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Tune Patterns 33 How such a complicated form came into existence has been the subject for a great deal of study by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars. Most helpful for Westerners is Glen Baxter's ‘Metricalorigins of the tz'u'.2 Professor Baxter points out that although poems of unequal line length are to be found all through Chinese history,3 the form that came to be known 品 tz'u had its ‘taproots' in the T'ang dynasty. During the T'ang the most popular form of verse-making was 缸，弱的 (regulated verse), that is to say, verse which adhered to strict rules regarding line length, tonal pattern, and rhyme. Of special interest in this form were the chüeh-chü (short-stop verse), which were quatrains written in either five- or seven-word lines. These were all intended to be sung. However, in spite of the care taken to match words and music, extra notes did occur and had to be compensated for by some interpolated word on the part of the singer. This was particular1y true of the non-Chinese music which was so popular in the Sui and T'ang dynasties. The music appealed to performers and audience alike but the words were unintelligible . Singers, therefore, applied Chinese lyrics to the tunes; but in order to do this, interpolations had to be used. These interpolations gradual1y changed from meaningless ‘ah's' or 'oh's' to actual words, thus giving rise to lines of unequal length, sti11 within the framework of an accepted chüeh-chü. These new songs came to be called ch'ang-tuan chü (long-short verse), and this has remained ever since an alternate name for tz'u. Sti11 another name for tz'u which shows again its re1ationship to shih is shih-yü (shih remnants). Tune Patterns In the ninth century as ch'ang-tuan chü became more common, they began to assume set patterns based on the tunes to which they were sung. These tune patterns are known as tiao. In the beginning the name of a tz'u tiao coincided with its subject matter. For example, a tz'u entit1ed 2 See Bishop, e孔 • Studies in Chinese literature, pp. 186-224. In Chinese, Hu Shih's 'Tz'u ti ch'i-yüan' (Origins of the tz切)， an appendix to his Tz切-hsüan， is frequent1y cited as a helpful introduction. So also is Hu Yün-yi's Sung tz'u yen-chiu (Study of Sung tz'u). More recent1y Jen Erh-pei has published two books on the hundreds of poems found on scrolls at Tun-huang at the beginning of the twentieth century. which shed much light on the existence of t 仿 z' 切 u in the T'ang dynasty: Tun ηZ"品uα 仰 ηg 34 The Tz'u as a Poetic Form ‘Yi Chiang-nan' (Thinking of Chiang-nan) by PO Chü-yi (772-846) really described the poet's recollections of the area south of the Yangtze. PO Chü-yi's friend, Liu Yü-hsi (772-842), liked the song and, using the same pattern,wrote a tz'u of his own with the same title. His subject, however, was no longer Southern China but the then capital, Loyang. He added the subtitle,‘A spring tz'u after Lo-t'ien [PO Ch垃-yi] to the tune of “Yi Chiang-nan".' Other poets were soon doing the same thing with different tz'u patterns. As time went on the number of patterns grew either as a result of the original compositions made by poets and musicians or the variations made by them in existing patterns, resulting in the creation of essentially new patterns. Each tz'u p前tern had a name, but very quickly the subject matter of the poems began to diverge widely from the tit1es. Thus, awkward as it is in English to use the phrase,‘a tz'u to the tune of such-and-such a pattern', some such phrase must be used if we are to convey an accurate picture of the tz'u. To say simply 'P'u sa man' or ‘Huan ch'i sha' is misleading since these are names of the standard tune patterns to which the poems were sung and not of the poems themselves. It is not, however, important to translate these names into English any more than we would translate a Chinese surname or place name. ln the Sung dynasty, in order to give some clue to the subject...

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