Huan Yi's three tunes: how Meihua Sannong began on a flute
The Eastern Jin general Huan Yi, asked by a stranger to play as he passed a riverbank, got down from his carriage, sat on a camp stool, played three tunes on his flute and left; the two men never exchanged a word. That flute piece later became the qin piece Meihua Sannong. This article covers the scene in the Shishuo Xinyu, who Huan Yi was, the flute in his hand that Cai Yong had made, and what the three tunes became on the qin.
An ongoing record of guqin study, technique and digital notation.
Translated from the Chinese original.
The Eastern Jin dynasty, in the fourth century, on a riverbank near the capital Jiankang (modern Nanjing). A boat is moored below a landing. The man aboard is on his way to the capital, and he is waiting.
Carriages and horses pass along the bank. Someone in the boat recognizes the man in one of the carriages and says quietly: that is Huan Ziye.
The owner of the boat hears this and sends a servant ashore with a message: I hear you play the flute well. Would you play a piece for me?
The man in the carriage is the governor of a province, a hero of the battle of the Fei River, one of the great officials of the court. He could easily ignore the request. It comes from a stranger, across the water, and it breaks every rule of etiquette. But he knows the name. He gets down from his carriage, has someone bring him a folding stool, sits down on the bank, takes out his flute and plays three pieces.
When he has finished, he gets back into his carriage and leaves. The man in the boat does not even rise to thank him. From beginning to end, the two of them do not say a single word.
The riverbank
The scene comes from the chapter "The Free and Unrestrained" in the Shishuo Xinyu (世说新语, "A New Account of Tales of the World"), a fifth-century collection of anecdotes about famous people of the preceding two centuries:
Wang Ziyou was leaving for the capital and his boat was still moored at the landing. He had long heard that Huan Ziye played the flute well, but they had never met. It happened that Huan passed along the bank while Wang was in the boat, and one of the company who knew him said, "That is Huan Ziye." Wang sent someone to say to him, "I hear you play the flute well. Would you play something for me?" Huan was by then eminent and powerful, but he had long known Wang's name. He turned back at once, got down from his carriage, sat on a camp stool, and played three tunes for him. When he had finished, he got back into his carriage and left. Host and guest did not exchange a single word.
Ziyou is Wang Huizhi's courtesy name; Ziye is Huan Yi's childhood name.
"Played three tunes" is the origin of sannong (三弄). The word nong means to play a piece through, and sannong means three statements, three playings.
Huan Yi
Huan Yi, courtesy name Shuxia, childhood name Ziye, lived under the Eastern Jin (317–420). He was not an idle artist. He was a general.
In 383, Fu Jian, ruler of the northern state of Former Qin, marched south with an army said to number eight hundred thousand. He boasted that his soldiers' whips, thrown into the Yangzi, would stop its flow. The Eastern Jin had eighty thousand men. Huan Yi, together with Xie Xuan and Xie Shi, met the invaders at the Fei River, and the Qin army collapsed. Two idioms still in use, "the sound of the wind and the cry of the crane" and "every bush and tree a soldier", describe the fleeing Qin troops, who took every sound and shadow for pursuers. The battle saved the Eastern Jin. For his part in it Huan Yi was made Marquis of Yongxiu, and he later became governor of Jiangzhou.
The official History of Jin, in its biography of Huan Yi, says he "excelled in music, the finest of his time, first in all the lands south of the Yangzi". It adds that "he owned Cai Yong's Keting flute and often played it himself". This was the flute Cai Yong had made from a bamboo rafter he noticed in the roof of the Keting pavilion at Kuaiji (see The Scorched Tail qin). Cai Yong died in 192; Huan Yi lived in the late fourth century. The flute had passed down nearly two hundred years to reach a general's hands, and the three tunes on the riverbank were very likely played on it.
There is another story about Huan Yi. Emperor Xiaowu had grown suspicious of Xie An, who had directed the war at the Fei River and whose prestige now seemed a threat. At a palace banquet Huan Yi played the zheng, a long plucked zither, for the emperor and sang the Poem of Resentment by the third-century poet Cao Zhi:
To be a ruler is not easy; to be a minister is harder still. When loyalty and good faith go unseen, there follows the misfortune of suspicion.
He sang, the History says, with a stirring voice and a noble bearing. Xie An, who was present, wept openly, rose and said to Huan Yi, "In this, sir, you are no ordinary man." The emperor himself looked ashamed.
A man who won a decisive battle and defended a friend before the emperor with a song played three pieces for a stranger on a riverbank and left. This is what the writers of the Wei and Jin period (third and fourth centuries) meant by being "free and unrestrained". It does not mean self-indulgence. It means not saying one word more than necessary.
