On a snowy night, a snow-covered canopied boat passes beneath a stone arch bridge. Inside, a woman in red listens as a scholar in blue plays a bamboo flute, while a boatman in a straw hat and cape poles at the stern past lit houses.
Songs of the Shijing and Chu
Work Chants (Haozi)
Yuefu Songs
Tang–Song Sung Lyrics
Mountain Songs (Shan'ge)
Songs of Tibet and the Northwest Peoples
Songs of the Southern Peoples
Qin Songs and Chanting
Mongolian and Northern Peoples' Songs
Ditties and Popular Tunes (Xiaodiao)
Hua'er
Grand Song of the Dong
Chinese Art SongTang–Song Sung Lyrics
Words fitted to the tune, sung to its beat
Introduction
Tang poems and Song ci sung to the tunes of banquet music
Tang–Song sung lyrics are the songs in which poems and lyrics were sung to the tunes of Tang and Song banquet music: the 'sung poems' performed by Tang musicians, and the ci written to fit the beat of a given tune. The Tang writer Cui Lingqin's Records of the Music Academy lists 325 tunes used by the court music academy in the Kaiyuan era, and several of them, such as Pusaman, Wangjiangnan and Huanxisha, later became ci tune patterns; Wang Wei's poem Seeing Off Yuan the Second on His Mission to Anxi was sung as the Song of Weicheng. Song ci were mostly sung by courtesan singers with accompaniment, but almost all of the music is lost: only Jiang Kui's Songs of the Daoist of White Stone, from the Southern Song, records the tunes of seventeen ci in a popular notation, and today they are transcribed and sung from it. This record covers the music and performance of ci; ci as literature belongs to the Song ci record.
Timeline
- 720OriginThe tunes used by the court music academy in the Kaiyuan era (713-741) are listed, 325 in all, in Cui Lingqin's Records of the Music Academy; among them Pusaman, Wangjiangnan, Huanxisha, Dingfengbo and Linjiangxian later became ci tune patterns. It is the earliest large record of songs sung to set tunes.
- 1176EvolutionAt the winter solstice of 1176 Jiang Kui passed through Yangzhou and 'composed this tune himself', the Yangzhou Slow; in the winter of 1191, at Fan Chengda's Stone Lake estate, he wrote Anxiang and Shuying, which Fan 'had his musician-courtesans rehearse'. These tunes are written in popular notation beside the words in the Songs of the Daoist of White Stone, the only surviving set of Song ci melodies.
- 1746ImpactThe Jiugong dacheng nanbei ci gongpu, completed in 1746 with 4,466 tunes, includes settings of Tang, Five Dynasties and Song ci made by Qing musicians, one of the main later sources for singing Tang–Song lyrics.
- 1957ImpactIn 1957 Yang Yinliu and Yin Falu published their study of Jiang Kui's songs, transcribing his popular notation into modern notation, so that his ci songs could be sung again.