Slow Tune of Yangzhou

Introduction

A song tune Jiang Kui created on passing Yangzhou at the winter solstice of 1176, with its notation preserved

Yangzhou Man is a song tune created by the Southern Song poet and musician Jiang Kui, in two stanzas of ninety-eight characters. Passing through Yangzhou at the winter solstice of 1176, he found the city desolate and wrote this lyric together with its music. The melody is a slow piece in two sections of two phrases each, whose opening motifs and closing cadences answer one another. It is one of seventeen songs in his collection Baishi Daoren Gequ that carry side notation in a popular script, regarded as the only surviving notation of Song lyric tunes. Yang Yinliu transcribed these notations into staff notation in the 1950s and published them with Yin Falu in 1957, and later studies of the piece often work from his version.

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