Chapter Ten

e Song Lyric in the Twelfth and irteenth Centuries

Introduction

e period of formal innovation in the genre had largely ended by the beginning of Emperor Huizong’s 徽宗 reign in 1100. Writers had adopted the extended man form, and some continued Zhang Xian’s and ’s practice of adding headnotes to their ci and treating the genre as one more form of occasional composition. By 1100, composing song lyrics had become part of elite cultural life, and most of the important writers of shi poetry in the late Northern Song and throughout the Southern Song also were accomplished composers of ci. For the period after 1100, histories of ci focus primarily on those authors who sought to preserve the distinctiveness of the song lyric as a specifically musical genre. Five of the six authors featured in this chapter had a specialist’s mastery of music, and most wrote their own tunes. Even among these authors, however, ci came to play a broader role as a versatile occasional genre applicable to a wide range of events in elite life. is breadth of occasion and content is especially true of the sixth writer——who is mostly known as a patriotic poet but who in fact experimented in many ways with expanding the range of the form. e time period covered in this chapter extends from Huizong’s ascension to the throne in 1100 through the fall of the Northern Song in 1126 to the end of the Southern Song in 1280. In contrast to the significance of the An Lushan Rebellion for Du and the Mid- and Late Tang poets, however, the particular details behind the fall of the north to the Jurchens and indeed behind most of the political and social history of the successor Southern are largely incidental to the writings of the six authors we shall examine. and Xin Qiji were deeply affected by the loss of the north on a personal level, but the Song dynasty’s failure was not a cultural catastrophe that demanded the sort of reflection and questioningoccasioned by the crisis after the collapse of Xuanzong’s reign in the Tang. In a similar manner, , Wu Wenying, and Zhang Yan all were affected by the social and political developments of their day, but these larger trends had little direct impact on their ci compositions. us this chapter looks less at the intersection of historical circumstances and the development of ci as a genre and focuses instead on the actual practice of ci composition by the major Song dynasty writers in the form.

The Song Lyric in the 12th and 13th Centuries 401

Zhou Bangyan 周邦彥 (1056–1121)

Later writers in the ci tradition considered the great synthesizer of the genre. Like Liu Yong, he was deeply versed in musical technique and was a master of the long man form, but he brought a more refined command of language and phrasing to his lyrics. Zhou was from an elite clan from Qiantang, the region around , a center of ci composition. His uncle Zhou Bin 周邠 (jinshi 1063) was a friend of Su Shi’s. Zhou Bangyan had a rather successful official career. During the period when ’s reform regime stressed the route of entering government service via the Imperial University (Taixue 太學), Zhou became an “outer hall” student there and attracted the emperor’s attention by writing an obscurely learned, monumental fu on the imperial capital.1 He received a minor initial appointment but worked his way up to county magistrate, prefect, and finally director of the . Perhaps because of Zhou’s reputation as a writer of ci, Zhang Yan 張炎 (1248–1320), the late Southern Song writer and critic of ci, reported that Zhou was also briefly appointed to the Imperial Music Bureau (Dashengfu 大晟府) when Emperor Huizong created it in 1103 in order to correct the musical tunings and provide court music. While this post became part of Zhou’s biography in late imperial times, modern scholars suggest it was a creative reading on Zhang Yan’s part. Such loosely substantiated details may have gained credence because, although Zhou Bangyan compiled a literary collection that survived until the early Southern Song, it then disappeared. His only surviving writings are his song lyrics, and stories inevitably accumulated around them, connecting them to putative events and relationships in his life. Zhou Bangyan was a careful stylist who worked lines from earlier poetry into his lyrics and tended to be reticent rather than explicit in writing emotionally charged scenes. e topical range of his extant lyrics return to the world of Zhang Xian and Liu Yong rather than Su Shi: the joys of the pleasure quarters and the sorrows of travel. He was sufficiently musically accomplished as to write his own tunes, which became popular during his lifetime, and later writers of ci treated him as a model throughout late imperial times.

1. ere were two thousand students in the “outer hall,” three hundred in the “inner hall,” and one hundred in the “upper hall.”