The Deer Cry

Introduction

One of six Lesser Odes in the Twelve Scores of Feng and Ya passed down by Zhao Yansu and kept by Zhu Xi

The Deer Cry is a poem of the Lesser Odes in the Book of Songs, in three stanzas, and the Mao preface says it was sung when a ruler feasted his ministers and honoured guests. Among the surviving early scores for the Book of Songs, the oldest are the Twelve Scores of Feng and Ya transmitted by Zhao Yansu of the Song, said to be the tunes used to sing the odes at the village drinking rite in the Kaiyuan reign of the Tang. The set holds six Lesser Odes, The Deer Cry, The Four Steeds, Brilliant Are the Flowers, Fish Caught in the Trap, The South Has Fine Fish and The Southern Hills Have Sedge, together with three odes each from the Zhounan and Shaonan. Zhu Xi placed the scores at the head of the section on learning in his General Explication of the Ritual Classics, and Xiong Penglai, writing at the turn of the Song and Yuan, copied them into his Se Scores with only small differences, perhaps from a separate source. In the Ming, Huang Zuo included the scores, written in pitch-name notation, in his records of the Nanjing Imperial Academy and in his Canon of Music.