Guangling San
Guangling San (广陵散, also known as Guangling Zhixi 广陵止息) is among the most legendary large-form pieces in the Chinese guqin repertoire. Its narrative subject is generally believed to relate to the Han-dynasty tale of Nie Zheng’s assassination of the King of Han (聂政刺韩王), and its musical character — fierce, defiant, and at times openly violent — stands in striking contrast to the gentle, contemplative aesthetic that dominates most surviving qin music.
The piece owes much of its later mystique to the third-century scholar Ji Kang (嵇康, 223–262), who was said to have played Guangling San on the execution ground before his death and lamented, “Guangling San is now forever lost.” For more than a thousand years afterwards, the title carried the image of a vanished masterpiece.
The Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, 1425), compiled by Zhu Quan, recovered a complete forty-five-section version of the piece in its Taigu Shenpin volume. The compiler’s note remarks:
“Its mood is most unsettled. It bears the image of a subject overpowering his lord; played out, it fills the breast with anger, and one cannot bear to listen to its end.”
Historical Versions
The account of Ji Kang’s final performance is preserved in the Jin Shu · Biography of Ji Kang, but no tablature of his actual playing survives. The earliest extant version of Guangling San is the one transmitted in Shenqi Mipu. It is divided into six large structural blocks — Kaizhi (opening), Xiaoxu (small preface), Daxu (great preface), Zhengsheng (main voice), Luansheng (turbulent voice), and Houxu (postlude) — comprising forty-five sections in total. At roughly twenty-two minutes, it is one of the longest works in the traditional repertoire.
In the twentieth century, masters such as Guan Pinghu (管平湖) and Wu Jinglüe (吴景略) reconstructed performable editions from the Shenqi Mipu tablature, returning the piece to active circulation after centuries of silence. Guan’s reading from the 1950s remains the most widely consulted reference today.
Performance Notes
- Structure: opening — small preface (3 sections) — great preface (5) — main voice (18) — turbulent voice (10) — postlude (8); roughly twenty-two minutes in total.
- Idiomatic figures: heavy use of bola (拨剌, rapid two-string strike) and cuo (撮, simultaneous attack on two strings), evoking the imagery of armed conflict and impassioned outcry.
- Tuning: manshang (慢商) — the second string is lowered to unison with the first. This is one of the rarer non-standard tunings in the qin tradition.
- Interpretive challenge: the zhengsheng and luansheng sections demand sharp dynamic contrast and rhythmic drive without slipping into showmanship; the dramatic tension must remain disciplined.
About This Score
The version on this page is based on the Shenqi Mipu (1425) tablature, cross-checked with Guan Pinghu’s modern reconstruction. All fingerings are encoded in the Qixianpu (七弦谱) format and can be opened directly in the online editor for further editing, annotation with numerical (jianpu) notation, or export to PDF.
Further Reading
- Zhu Quan, Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, 1425) — the earliest surviving complete tablature of Guangling San, public domain
- Yang Lun, Boya Xinfa (伯牙心法, 1609) — preserves an alternate transmission line
- Guan Pinghu, Collected Guqin Pieces — modern performer’s reconstruction
出处文献
- 神奇秘谱（1425，朱权编"太古神品"卷）
- 风宣玄品（1539）
- 西麓堂琴统（1549）