Forgetting Schemes among the Gulls
Oulu Wangji (鸥鹭忘机) draws its title and conceit from a parable in the Liezi · Huang Di chapter:
“There was a man at the seaside who loved gulls. Each morning he went down to the sea and played among them; the gulls came and stayed by the hundred and would not leave. His father said: ‘I hear the gulls follow you everywhere — bring some back, I should like to play with them.’ The next day he went to the shore, but the gulls only circled overhead and did not come down.”
The lesson is the Daoist commonplace: when calculation arises, the world withdraws; without calculation, all things draw near. The music renders the scene as an open seascape in which person and bird have forgotten each other — a leading exemplar of the qingyi (清逸, “clear and untrammeled”) lineage of qin pieces.
Historical Versions
Oulu Wangji is first recorded in Zhu Quan’s Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, 1425) in its Xiawai Shenpin volume; the piece is traditionally attributed to the Southern Song Zhe-school master Liu Zhifang (刘志方), though some sources leave the composer unstated. From the late Ming onward it circulated widely and appears in Xiluotang Qintong (西麓堂琴统, 1549), Ziyuantang Qinpu (自远堂琴谱, 1802), Jiao’an Qinpu (蕉庵琴谱, 1868), and most major late-imperial collections.
The various transmissions are unusually consistent in section count and melodic shape; this is one of the more stable pieces in the late-imperial repertoire. Modern performances typically draw on the Ziyuantang Qinpu reading or on twentieth-century reconstructions by Xu Lisun (徐立孙) and Wu Jinglüe (吴景略).
Performance Notes
- Structure: six or eight sections in standard layout; six to eight minutes in performance.
- Idiomatic figures: alternation of san (open) and an (stopped) tones with a relaxed rhythmic profile; the closing section commonly resolves into harmonics, signalling the dissolution of self into the seascape.
- Tuning: F-key standard tuning (仲吕均 zhonglü).
- Interpretive challenge: the difficulty of this piece is its plainness. The fingerings are simple, but the breath of the line must remain unbroken across the full work, and the weight of the left-hand yin and nao determines whether the imagery actually appears.
About This Score
The version on this page is based on the Ziyuantang Qinpu (1802) reading, cross-checked with Shenqi Mipu (1425). 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 Oulu Wangji, public domain
- Wang Zhi, Xiluotang Qintong (西麓堂琴统, 1549) — a large Ming compilation preserving an alternate reading
- Wu Hong, Ziyuantang Qinpu (自远堂琴谱, 1802) — the standard Qing edition
出处文献
- 神奇秘谱（1425）
- 西麓堂琴统（1549）
- 自远堂琴谱（1802）