How Can I Help Thinking of Her

Introduction

Zhao Yuanren's 1926 setting of a 1920 poem by Liu Bannong, drawing on the xipi interludes of Peking opera

How Can I Help Thinking of Her began as a new-style poem that Liu Bannong wrote in 1920 while living in Britain, and Zhao Yuanren set it to music in 1926. Zhao had come back to Beijing with his family in 1925 to teach at Tsinghua University, where he also chaired the music committee, and the song belongs to those years. Liu's poem used the character for 'she', but once it became a song the title was often written with the general character for 'he'. The music borrows the sound of the xipi interludes of Peking opera, blends Western form and changes of key into a melody close to operatic singing, and gives the piano a real part in shaping the song's imagery. In 1928 the Commercial Press in Shanghai published it in Zhao's New Poetry Song Collection, a first edition of fourteen songs.

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