This melody is set to quite famous lyrics that form a sad poem in the voice of a lady lamenting her absent lover. The lyrics, except for those of a coda, are slightly modified from those of a poem by the famous woman poet Li Qingzhao (1084 - ca.1151).³

Qinqu Jicheng actually has two settings of these lyrics. For both tablatures the source of the melody is unknown. The first one is the present one. It was published in the Boya Xinfa of 1609, where it is called Gui Yuan Cao; to the original poem this version adds a brief coda of unknown origin.

The other setting, to a completely different melody, uses the name commonly associated with Li Qingzhao's poem, On Phoenix Terrace Recalling the Playing of a Flute (Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao⁴). This latter version is #15 in the Japanese handbook Hewen Zhu(yin) Qinpu (Wabun Chuyin Kinpu [?]).⁵ There a comment at the end of the song says "revisions were made by the hand of Toko Etsu".⁶ This may suggest that Jiang Xingchou (in Japan known as Shin-Etsu and Toko-Etsu) brought the latter melody with him from China in 1677, revising it after he was in Japan. However, that melody itself is not known to have been preserved in China.⁷

The title Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao originally refers to an old story about Xiao Shi and Nong Yu,⁸ who fell in love through the sound of a flute.⁹ Xiao Shi was impoverished but highly skilled (other versions say he was a deity). Nong Yu was a daughter of Duke Mu of Qin (reigned 659-621). When playing the flute Xiao Shi was able to imitate the sound of phoenixes.¹⁰ Nong Yu fell in love with him and eventually they married. He taught her to play the way a phoenix calls out. After several decades of this, male and female phoenixes would come down in response to the sounds. The duke then built a Phoenix Terrace, where the couple would spend their time. Several more years later Nong Yu got on a phoenix, Xiao Shi mounted a dragon, and the two of them ascended into immortality.

This old love story was once very well-known. Images of Xiao Shi and Nong Yu could often be found in temples. There are at least eight old Fenghuang Tai in six different provinces.¹¹ And the Jade Maiden Shrine on Jade Maiden Peak in the middle of the Huashan Mountain Range is sometimes said to commemorate Nong Yu.¹²

The poem by Li Qingzhao reflects the thoughts of a woman whose lover has gone away. As a ci poem it was set to the character per line count of an earlier song,¹³ the lyrics and melody of which are apparently lost, but the name of which was Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao. To distinguish it from other poems using the same structure it is sometimes called Li Bie (Separation), to the tune Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao.¹⁴ The absent lover presumably reminds the narrator of the famous old love story, but there are no specific statements about or allusions to it.

There are several published translations of the poem into English. And the original Chinese text is online in several places. For example, see an online facsimile edition.

The Chinese text accompanied by the qin melody as published in Japan but played on a xiao flute is also online.¹⁵ It follows not the published transcription by Wang Di,¹⁶ but the transcription of a reconstruction by Yao Bingyan.¹⁷

 
Original preface¹⁸

 
Footnotes (Shorthand references are explained on a separate page)

1 Lament in a Lady's Chamber (閨怨操 Gui Yuan Cao)
42221.14 has only 閨怨 gui yuan, with no mention of Li Qingzhao or music. By itself gui yuan means "lament in a lady's chamber" and the entry says a variety of poets have used this to express the theme of a lady separated from her lover or family. (Return)

2 The handbook calls it 徵音 Zhi Yin. Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao, in contrast, uses a mode called 商音 Shang Yin. (Return)

3 李清照 Li Qingzhao (1084 - ca.1151; 14819.1038)
Li Qingzhao, nicknames 易安居士 Yi'an jushi (as in the preface to Gui Yuan Cao) and 樕玉 Suyu, was a major Song dynasty poet. Biographical information is readily available online. She was a daughter of the distinguished literatus 李格非 Li Gefei, and the wife of another literatus and senior official, 趙明誠 Zhao Mingcheng. The marriage was apparently a happy one. Originally from the Jinan region of Shandong province, she and her husband moved south in 1127 as the Northern Song dynasty was collapsing. Her husband died shortly after this, after which her life was quite difficult.

Li Qingzhao is said to have written many poems, but that only a few have survived. Some sources put the number at about 50, but 65 are translated in Rexroth and Chung (see below). Of note besides the poem set to Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao is one of her poems to the tune 浣溪沙 "Silk Washing Brook" (translations referenced below), which includes the line "倚樓無語理瑤琴 High in my chamber and without a word I play (lit. 'arrange') my jade (-studded) qin." This may suggest she herself played it.

