Remembering an Old Friend
Yi Guren (忆故人, also titled Shanzhong Si Guren 山中思故人, “Thinking of an Old Friend in the Mountains”) has long carried a traditional attribution to the Eastern Han scholar Cai Yong (蔡邕), but no qin tablature collection of the imperial period preserves a piece by that title. The version known today was instead transmitted in the early twentieth century by the Sichuan-school master Peng Zhiqing (彭祉卿, 1891–1944) and first published in 1937 in Jinyu Qinkan (今虞琴刊), the foundational journal of modern qin scholarship co-edited by Zha Fuxi, Peng himself, and Zhang Ziqian.
The musical argument is simple and direct: distance separates two friends, and the longing cannot be sent. The melody is unusually lyrical and openly affectionate — among the most emotionally communicative works in the modern qin repertoire.
Historical Versions
Peng Zhiqing came from a Sichuan-school household and studied with his father Peng Qingshou. According to his own account, Yi Guren was a family transmission whose earlier history could no longer be reconstructed in detail; for this reason scholars today identify the piece as “transmitted by Peng Zhiqing” rather than pressing the Cai Yong attribution.
The first published edition appeared in the inaugural issue of Jinyu Qinkan in 1937, with Peng dictating and Zhang Ziqian transcribing the tablature. From the 1950s onward, recordings by Wu Jinglüe and Zhang Ziqian carried the piece into wide circulation, and it has since become one of the most frequently performed works of the modern repertoire.
Performance Notes
- Structure: six sections in standard layout; seven to eight minutes in performance.
- Idiomatic figures: the texture is dominated by stopped tones and sliding figures; the long left-hand yin and nao give the melody a strongly vocal, song-like quality.
- Tuning: F-key standard tuning (仲吕均 zhonglü).
- Interpretive challenge: the difficulty is restraint. The fingerings are not technically demanding, but the line is easy to overplay into sentimentality. The weight of the left-hand ornamentation determines whether the piece preserves its proper register — si er bu shang (思而不伤), longing without sorrow.
About This Score
The version on this page is based on the Peng Zhiqing transmission as published in Jinyu Qinkan (今虞琴刊, 1937). 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
- Zha Fuxi, Peng Zhiqing, Zhang Ziqian (eds.), Jinyu Qinkan (今虞琴刊, 1937) — foundational journal of modern qin studies; the first publication of Yi Guren
- Zhang Ziqian, Cao Man Suoji (操缦琐记) — recollections including Peng Zhiqing’s transmission of the piece
- Collected Guqin Pieces (Renmin Yinyue Press) — modern reconstruction with parallel jianpu notation
出处文献
- 今虞琴刊（1937）
- 古琴曲集（人民音乐出版社）