Three Refrains at Yang Pass

Introduction

A setting of Wang Wei's farewell poem whose lines are sung three times over, hence the name

Three Refrains at Yang Pass is a guqin piece and qin song based on Wang Wei's quatrain Seeing Off Yuan the Second on a Mission to Anxi. In the Tang the poem was already sung, with a line repeated three times and new lines added, which gave the piece its name, and it entered the Yizhou suite as the Weicheng song. The Tang tune was lost by the Song, although Su Shi saw an old score of it. The earliest surviving score is in the Zheyin Shizi Qinpu of 1491, edited by Gong Jing, where eight sections remain and only the first keeps Wang Wei's words. A version printed in 1530 was later adapted by the Qing player Zhang He for his Qinxue Rumen, and that is the version most players use today.