“Go three days without playing, and thorns will grow on your fingers.”
Qin players have a saying like this. A piece held in the mind is one thing; fingers that can still find their way through it are another. Leave the instrument untouched for too long, and even familiar movements begin to feel strange.
Zhang Ziqian practiced every day. But during the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a confinement known as a “cowshed.” He had no qin beside him.
How do you practice without an instrument?
He moved his hands as though he were playing one. There were no strings beneath his fingers, but his hands followed the fingerings he knew. At the same time, he practiced changxian, singing the names of the finger techniques along with the melody.
Guqin music is commonly recorded in jianzipu, a notation that tells the player what the left and right hands do. Changxian gave Zhang a way to carry those actions, as well as the tune, in his memory. It was more than humming a melody. He was rehearsing where his hands would go, how they would move, and what would come next.
To someone passing by, there might have been only quiet singing and a pair of hands moving through empty air. To Zhang, it was practice, even though the instrument made no sound.
“No strings in the hands, but strings in the heart.” In this story, the saying does not mean that a musician no longer needs a real qin. Zhang valued playing so deeply that, when he could not reach his instrument, he found a way not to forget it.
When the qin returned to his hands, its strings could sound again. The time spent tracing fingerings in the air and singing them had not been empty time. He had continued to live with those pieces while the instrument was out of reach.
Zhang was still able to play in old age. At the third national gathering devoted to reconstructing guqin pieces from old notation, held in Yangzhou in 1985, he met fellow elder players including Wu Jinglue and Cheng Wujia. In a generation when many players were growing old and younger musicians were still learning to carry the music forward, Zhang's continuing practice mattered. It was not the achievement of a single day, but the result of years of refusing to stop, including those when he had no qin to play.
We often imagine that practice must make a sound to count. Zhang's story suggests otherwise. Sometimes the music a person is most determined to keep alive cannot be heard at all.
His hands played in the air. The qin was not there. The music still was.
Source: Yan Xiaoxing, “Qinbian Paizhang Lu: Jinshi Guqin Yiwen Xianhua, Part 12,” Music Lover (2010), pp. 34–35.
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