Midnight Songs

Introduction

A Wu song of the Jiangnan region from the Eastern Jin onward, by tradition created by a woman named Ziye

The Ziye song is a tune of the southern Wu songs, and Guo Maoqian's Song-dynasty Collection of Yuefu Poetry files it among the Wu songs of the qingshang section, with forty-two poems labelled as texts of the Jin, Song and Qi. The collection quotes the music treatise of the Tang shu as saying that the Ziye song was a Jin tune, created by a Jin woman named Ziye, with a sound of deep sorrow. It also quotes the Song shu account that in the Taiyuan era of Emperor Xiaowu of the Eastern Jin a ghost sang the Ziye song in the household of Wang Kezhi of Langya, from which it follows that Ziye lived before that era. According to the Jin shu treatise quoted there, the Wu songs all came from the Jiangnan region and grew in number after the Eastern Jin; from the crossing of the Yangtze in the Yongjia years down to the Liang and Chen, the southern courts all had their capital at Jianye, and the Wu songs rose from there. Later writers added songs of pleasures through the seasons, called the Ziye Songs of the Four Seasons, and there were further variants such as the Great Ziye Song, the Ziye Warning Song and the Ziye Changed Song. These accounts of Ziye are tradition.