Wang Huizhi
The man in the boat deserves a few words too.
Wang Huizhi was a son of Wang Xizhi, the most revered calligrapher in Chinese history, and he was himself a model of the "free and unrestrained" style. In his best-known story, he woke one snowy night, opened the door, poured some wine and suddenly thought of his friend Dai Kui, who lived up the Shan River. He set off by boat at once and travelled all night, but at Dai's gate he turned around without going in. Asked why, he said: "I set out on the strength of a mood, and when the mood was spent I came back. Why should I need to see Dai?"
Another story about him is known as "both the man and his qin are gone". When his younger brother Wang Xianzhi died, Huizhi sat by the coffin and tried to play his brother's qin. The strings would not come into tune. He threw the instrument to the floor and broke down weeping (see The qin in Chinese idioms).
For such a man, asking a stranger to play and then not thanking him is entirely in character. He wanted the music, not a new friend, and Huan Yi understood that.
Why no words
"Host and guest did not exchange a single word" is the heart of the story. Neither thanks nor small talk. Later readers took it as a perfect example of the Wei and Jin spirit: the two men had already met in the music, and words would have been superfluous.
Compare Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi. When Bo Ya played, Zhong Ziqi at least said, "Lofty, like Mount Tai." Wang Huizhi and Huan Yi did without even that. One pair spoke and one did not, and both are remembered as true listeners.
There is one more layer. Huan Yi was "by then eminent and powerful", a provincial governor and a marquis. Wang Huizhi was a celebrated son of a great family, but held no such office. By etiquette Huan Yi was lowering himself, and he did not weigh it for a moment. What the Wei and Jin admired as fengdu (风度, "bearing" or "style") was exactly this: not insisting on one's due at the very moment one would be expected to.
From flute to qin
How did a flute piece become a qin piece? The Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, "Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425), compiled by the Ming prince Zhu Quan and the oldest surviving collection of qin music, includes Meihua Sannong (梅花三弄, "Three Variations on Plum Blossom"). Its preface to the piece says:
Huan Yi took out his flute and played the air of Plum Blossom in three variations. Later people made three variations of it on the qin.
The Shishuo Xinyu itself says only "three tunes" and never mentions plum blossom. When the title was attached is not recorded, but by the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644) it was fixed. How the flute piece became a qin piece over those thousand years, no one recorded.
The qin piece keeps the idea of three statements. The same theme in harmonics appears three times, each time on different strings and in a different register, like looking at the same plum tree from three angles. The harmonics, clear and bright and without vibrato, sound much like a flute, probably the piece's most direct tribute to its origin. Between the three harmonic passages come sections of stopped notes, dark and heavy, with wide vibrato, like wind and snow. The contest between the blossom and the storm is the drama of the piece.
How the three statements are played
In the qin version of Meihua Sannong, the three harmonic passages fall on different hui and strings. The hui are the thirteen inlaid position markers along the instrument. The first statement sits mostly around the 7th and 9th hui, in the middle register. The second moves higher and sounds clearer still. The third shifts to yet another place. The melody is the same each time, but on different strings and positions the texture changes slightly, since on the qin the same pitch has a different color on each string. Players describe it as "one tune, three colors".
To play a fan yin (泛音, harmonic), the left hand touches the string lightly at a hui without pressing it down, and lifts off at the moment the right hand plucks. A harmonic has no vibrato and cannot slide. Each note sounds once, cleanly, and is done. That is the quality of a flute, whose notes also come one at a time, unlike stopped notes, which can travel along the string. Later players probably chose harmonics for Huan Yi's tunes for this reason: they are the most flute-like sound the qin can make.
Plum blossom
In Chinese culture the plum blooms alone in the cold, at the end of winter, before any other flower. The eleventh-century statesman Wang Anshi wrote:
From far off I know they are not snow, because a faint fragrance drifts this way.
And the Southern Song poet Lu You:
Fallen, turned to mud, ground into dust, only the fragrance stays as it was.
To name a flute piece played on a riverbank Plum Blossom, and then to move it onto the qin, was an interpretation of Huan Yi made by later generations. There must have been something in those three tunes, they felt, that opened by itself in a cold place. A general, in front of a stranger, played three pieces and left. A plum tree, where no one was looking, blossomed three times and fell. Later listeners felt these were the same thing.
Today Meihua Sannong is the qin piece most often heard in concert, and a landmark piece for intermediate students. When you play its harmonics, think of that afternoon on the riverbank: a general sitting on a folding stool, playing three pieces, then climbing back into his carriage and driving away.
For the piece's difficulty level and technical points, see the guide to classic qin repertoire (in Chinese).