By Shi Hong
Master Mei often said: "The four great pieces of the Guangling school are Yu, Qiao, Mo, and Pei" — referring to Fisherman's Song (渔歌), Woodcutter's Song (樵歌), Mozi's Lament over Silk (墨子悲丝), and Pei Lan (佩兰). Of these, Master Mei himself was peerless in his performance of Woodcutter's Song.
This piece has appeared in more than forty qin handbooks over five hundred years, from the Shen Qi Mi Pu (1425) onward. Tracing the evolution of Woodcutter's Song through the five major Guangling handbooks reveals a clear arc of development. In the Ming dynasty versions, the auxiliary tones biangong and bianzhi appear with considerable frequency. By the time of the Qing dynasty Wuzhizhai Qin Pu (1722), the melody had been reorganized around a predominantly pentatonic scale, with fewer auxiliary tones and some shifts in tonality. Yet the original piece's characteristic features — frequent modulation, and melodic movement in major thirds and fourths — were preserved. What the Wuzhizhai added was a far richer vocabulary of yin, nao, chuo, and zhu ornaments, with wider vibrato sweeps and a more expansive, unhurried quality that represented a significant breakthrough beyond all earlier handbooks. In this we can see the creative genius of Xu Qi, the founding master of the Guangling school.
By the Jiao'an Qin Pu (1868), the tradition had evolved further: building on the Wuzhizhai foundation, the compilers made greater use of yangtuo and such ornaments as jinnao, zhuonao, and dasangnao, intensifying the force and speed of certain passages. At the same time, some ornaments were reduced in other passages, replaced by the direct "crane-step" descent, giving the whole piece a cleaner, more vigorous character. The closing harmonics were also revised to be more concise and bright.
The Mei Style
Liu Shaochun's performance of Woodcutter's Song was transmitted to him by Sun Shaotao, and traces its lineage to the Jiao'an handbook. In the less than a century between the Jiao'an and Liu's 1956 recording, the piece continued its natural evolution through successive generations of oral transmission. In the nearly half-century since Liu Shaochun, Woodcutter's Song underwent further transformation in Master Mei's hands — through years of absorption and reflection — and many of its most distinctive tonal qualities had by then become unmistakably characteristic of the Mei style.
The most striking example occurs at the very first gliding note after the piece opens on open strings. In both the Jiao'an handbook and Liu Shaochun's performance, this passage moves from the ninth hui position on the second string up to the seventh-seventh hui with a jinnao ornament. Master Mei, however, dramatically flings the note all the way up to a position near the sixth hui — a deliberately ambiguous pitch — before sweeping back down to the seventh-seventh hui for a leisurely, rolling dangnao. Similar treatments appear at several other points in the piece.
What was his reasoning? Master Mei explained that this was "the mountain wind roaring." In his youth he had worked along the Yangtze River, rafting timber downstream, and had witnessed many times the awesome power of great winds shaking through the forest. Later, this impression found its way — almost unconsciously — into his fingertips as he played Woodcutter's Song. He felt that without this gesture, the music could not fully conjure that elemental force.
To take a melodic interval that was originally quite clear and stretch it like a rubber band to the very limit of its tension — this is to shift the very foundation of the musical melody, and to mount a revolutionary challenge to the listener's ear. Such audacity is not merely imaginative; the sheer boldness it displays is something only a master of the highest order could carry off. With a single sweep of the hand, it startles and refreshes without ever crossing into excess — truly, as the saying goes, "unexpected, yet entirely right." And so Master Mei's Woodcutter's Song opens a deeper realm within the mountain valley, making what the Wuzhizhai called "the bearing of one who shakes out his robes on a thousand-foot peak" feel more vivid than ever.
A World of Scenes
Yet Woodcutter's Song is by no means all roaring wind. This celebrated piece of the Guangling school contains a world of scenes and moods: the rhythmic thud of an axe on wood, the floating sound of a mountain song, the high call of a work chant. The perspective shifts near and far; figures appear and vanish. Forest wind falls quiet, broken by a clear whistle from among the clouds; the music pours forth freely, yet the sense of an empty mountain with no one present only deepens. Through all its turns and glances, this long piece moves as a single breath — building momentum in the swift passages, finding feeling in the slow ones — until the final "drunken dance down the mountain" brings the piece to its close, leaving the listener with the sensation of having heard something that will not easily be forgotten.
Silk Strings and Steel
It is worth noting that the dramatic tonal transformation described above owes something not only to Master Mei's personal insight and courage, but also to an objective historical cause: a revolution in materials that swept through Chinese instrument-making in the mid-twentieth century. The silk strings that had been used on most traditional Chinese stringed instruments for thousands of years quietly disappeared within a very short period in the 1950s and 60s, replaced by steel wire, nylon, and other modern materials. The inherently warm, mellow quality of silk strings is difficult to reproduce on steel or nylon, and this became one of the central grievances of those qin players who dedicated themselves to recovering the ancient sound.
But if we take a fully objective view of that transformation in the history of Chinese instrument-making, can we really say that the spread of steel strings had no value whatsoever — that it was nothing more than a blind following of fashion, a naive "modernization"?
I once attempted to play Master Mei's version of Woodcutter's Song on silk strings, and found that the very passage — that rapid upward fling followed by the sweeping return — simply could not produce the effect of "the mountain wind roaring" that steel strings make possible. Silk strings have too much friction and insufficient vibrational responsiveness; when the speed of the glide exceeds a certain threshold, the extension of the yun (resonant decay) is compromised. Steel strings are different: their smooth surface and excellent vibrational properties allow the gliding tone to unfold fully, swiftly, and with complete freedom of roll and sweep. Master Mei's innovation, it becomes clear, could only have been discovered after the adoption of steel strings.
Master Mei's attitude toward the new materials was neither to cling to tradition nor to accept change passively, but to engage actively — to look for the advantages in the new material's properties and to expand the possibilities they offered. As for the question of tone color, he addressed it on two fronts: on one hand, adjusting his touch and finger technique to move as far as possible toward warmth and depth; on the other, fully exploiting the clarity and brightness that steel strings offer, so that even the softest notes remained distinct and penetrating. The sound that came from Master Mei's fingers always gave the impression of complete spiritual presence and tonal fullness — and this, one must say, had much to do with his deep understanding and masterful command of the instrument's properties. In any case, musical expression ultimately depends on the person. Although every surviving recording of Master Mei was made on steel strings, this in no way prevents us from hearing, in his playing, a profoundly traditional quality of feeling. The cultivation that lies in the bones cannot be constrained by the tools one uses.
This essay is excerpted from the Memorial Volume for Mei Yueqiang. Originally written in Chinese by Shi Hong; translated for Seven String Qin.
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