Song Lyrics of the Tang, the Five Dynasties, and the Northern Song

CHAPTER TWELVE

SONG LYRICS OF THE TANG, THE FIVE DYNASTIES, AND THE NORTHERN SONG

At the same time when poetry flourished in the Tang dynasty, the song lyric (ci) was also gradually taking shape as a subgenre of poetry in the wide sense of the word. In the course of its birth and development, the song lyric displayed distinctively different nature from traditional poetry, and the juxtaposition of poetry (shi) and the song lyric as different genres lodged itself into public consciousness. In later times, the poetry of the Tang, the song lyric of the Song, and the plays/arias of the Yuan came to be regarded as respectively representative of the highest literary achievement of each of these dynasties. From the Late Tang to the Five Dynasties and then to the North- ern Song, the development and change of literature followed different paths with the song lyric on the one hand, and with poetry and prose on the other. In the case of the song lyric, it followed a more obvi- ous trajectory in its train of succession. As regards poetry and prose, they made their own orbit on the basis of making accommodations to the emergence of the song lyric. In other words, poetry and prose of the orthern Song appeared to have differentiated themselves from the song lyric. Taking that into consideration, it may be more appro- priate to discuss the song lyric of the Tang and the Five Dynasties in the company of that of the Northern Song.

1. Song Lyrics of the Tang Dynasty

At first, the song lyric was only a kind of word text for a song. In that respect, it was by no means different from the poems sung with musical accompaniment in The Book of Songsand the Music Bureau col- lections of the Han-Wei period and the Six Dynasties. However, what served in its accompaniment in this case was a new type of music: the music of Yan, which emerged out of an integration of the “Music of Hu” (especially the music of Qiuzi) into the various types of folk music originally of the Han nationality which were primarily music in the 412 chapter twelve

Qingshang mode.1 Titles in the “Music of Yan” already existed during the Sui, and it flourished by the Tang dynasty. In discussing the music of Yan during the Tang in the section on “Songs of Recent Times” of A Collection of Music Bureau Poetry, Guo Maoqian of the Song remarked that “it flourished during the Kaiyuan and Tianbao reigns, and what were placed on record counted two hundred and twenty-two songs in fourteen modes.” The word text for this type of music, called “lyric for the song” at the time, was the prototype of the song lyric. In its format of usage, there was no strict requirements for the songs accompanied by the music of Yan of the Tang, many poems (especially heptasyllabic quatrains) written by the literati were directly used by singers in their performance. For possible examples of such a condition, the seventh section of the “Water Tune,” recorded in A Collection of Music Bureau Poetry, is actually Du Fu’s “Presented to Commander Hua,” and the “Water Tune” included in the Miscella- neous Records from the Xuanzong Reign is the last four lines of Li Jiao’s heptasyllabic poem in old style, “Song of Fenyin.” However, when a poem is put into a song, there may be incongruence, and in order to adapt it to the musical tune, some alterations have to be made, such as the breaking up of the lines or the use of repetition in chorus. Accord- ing to the speculation of Shen Gua, Zhu Xi, and others from the Song dynasty, in singing such poems, one also needed to insert sounds of “harmony” and “overtone” so that it will synchronize with the uneven musical meters. Later the song text was composed in closer coordina- tion with the music, wherein one had to divide the text into sections in compliance with the structure of the music score, to have lines based on musical phrases, and to adopt words in harmony with the pitch of the musical sounds. Gradually the song text developed into something where the lines, though of various lengths, still need to observe a set pattern. Such a condition was not known in the previous texts for the Music Bureau songs, and the basic format of the “song lyric” was thereupon established.

1 Hu was the name used for various ethnic groups living in the north and west borderland in ancient China, especially during the Han dynasty. Qiuzi was the name of a city-state in the northwestern borderland in ancient China, which is located in Kuqa, Xinjiang today. Qingshang was a brief general term for ancient folk music of the Han nationality, shang being the name of a note of the ancient Chinese five-tone scale corresponding to 2 in numbered musical notation.