Tang-era piece: Xixi Yan
《惜惜塩》
compiled by David Badagnani (rev. 20 April 2024)
In an effort to make this information more accessible, this document contains resources related to the Tang-era piece entitled Xixi Yan《惜惜塩》, which exists in the form of an instrumental part for a single-movement piece in several sections, in the Dorian mode on E, called Ping diao (平調) in Chinese and Hyōjō in Japanese.
Although it has been proposed that this piece's title translates as "Song of Regret," recent scholarship by the musicologist Zhang Jianhua (张建华) indicates that Xixi Yan (pronounced "Siek-siek Yiem" in Middle Chinese) may derive from a Turkic-language title meaning "Song of the Flowers," čeček or çiçek meaning "flower" and yïr or yır meaning "song" in Turkic languages.
In the Sino-Japanese tradition, this piece is called Seki Seki En『惜惜塩（せきせきえん）』, spelled with an iteration mark in the original manuscript: 『惜〻塩（せきせきえん）』, and it appears in the following score collections:
1) Gogen Fu『五絃譜』or Gogen Kinfu『五絃琴譜』, the manuscript itself simply bearing the title《五絃》(Gogen); individual pieces in the collection bear the dates 773 and 842 and the music is believed to be of Tang Chinese origin, though the manuscript was probably copied in Japan in the 11th century during the mid-Heian period.
2) Kagaku ifu『歌楽維譜』, a miscellaneous collection of flute and lute notation and various other textual sources about music, compiled in Japan in the 13th-century, during the Kamakura period; the collection contains flute notation for three movements of Xixi Yan
The list of "Tang music" pieces prepared by the Japanese flute player Heguri no Hideshige (平群秀茂) that appears in his Sango Hishō『三五秘抄』(928) lists Xixi Yan as a po (破, "broaching") movement in Xing diao (性調; Japanese: Sei-chō).
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Videos and recordings of Xixi Yan
● Multitrack recording of Xixi Yan, performed by Bilibili user Beilin Zhai Zhuren (北林斋主人), bili, heng di, and percussion (China, 2021)
● Electronic realization of Xixi Yan (5-string pipa only) by YouTube user 古樂尋蹤_HGofACH (Canada, 2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8b2xsnmg1s
● Electronic realization of Xixi Yan (transverse flute only) by YouTube user 古樂尋蹤_HGofACH (Canada, 2021)
● Electronic realization of Xixi Yan (ensemble) by YouTube user 古樂尋蹤_HGofACH (Canada, 2021)
● Electronic realization of Xixi Yan (ensemble) by YouTube user 古樂尋蹤_HGofACH (Canada, 2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3wfM2BBSFI
● Electronic realization of Xixi Yan (Gogen Fu version) by YouTube user 古樂尋蹤_HGofACH (Canada, 2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuymE8aJfA
● Small-ensemble performance (with dance) of Xixi Yan (Gogen Fu version), performed by the Haus of Imperial Music (上元燕楽舍) (Taiwan, 2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjcCYToxds4
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Bibliography
● Nelson, Steven G. スティーヴン・G・ネルソン. "Gogen-fu shinkō: Omo ni gogen-biwa no jūsei oyobi chōgen ni tsuite"「五絃譜新考一主に五絃琵琶の柱制及び調絃について一」 [The Gogen-fu, a Japanese Heian-Period Tablature Score for Five-Stringed Lute: Concentrating on the Fret System and Tunings of the Instrument]. Tōyō ongaku kenkyū 『東洋音楽研究』[Journal of the Society for Research in Asiatic Music], vol. 50 (1986): pp. 13-76. [Contains a detailed English summary of sections 4 through 9.]
● Wolpert, R. F. "A Ninth-Century Score for Five-Stringed Lute." Musica Asiatica, vol. 3 (1981), pp. 107-135.
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Thanks to Steven G. Nelson and Keith Wong for assistance with this page.
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