical.
For instance, in the unison or octave doublings common in qin music, Master Mei would sometimes deliberately introduce a tiny pitch discrepancy between two or three successive notes — slightly higher then lower, or lower then higher — creating a sense of rise or fall, nearness or distance, or a layering of solid and empty timbres between the paired notes. He once compared this to calligraphy: when two or more horizontal strokes appear in parallel, they should always vary in length, weight, and direction — repetition is to be avoided.
There are also some remarkable examples in Master Mei's recordings from the early 1990s. In Qiu Ye Du Yi (Reading the Changes on an Autumn Night), certain passages depicting the sound of recitation rise nearly a quarter-tone above the surrounding pitch level — an irregular, momentary transposition, as if the reader, caught up in excitement, unconsciously raises his voice. This reflects Master Mei's "relativist" view of tuning. In his later recordings of the same piece, this quality is retained, though the degree of upward shift has become more restrained — perhaps ten to twenty cents — so that the sound of "bright, resonant recitation" is still present, but expressed with considerably more subtlety than in his earlier years.
Another example comes from Zui Yu Chang Wan (The Drunken Fisherman Sings at Dusk), also from his 1990s recordings. In the main melody, the major second intervals between the principal scale degrees measure approximately 230 cents — far wider than the major second in either Pythagorean or just intonation. This is unlike anything I have encountered elsewhere, and I do not know its origin. One might be tempted to attribute it to imprecise hearing in old age — but this interval pattern maintains a remarkably stable, parallel structure across multiple transpositions throughout the entire piece, and at no point does it sound out of tune or wayward.
It is a source of lasting regret that during the years when I had the most time to study with Master Mei, I did not pay sufficient attention to these questions of tuning. When the old master touched on them in passing, I did not take them seriously enough — I was too focused on learning the fingering. In recent years I have come to feel that there is something profound here, something I have barely begun to understand. But the master is no longer in this world. There is no one left to ask. The regret is beyond remedy.
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