Tasting Mei is a series of essays on the guqin tradition as remembered through the life and teaching of Master Mei Yuqiang. This is the sixth installment.
A Daoist Who Stayed
Xia Yifeng was born in 1883 with the given name Fuyun. He came of age in a Daoist temple in Huai’an, Jiangsu, where he learned the kun opera and the kun flute before finding his way to the guqin through the painter Yang Ziyong. In middle age he moved to Nanjing, and Nanjing is where he remained.
Yang Yinliu, writing in the first volume of Collected Guqin Pieces published in 1956, described his circumstances with characteristic plainness: Xia “lived permanently in Nanjing; apart from teaching people to play the qin, he worked as an administrator at a charitable institution. Before Liberation his life was very hard — his wife took in work from other households, and he himself lived mainly on the two pecks of rice he received each month from the charitable institution. After Liberation he received support from the government, and only then could he devote himself wholeheartedly to the study of guqin technique.”
Two pecks of rice. That was the measure of a life spent in music.
The Question of Lineage
In the Jinyu society’s register of qin players, the column for Xia Fuyun’s school affiliation was left blank. Yang Yinliu noted that he had “studied under several teachers” — teachers who may have belonged to different schools, leaving Xia himself uncertain how to answer when the form was put before him.
And yet Master Mei, in his everyday conversation, placed Xia Yifeng without hesitation in the Jinling school.
I was never one to press for explanations, and in those years I did not pursue the matter further with Master Mei. Now, when friends raise the question and trace the lineage with some care, I find myself at a loss. The blank in the register remains a blank.
What is not blank is the music itself. Among the pieces Xia transmitted to Master Mei — Guanshan Yue, Qiufeng Ci, Changmen Yuan, Fenglei Yin — several appear for the first time in the Mei’an Qin譜. When the Longyin Guan Qin譜 was rediscovered in the 1980s, Xia had already been gone for many years and could not see it. No recording of his playing survives for these pieces. But listening to Master Mei perform them, one hears nothing of the Mei’an manner — not a trace.
This is surprising. Yang Yinliu’s published transcriptions of Changmen Yuan and Fenglei Yin both carry the attribution “transmitted by Xia Yifeng from Wang Yanqing’s notation.” Wang Yanqing’s reputation had been rising since the Chenfenlu qin gathering; the Mei’an style was at its height. That a piece transmitted through Wang’s notation should leave no stylistic mark at all is, to say the least, unexpected.
Zhan Chengqiu once wrote a brief biography of Wang Xinkui of Langya, published in Jinyu, which mentions that Wang brought “thirty notations of famous Jinling pieces from Master Wang Lengquan.” Wang Yanqing himself had studied under Wang Lengquan. So when the attribution reads “transmitted from Wang Yanqing’s notation” rather than “transmitted from the Mei’an notation,” the distinction may be deliberate — the notation was passed on, but not the style.
There is one more detail worth noting. Xia’s transmission of Qiujiang Yebo uses the zheng tuning without lowering the third string, while the Mei’an Qin譜 version lowers the third string — yet the two are in the same mode. Strip away the ornamental finger-rolls that Wang characteristically added, and the two melodies are essentially identical. Another coincidence to turn over in the mind.
The Moon over the Mountain Pass
The piece Guanshan Yue in the Mei’an Qin譜 is said to draw its musical material from a Shandong folk tune called Cursing the Faithless Lover. The melody is beautiful enough that it has since been arranged for many other instruments, and versions of it appear even in vocal collections — set to Li Bai’s poem Guanshan Yue: “The bright moon rises over Tianshan, lost in the vast sea of clouds…” — with the melody taken directly from the Mei’an Qin譜.
The Mei’an Qin譜 itself contains no lyrics. The pairing of this melody with Li Bai’s poem was the work of two men: Xia Yifeng and Yang Yinliu.
Master Mei mentioned this more than once. Two years ago, through the Hong Kong qin friend Li Huawen, I obtained a photocopy of Collected Guqin Pieces, and what Master Mei had described was confirmed in full. Yang Yinliu wrote:
“More than ten years ago, Xia Yifeng and the Nanjing qin players attempted to fit Li Bai’s Guanshan Yue lyrics to this melody. The initial attempt failed — the musical phrases and the poetic lines did not align, and the words were difficult to express in performance. In recent years we reanalyzed both the melody and the text, and discovered that the poem has twelve lines and the melody has twelve phrases; the poem is in five-character lines and the melody clearly suits only five-character lines; in terms of rhythm, the two are perfectly compatible. We rearranged the setting and consulted Xia Yifeng, who gave his enthusiastic approval. What is remarkable is that after this rearrangement, the text and melody fit together with extraordinary naturalness in rhythm, rhyme, and feeling. In modern song, it is very difficult to find examples that satisfy both conditions — five-character lines and twelve phrases. And yet when these two pieces of the same name are brought together, the fit is so precise that one cannot help but feel astonished. This leads us to an initial conjecture: that this qin melody, with its flavor of northern frontier folk song, may once have been paired with Li Bai’s — or someone else’s — Guanshan Yue lyrics. If this conjecture is correct, the piece may preserve something of the Tang dynasty’s military processional music.”
Yang Yinliu’s imagination ran far — all the way to the Tang dynasty’s military processional music. Whether or not the conjecture holds, the precision of the fit between melody and text is remarkable in itself.
A Good Death
Xia Yifeng lived in poverty for most of his life. He was fortunate, in the end, to die well.
Master Mei recalled: “One day we were at our teacher’s home playing the qin. The next day we went again, and the teacher’s wife told us: ‘Your teacher fell asleep peacefully last night, and this morning he simply did not wake up.’”
The year was 1963. He was eighty years old.
The photographs show Xia Yifeng at the guqin. The record label is from his 78 rpm recording of Liangxiao Yin (A Quiet Evening’s Prelude), released by Pathé Records Shanghai — one of the few surviving documents of his playing.
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