Old Grief

Introduction

Jiang Kui's own qin song, the earliest surviving qin song score written with fingering notation

Old Grief is a qin song composed by the Southern Song lyric poet Jiang Kui and kept in his collection, the Songs of the Whitestone Daoist. The collection holds seventeen songs of his own making, written in pitch-name, qin tablature and popular notations, and Old Grief is the only one with qin fingering marks. That tablature is also the earliest qin song score to survive. The piece is in three sections; the first two share the same prelude, and several altered notes in the second make the melody still more plaintive. Most of Jiang Kui's poems date from between 1176 and 1197, and after a Yuan manuscript of the collection came to light in the early Qing, it was printed in the Qianlong reign first by Zhang Yishu and then by Lu Zhonghui.