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 eighth installment.
A Single Character
Among all the pieces in Master Mei’s recorded repertoire, one carries a name that sets it apart from every other version in existence.
The piece is known in virtually every other guqin score as Liangxiao Yin — the Prelude of a Fine Evening. But Master Mei called it Liangxiao Yin — the Chant of a Fine Evening. The difference is a single character: yin (引), meaning prelude or introduction, replaced by yin (吟), meaning to chant, to hum softly, to give voice to something felt rather than performed.
One character. And yet the distance between them is considerable.
What “Yin” Once Meant
The scholar Xia Chengtao, writing in An Introduction to Reading Ci Poetry, traced the musical origins of the character 引 with characteristic precision. In ancient Chinese music, he explained, yin referred to a specific formal category — a section that preceded the main body of a large-scale composition, something close to what Western music might call an introduction or overture. Over centuries, as these introductory passages were gradually detached from their parent compositions and began to circulate as independent pieces, the character yin lost its formal meaning. What remained was only a kind of genealogical trace — a hint of origin, a bloodline marker, waiting for some future scholar to follow.
By the time Liangxiao Yin entered the guqin repertoire as we know it, the word yin in its title was almost certainly no longer describing a formal musical structure. It had become, like so many terms in the classical tradition, a name that outlived its original meaning.
What “Yin” Feels Like
The character 吟 is different in kind. It has no formal musical definition — no treatise assigns it a structural role in ancient composition. But its meaning as a verb is immediate and sensory: to chant softly, to murmur, to give voice to an inner state. The classical phrase qian yin di chang — shallow chanting, low singing — captures something of its quality: intimate, unhurried, turned inward.
When Master Mei quietly changed 引 to 吟, he was not making a scholarly argument. He was making a personal one. He was saying: this is not a prelude to something else. This is the thing itself — a man alone on a fine evening, giving voice to what he feels, not performing it for anyone.
And listening to his recording, one hears exactly this. There is a quality of ease in his playing — what the Chinese might call yi ran zi de, a kind of unforced contentment — that seems to overflow the strings without effort. The music does not announce itself. It simply is.
So let the old man have his Liangxiao Yin, as he preferred to call it. The change costs nothing and gains something that cannot quite be named.
Two Kinds of Stillness
Among Master Mei’s recordings there is another piece of similar character: Jingguan Yin — the Chant of Still Observation. Its title draws from a line by the Song dynasty poet Cheng Yi: “Observe the ten thousand things in stillness, and each finds its own contentment.” Where Liangxiao Yin conveys a warm evening’s ease, Jingguan Yin reaches for something cooler and more detached — a state of mind in which the self steps back and watches the world with clear, unhurried eyes.
To play seriously with the difference between the two pieces: Jingguan Yin expresses a kind of mutual regard between self and world — the observer and the observed holding each other at a slight, respectful distance. Liangxiao Yin dissolves that distance entirely. The evening and the player become one thing. It is warmer, more intimate, less philosophical and more human.
One is cool. The other is tender.
The Same Piece, Two Temperatures
Master Xia Yifeng also left a recording of Jingguan Yin, and it is remarkable. Listening to it, one enters a state of mind in which the ten thousand things of the world are held at arm’s length — present, but not pressing. The quality of his playing is difficult to describe: a kind of hovering between engagement and detachment, leaving no fingerprints on what it touches.
Master Mei’s version of the same piece follows Xia’s closely in its outlines. But something in the sound is different. Where Xia observes the stillness of things from a position of equanimity, Master Mei observes it with feeling. His is an emotional stillness — the stillness of a man who is moved by what he sees, and who allows himself to be moved. Listening, one cannot help but feel something stir.
This difference is not a matter of technique. It is a matter of character. And character, in the end, is what the guqin has always been for.
This essay is excerpted from the memorial anthology dedicated to Master Mei Yuqiang, written by Shi Hong.
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