Relevant translations of Li Qingzhao's poems are in:

• Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, Li Ch'ing-chao: Complete Poems; New York, New Directions, 1979
  Biography by Chung (pp. 83 - 95)
  Thoughts from the Women's Quarter, to the tune "Nostalgia of the Flute on the Phoenix Terrace" (p.30)
  On Spring (p. 21)

• Chang, Kang-i Sun and Saussy, Haun: Women Writers of Traditional China; Stanford, Stanford U. Press, 1999
  Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chuixiao: a poetic rhythm "also known as Tiao xiao ling, 'Song of Flirtation'." (p. 814; here only by others)
  Huan Xi Sha (p. 91; translates qin as lute)

• Xu Yuanzhong, Songs of the Immortals; New World Press, Beijing, 1994.
  Tune: Playing Flute Recalled on Phoenix Terrace" (p.229 [English], p.432 [Chinese]).
  Tune: Silk Washing Stream (pp. 231 and 433)
  (Return)

4 On Phoenix Terrace Recalling the Playing of a Flute (鳳凰臺上憶吹簫 Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao)
47631.131 has this as both a 詞牌 cipai and a 曲牌 qupai. The former quotes a story from 列仙傳，拾遺 Lost Records of the Liexian Zhuan. The latter mentions 李清照 Li Qingzhao and 香冷金猊 Xiang leng jin ni, the first four words of her poem; qupai suggests a connection with Yuan dynasty opera. (Return)

5 Zha Guide lists Gui Yuan Cao (29/232/442) separately from Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao (35/--/505). The two versions are in QQJC VII/190 and XII/192. (Return)

6 東皋越杜多手校; 東皋越 Donggao = Toko Etsu; 杜多 duduo = monk (from dhuta [sanskrit]). (Return)

7 Although the old tablature was apparently preserved only in Japan, modern transcriptions from the Japanese tablature have been published in China. The transcriptions by Wang Di and Yao Bingyan are discussed below. The latter is apparently the source of modern attempts to revive this qin song. (Return)

8 簫史 Xiao Shi; 弄玉 Nong Yu. (Return)

9 Flute: 簫 xiao today is a bamboo end-blown flute, but in those days the word could have referred either to the 排簫 paixiao panpipes (somewhat resembling the modern 笙 sheng mouth organ), or to the side-blown bamboo flute now called a 笛子 dizi. Some versions of this story have Xiao Shi playing the xiao and Nong Yu the sheng. (Her name means "Play Jade"; she was so named because she liked to play with jade as a child; perhaps she also had a jade sheng.) (Return)

10 鸞鳳 Luan feng; luan seems be used here like 凰 huang: female phoenix. An expression for happy marriage is 鸞鳳和鳴 "luan and feng call out together". (Return)

11 I don't know how many of these are associated with this story. (Return)

12 21296.29 玉女 Yu Nü has a number of entries, but none mentions Nong Yu.
    /.36 玉女峰 Yu Nü Feng (Jade Maiden Peak) also makes no mention of Nong Yu. (Return)

13 See below for a brief analysis of this ci structure and information on how to see copies of poems that use it. It must be emphasized that there is no evidence suggesting survival of any of the original melodies on which ci poems were based. In fact the ci structures do not necessarily follow the melodies, only the lyrics: the number of characters per phrase should remain more or less faithful to what it was in the original lyrics. However, as can be seen from a transcription of the Fenghuang Taishan melody here, although the melody largely follows the lyrics with one character (syllable) for each note, sometimes a character has more than one melodic note, and the ornamentation indicated also suggests the note values do not remain the same. For this and other reasons the rhythm of the melody is very much open to question. For more on this see my brief comment on ci lyrics.
(Return)

14 Separation (離別 Li bie)
43079.41 does not seem to have any references that connect to Li Qingzhao or music. (Return)

15 The performer not identified. The use of the xiao is of course appropriate to the title, but the lack of explanation may lead people to think this melody was originally for flute, whereas there is no actual evidence of what or where it was before being written in the Japanese handbook (see next footnote). (Return)

16 Wang Di's transcription is published in her Qin Ge (which also has her Ziye Wu Ge). There is a clear mistake in the middle: between the words 生怕 shengpa and 悲愁 beichou the melody is mistakenly transposed up a fifth (compare her two Ziye Wu Ge transcriptions: these are a fifth apart). There is no such transposition in Yao Bingyan's transcription (see next footnote). (Return)

17 Yao Bingyan's reconstruction, published in Zhongguo Gudai Gequ, was based on the tablature in the same Japanese qin handbook used by Wang Di (see previous footnote). It was apparently put into staff notation by someone else, 沈德皓 Shen Dehao. This perhaps accounts for at least one of the two deviations in the transcription from the original tablature.

