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 seventh installment.
The Beginner’s Piece That Never Ends
Since the Mei’an Qin譜 was first published, almost every student of the guqin has learned Qiufeng Ci — the Autumn Wind Lyric — early in their studies. The piece is short. Its phrase structure is regular. From beginning to end, it alternates between stopped and open strings, and its melodic line is more immediately singable than Xianweng Cao, the other standard beginner’s piece. It makes an ideal advanced exercise for the xianweng fingering technique without becoming dry or mechanical.
And yet precisely because it is short and easy, and because most players have known it since their first months of study, something tends to happen over time. As the repertoire expands and the fingers grow more practiced, the piece that introduced them to the instrument fades into the background. Players who can perform the great long pieces with authority will often play Qiufeng Ci carelessly, as if it no longer deserves their full attention.
Master Mei did not share this attitude. He often said: “Pieces have no rank, only length. If you are willing to play with full attention, even the shortest piece can leave a resonance that lingers long after the sound has stopped.”
The Warmth in the Notation
Comparing Master Mei’s performance of Qiufeng Ci with the original Mei’an notation, one notices immediately that his vibrato and finger pressure are simpler — less ornamented, less insistent. Several places where the Mei’an score calls for the zhuang technique — a sharp, percussive press — become in his hands the jinfu, a gentler return motion. The effect is a broader, more unhurried breath running through the piece, something close to the soft, yielding quality one associates with the temperament of the Jiangnan region.
Master Mei said that he learned this piece directly from Xia Yifeng. The warmth in his playing, one suspects, carries something of Xia’s own character.
In the conversations I remember from ordinary afternoons, the Xia Yifeng who emerged from Master Mei’s recollections was a man of extraordinary gentleness. Master Mei said he always wore the same expression — calm, unhurried, good-humored. When a student made an error, he would not correct them sharply. He would draw out the syllables in a soft, patient voice and say, very quietly: “Not quite〜〜” — and then, with complete patience, teach the passage again from the beginning.
I cannot explain why, but every time I hear Master Mei play Qiufeng Ci, I find myself thinking of the expression on his face when he imitated that gentle “Not quite〜〜”.
Two Kinds of Warmth
Xia Yifeng also transmitted to Master Mei the piece Changmen Yuan — the Lament of the Changmen Palace — and it too has a quality of warmth and tenderness. But the two pieces are warm in entirely different ways.
Changmen Yuan has a specific character moving through it from beginning to end: a woman of known identity, in a known situation, with a known grief. The narrative elements are present. The performer’s task is to understand that character — her dignity, her restraint, her particular quality of sorrow — and to shape the music’s dramatic arc accordingly, maintaining a cool, clear view of the whole even while inhabiting the emotion.
Qiufeng Ci is something else entirely. It is a pure lyric miniature. It captures not a story but a moment — a specific fragment of experience that almost anyone might have felt at some point in their life. What it expresses is the emotional state of a single instant. And because of this, it works less through narrative and more through what is left unsaid: the silences, the resonances, the spaces between phrases that the performer fills with their own experience.
Listening to Changmen Yuan is like watching a complete scene in a play — from the opening to the entrance to the drama to the exit to the closing curtain. It is satisfying in the way that a well-made story is satisfying.
Listening to Qiufeng Ci is like hearing a single exquisite passage of singing from within that play — a moment that stays with you long after the performance is over.
The Question of Authorship
There is an unresolved matter attached to this piece. The Mei’an Qin譜 attributes it to Li Bai.
The lyrics used in the score do draw from Li Bai’s poem Three-Five-Seven Syllables: “The autumn wind is clear, the autumn moon bright. Fallen leaves gather and scatter; cold crows settle and start. When will we meet again, you and I? This night, this moment — the feeling is too much to bear.” But the presence of Li Bai’s words in the score is not sufficient evidence that Li Bai composed the music. The second half of the lyrics cannot be traced to any Tang or Song source, and its language does not read like Tang or Song writing. The melodic style, when one listens carefully, feels closer to the music of the Ming or Qing dynasties.
This is not unusual. Among the many qin scores that have survived, attributions to famous historical figures are everywhere. I used to think, somewhat naively, that this was a kind of voluntary self-erasure — that the unknown composers of these pieces had chosen to give up their own names in order to attach their work to a famous figure and ensure its survival. There was something poignant about this idea, even if it meant the original creators went unacknowledged.
I no longer think this way.
The more one reads about the history of qin notation and transmission, the more one realizes that the people who wrote about the qin were not always the disinterested guardians of an ancient tradition they claimed to be. History as it appears in texts is always shaped by the person writing it. What is called “voluntarily giving up the right to attribution” is, on reflection, a self-deceiving fantasy.
The more likely truth is this: pieces circulated for so long that their origins were genuinely forgotten, and later compilers, unwilling to leave a blank, attached a famous name. Or — and this too cannot be ruled out — the original composer’s name was known, but was deliberately erased by someone with reasons they preferred not to state.
The autumn wind, the poem says, is clear. The history of who made this music is considerably less so.
This essay is excerpted from the memorial anthology dedicated to Master Mei Yuqiang, written by Shi Hong.
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