Guqin, also known as the lyre, is also known as "Jiaowei" and "Luqi", and is one of the oldest plucked musical instruments in the world, with a history of more than 3,000 years. Since ancient times, the qin, chess, calligraphy and painting have been the concrete manifestations of the literacy of Chinese literati, among which the qin ranks first among the "four arts".
The Tang Dynasty poet Lu Tong said in the poem "Qin in the Wind": "Five tones, six rhythms and thirteen emblems, the dragon and the crane sound Si Kuxi." A flick of flowing water and a flick of the moon, the water and the moon wind give birth to pine branches. The guqin was called "qin" before the pre-Qin era, "Yaqin" during the Han and Wei dynasties, and "seven-stringed qin" after the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Later, the musical instruments appeared "Huqin", "Yueqin", "Yangqin", "Organ", etc., and people added the word "Gu" in front of the qin, which was called "Guqin". In 2003, Chinese guqin art was included in the second batch of the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
The history of the piano is millennium. In Chinese culture, the guqin is a living and spiritual instrument, and it is the essence of Chinese music. Compared with other musical instruments, the most distinctive feature of the guqin is its speaker, which is not made of multiple wooden planks glued together, but hollowed out of the whole piece of wood. Because the speaker wall of the guqin is thicker and the polishing is rougher, the timbre of the guqin is rich and long.
In terms of appearance, the guqin is 3 feet 6 inches and 5 minutes long, representing 365 days in a year. The surface of the piano is curved and represents the sky; The bottom of the piano is flat, symbolizing the ground, and there is a saying that "the sky is round and the place is round". There are 13 emblems on the surface of the guqin, representing the 12 months of the year and 1 leap month.
In addition, the surface of the piano is also inlaid with a hardwood that is used to hold the strings, called Yueshan. There are two sound grooves at the bottom of the piano, the big one is called the dragon pool, and the small one is called the phoenix swamp, which is called "there are mountains and rivers and dragons and phoenixes". The guqin originally had 5 strings, symbolizing metal, wood, water, fire, and earth; King Wen of Zhou, in order to mourn his dead son Bo Yi Kao, added a string; When King Wu was fighting, in order to increase morale, another string was added, so the guqin is also called "Wenwu Lyre".
There are many legends about who invented the guqin, such as Fuxi, Shennong, Yellow Emperor, Emperor Shun, and so on. Cai Yong, a famous scholar of the Han Dynasty, said in "Qin Exercises": "Fuxi made the qin. He said that Fu Xi saw the phoenix falling on the plane tree, so he made a piano out of paulownia wood in the shape of the phoenix.
The Book of Poetry records: "My Fair Lady, Qin Se Friend." In the "Historical Records" and "Records of Rites", it is said that Di Shun made the guqin ......These all indicate that the origin of the guqin is very early. In ancient times, Shun played the five-stringed piano and sang the poems of the southern country, thus governing the world. The ancients associated playing the qin with governing the country, which shows that the status of the guqin was very high at that time.
According to historical records, the guqin already existed in the Western Zhou Dynasty and became widely popular in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, but these qins are very different from modern guqins in terms of shape. The earliest existing physical guqin, is the Warring States guqin unearthed more than 2,400 years ago from the tomb of Marquis Yi in Hubei, compared with the later generations of the guqin, it is not perfect, but it also belongs to a more mature form of musical instrument.
In the Qin Dynasty, there was a special institution in charge of the court - Yuefu. In the Han Dynasty, Yuefu further developed, and the art of guqin also developed, and Shi Zhong and Sima Xiangru were very famous musicians at that time. According to legend, Sima Xiangru heard that Zhuo Wangsun had a daughter, who was beautiful, loved **, good at playing the drum and piano, and was brilliant in writing, and admired it very much.
Text notation and subtractive word notation.
In the process of inheriting the guqin for thousands of years, the guqin score has played an important role. Before the Sui and Tang dynasties, the teaching and dissemination of guqin music was carried out orally, and students followed the teacher, listening and learning at the same time. Once it leaves the teacher's oral tradition, it becomes a book from heaven, and many of the music will be deformed or even completely lost.
In order to facilitate learning and memorization, the people of the Han Dynasty began to record the fingering of the qin in writing, and then recorded the performance process of each fingering one by one, and also recorded the key name of the qin music, so that it became the qin score. At that time, it was called "Qin Narrative Score", which is what we call a written score today.
Although the text notation can record the playing method of the qin song, due to the lengthy narrative, two or three lines of text must be memorized at every turn, and a piano song has to spend a lot of space, which is very inconvenient to record and learn. Therefore, after the advent of the written notation, everyone felt the need to improve, and people tried in two directions: on the one hand, they tried to use simpler symbols to represent fingering; On the other hand, the text is simplified so as not to be too long, difficult to read, and affect learning. As a result, it was found that symbols could not replace words at all, and they still had to use text notation, and later, after hundreds of years of evolution, they slowly developed subtractive word notation.
At present, we can see about 150 kinds of ancient music scores, with a total of more than 3,000 pieces. Among them, such as "Mountains and Flowing Water", "Questions and Answers on Fishermen", "Plum Blossom Three Alleys" and other ancient literati's arias for nature and life have long become classics.
The publication and distribution of guqin scores directly promoted the exchange and popularization of guqin repertoire. At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the guqin ushered in a period of development and prosperity, and various genres bloomed. Due to regional cultural differences, as well as different conditions for teachers and genealogy, guqin genres have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and the art of guqin has presented a vibrant scene.
The ancients regarded the qin as a sacred object, and often used it as a medium to cultivate themselves and integrate with all things in heaven and earth. The subtlety of Chinese guqin art is to connect the art with the realm of life, singing and sighing, twists and turns, so that people can wander in a more pure and elegant spiritual world with the sound of the first, and arouse the resonance of deep thoughts.