1. "Short Songs" is an old title of Han Yuefu, which belongs to "Xianghe Songci Pingdiao". This means that it was originally the name of a piece of music. The original ancient words have been lost. There are 24 songs of the same name collected in Yuefu, the first one is Cao Cao's. How to sing this kind of music is of course unknown now. However, in addition to Short Songs and Long Songs in Yuefu's Xianghe Ge Pingdiao Qu, Wu Jing of the Tang Dynasty quoted the ancient poem "Long Songs Are Intense" in his Yuefu Ancient Titles, Cao Pi of the Wei Wen Emperor's Yange Xing "Short Songs Can't Be Long Singed" and Fu Xuan of the Jin Dynasty's Yange Xing "Ya Lai Long Songs Continue Short Songs" and other sentences, believing that "Long Songs" and "Short Songs" refer to "Long Songs with Long Singing". Now we can only understand the music characteristics of Short Songs on the basis of this little material. The music "Short Song Line", of course, originally had a corresponding lyrics, that is, "Yuefu Ancient Ci", but the ancient lyrics have been lost. The earliest "Short Songs" that can be seen now is Cao Cao's "Short Songs" imitating Yuefu. The so-called "imitative Yuefu" is to use old Yuefu tunes to supplement new words. There are two short songs handed down by Cao Cao. Here is the first of them.
2. The theme of this short song is very clear, that is, the author is thirsty for talents and hopes that talents will come to rely on themselves. In his political activities, in order to expand his ruling base among the common landlords and fight against the reactionary hereditary forces, Cao Cao once strongly emphasized "talent oriented", for which he successively issued the "order to seek talents", "order to select talents", and "order to seek leisure and talent"; In fact, "Short Songs" is a "Song of Seeking Virtue", and because it uses the form of poetry and contains rich lyric elements, it can play a unique role in influencing, effectively publicizing his insistent ideas, and cooperating with the decrees issued by him.
