Chapter 58 Xu Shangying/Famous pianist with both civil and martial arts

Xu Shangying (approximately 1582-1662), a pianist in the Ming Dynasty.Do not sign Qingshan.People from Taicang. Xu Shangying has good martial arts and originally wanted to serve the country with this, but this road did not work out in the end.When he was young, he failed in the martial arts examination twice.Lu Fu, who was in charge of rites and music in the capital, came to the south of the Yangtze River. After listening to him playing the piano, he was very surprised. He thought he was far superior to the pianists in the capital, and asked him if he would like to go to the capital.Xu Shangying replied, I was born in martial arts, and I have good martial arts skills. Going to the capital is a good opportunity to serve the country.Because Li Zicheng invaded Beijing the following year, he still failed to make the trip.In the last year of Chongzhen (1644), he wanted to participate in the Anti-Qing Dynasty with his martial arts, but to no avail.

Xu Shangying is good at playing the piano. He first learned from Chen Xingyuan, the son of the famous Loudong pianist Chen Aitong, and later learned from Zhang Weichuan, Chen Aitong's disciple.Because of his humility and eagerness to learn, his piano skills improved rapidly.In order to continuously improve his piano skills, he also took Yan Cheng from Changshu as his teacher, absorbed many of Yan Cheng's strengths, and benefited a lot.Later, he and Chen Xingyuan, Yan Cheng, Zhao Yingliang, Chen Yudao, Yi Zhuangle and others formed the Qinchuan (Changshu) Qin Club, known as the "Yushan Qin School", most of whom were from Loudong.Xu Shangying often discusses the theory of piano with piano friends, discusses the skills of playing the piano, and pays attention to collecting and learning from others to learn from each other.After many years of practice and summarization, he compiled the book "Da Huan Ge Piano Score", which contains a total of 322 piano pieces, with detailed fingering and notation as a whole.It is advocated that both slow and fast music should be given equal importance, and should not be neglected. It is emphasized that the tone and rhythm must be prioritized, urgent but not chaotic, numerous but not complicated.Therefore, "Pheasant Flies", "Birds Cry at Night", "Luxiang Water Cloud" and other excellent songs that Yan Cheng despised due to their fast rhythm are included in this collection.This is another important qin score of the Yushan Qin School after Yan Cheng's "Songxianguan Qin Score".At the same time, on the basis of the four-character qin theory of "clear, subtle, light, and far" advocated by Yan Cheng, he took the advantages of other schools and created a unique style, and proposed "harmony, tranquility, clearness, distance, square, square, The 24-character gist of mutton, tranquility, ease, elegance, beauty, brightness, coming, cleanness, moistness, roundness, firmness, grandeur, thinness, smoothness, strength, lightness, heaviness, lateness, and speed" is explained systematically and in detail. He learned the key points of playing the piano, such as finger movement, strength, and sound picking, and the aesthetic principles of qin science, enriched and developed the Yushan qin style, and was regarded as the criterion by the Yushan Qin School, which had a considerable influence on the later development of qin theory.Moreover, he also corrected Yan Cheng's shortcoming of only seeking simplicity and no haste in his performance, and reached a high artistic level.

In his later years, Xu Shangying lived in seclusion in Qionglong Mountain, Suzhou, and changed his name to Tie, named Shifan.In addition to "Da Huan Ge Qin Pu", he also wrote "Xishan Qin Kuang", "Wanfeng Pavilion Fingering Notes" and so on.