Zhang Ziqian played quickly. When he went to learn Xiaoxiang Shuiyun from Zha Fuxi, he had to do something harder than learn a new sequence of notes: he had to slow himself down.
Zha's performance lasted more than fourteen minutes. Zhang practiced for days, trying to give the piece the time his teacher gave it. At noon, when others were resting, he worried that his qin would disturb them. So he practiced under a quilt, muffling the sound.
Then one day he made it. Still covered by the quilt, he came stumbling out and called, delighted, “I finally got to fourteen minutes!”
Fourteen minutes is not a rule for how Xiaoxiang Shuiyun must be played. What stays with me is the joy in that cry. Zhang was already an accomplished qin player, yet he could still celebrate learning to do something differently. For a moment, he sounded like any student who had finally made it through a difficult lesson.
He kept being that student.
In the 1970s, Zhang went to Yao Bingyan's home every week to learn Liushui, “Flowing Water.” His grandniece and student, Dai Xiaolian, recalled that Zhang broke his leg in a fall while traveling there. The limp she remembered in his later years came from that injury.
The fall was an accident, not a price anyone should have to pay for music. The remarkable thing is what Zhang was doing on that journey. After a lifetime of playing and teaching, he was still making the trip to another musician's home because there was a piece he wanted to learn.
Dai Xiaolian wrote that Zhang urged his students to listen widely and learn beyond any one school's style. He did not ask them to remain within the bounds of what he could teach, because he had never set those bounds around himself.
A musician can become a master without ceasing to be a student. Zhang Ziqian showed what that looks like: patient enough to work against his own habits under a quilt, and curious enough, in his seventies, to keep going to someone else's door.
He played the qin all his life. He kept learning it, too.
Cover image: Zhang Ziqian, Zha Fuxi and Shen Caonong, left to right, in a 1963 photograph. Neither photo depicts the lessons or the fall described above.
Source for Zhang's visits to Yao Bingyan, the fall, and his approach to teaching: Dai Xiaolian, “In Deep Memory of My Elder and Mentor, the Renowned Qin Player Mr. Zhang Ziqian” (1992). The quilt-and-fourteen-minutes episode is recounted as an anecdote, not attributed to Dai's essay.
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