1. In the third line the note (c) assigned in the tablature to the first character of the second phrase (多 duo) has instead been assigned to the last character of the previous phrase (苦 ku). This change in phrasing perhaps resulted from Yao only playing the melody, not singing it.

2. Just before the end of the first line of the second stanza, played in harmonics, the character 難 nan is given two notes: it begins on an eighth note d (re, as indicated in the tablature), it then goes down to c, which is held quite long. In the original tablature an extra note was written in the margin at this place, but it is a repeat of the cluster assigned to nan. Such marginal notes also appear elsewhere in the tablature. Usually (but note always: here see the marginal correction next to 應 ying in the third line of the second stanza) they are the same as the note they appear next to. This gives the impression that perhaps in an earlier edition they were a correction: usually the correction has already been made, but for conservative reasons the marginal correction is retained. Here perhaps Yao interpreted the marginal correction as a separate note, then played it down one string. The problem is that this is a deviation from the rule that only one right hand stroke can be assigned to a syllable (i.e., a Chinese character). If the note is a slide, that would fit the rule, but such can not be the case here, since the passage is played in harmonics.
   (Return)

18 The original Chinese text is,

19 Li Qingzhao's original lyrics, sometimes given the sub-title 離別 Separation, form the first two verses, as follows (with character count); the source for the lyrics in the 尾 coda are unknown.

一	香冷金猊，被翻紅浪，起來慵自梳頭。	4,4,6 (14)
	任寶奩塵滿，[憑他]日上簾鉤。	5,4    ( 9 ["憑他 as usual" is only in the Japanese edition])
	[生]怕(的是)離懷別苦，多少事，欲說還休。	6,3,4 (13  ( 9 ["生 " is only in the Japanese edition])
	(如今)新來瘙，非于病酒，不是悲愁。	3,4,4 (11; total for verse: 47 [not counting the "pingta"])
二	休休！	2
	這回去也，千萬遍“陽關”，也則難留。	4,5,4 (13)
	念武陵人遠，煙鎖秦樓。	5,4    ( 9)
	惟有樓前流水，應念我(，)終日凝眸。	6,3,4 (13)
	凝眸處，從今又添(，)一段新愁。	3,4,4 (11; total for verse: 2 + 46)
尾	閨中離婦強登樓，	7
	見綠柳興愁，	5
	悔教夫婿覓封侯。	7

Note: The McGill Ming Qing Women's Writing website's online original omits the 憑他 pingta and seems to have 終日 zongri. So does another online version, which includes translation and analysis. The Xu Yuanzhang edition, which also omits pingta, has in the the second last line 終目 zongmu instead of zongri; Xu also adds a second comma in each of the last two lines (as indicated above).

The McGill Ming Qing Women's Writing website includes 81 poems using the structure Fenghuang Taishang Yi Chui Xiao. At least four of these are translated in Chang and Saussy and the present lyrics are translated in several places. From looking at the structure of the originals of the five translated poems, they are all quite similar. The main deviation seems to be in the line after the two character interjection beginning the second verse. This suggests that the last three lines of the second verse should parallel the last three lines of the first, and there should be the two character interjection between the verses. The first line of the first verse is always 4,4,6, but the first line of the second verse never is; usually it is 4,5,4, but there seem to be some variations here. (There is a similar first-line variation in Dongfeng Qi Zhuo Li.)

The four referenced translations in Chang and Saussy are of poems by He Shuangqing (p. 454), Gu Maoyi (p. 493), Shen Xiang (p. 543) and Jiang Zhu (p. 546). The originals of the five poems using this meter discussed here, together with a list of 76 others, can be found through the search page on the McGill Ming Qing Women's Writing website. To search, set the top box for "Poem Title", and search for "Feng Huang Tai Shang Yi Chui Xiao" (i.e., separate syllables). It should yield 81 such poems by women writers (I have no information on how often male writers used this form).

My own reconstruction of the melody tries to capture the parallels between the first and second verses, but this is not something strongly suggested by the existing tablature. (Return)

 
Return to the top or to the Guqin ToC