Drunken Ecstasy
Jiu Kuang (酒狂) is traditionally attributed to Ruan Ji (阮籍, 210–263), one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (竹林七贤). The piece adopts the posture of drunken abandon to figure the predicament of the Wei-Jin literati under the rising autocracy of the Sima clan: outwardly indulgent, inwardly resigned, taking refuge in wine and feigned madness in order to survive.
Zhu Quan’s Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, 1425) preserves the piece in its Taigu Shenpin volume, with the compiler’s note:
“Ruan Ji lamented that the Way could not be put into practice and that he was at odds with his age; so he set worldly concerns aside, beyond the body, and lodged his interest in drink, finding there the joy that should attend a life’s purpose.”
The remark captures the title’s double meaning: on the surface a study of intoxication, beneath it a study of political defeat.
Historical Versions
The Shenqi Mipu preserves the original tablature, but because the early tablature does not specify metre, Jiu Kuang was long classified as a “silent score” (哑谱) and fell out of the active repertoire for centuries. In 1957, the qin scholar Yao Bingyan (姚丙炎) reconstructed the piece from the Shenqi Mipu tablature, organizing it in triple metre and producing a fluent, performable modern reading. Yao’s reconstruction has since become the universally adopted version and stands as one of the most successful dapu (打谱) projects of twentieth-century qin scholarship.
Yao’s reading divides the piece into four sections plus a coda titled Xianren Tu Jiu Sheng (仙人吐酒声, “the immortal spitting wine”), running about three minutes — short by traditional standards, but exceptionally taut in dramatic energy.
Performance Notes
- Structure: four sections plus the Xianren Tu Jiu Sheng coda; about three minutes total.
- Rhythm: triple metre throughout, with the strong beat falling on the first pulse of each measure — an unusually explicit pulse-pattern within the traditional qin repertoire.
- Idiomatic figures: heavy left-hand use of zhuang (撞) and dou (逗) to suggest the stumble of drunken walking; exaggerated dynamic contrast in the right-hand gou and ti to convey the abandon of the protagonist.
- Tuning: F-key standard tuning (仲吕均 zhonglü).
- Interpretive challenge: the triple metre looks simple but is hard to play well — the pulse must remain stable while the surface conveys instability. Holding that double frame is the central difficulty.
About This Score
The version on this page is based on the Shenqi Mipu (1425) tablature, cross-checked with Yao Bingyan’s 1957 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 tablature of Jiu Kuang, public domain
- Wang Zhi, Xiluotang Qintong (西麓堂琴统, 1549) — an alternate Ming reading
- Yao Bingyan, Qinqu Gouchen (琴曲钩沉) — the modern reconstruction that established the triple-metre reading of Jiu Kuang
出处文献
- 神奇秘谱（1425）
- 西麓堂琴统（1549）