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Music
Soundscapes of Memory: ethnomusicology in ChinaPosted by Peter Micic on Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at 5:17 PM
 Xiao Mei and Ji'erhuleng, a "long-tune" or changdiao singer, Sunite Left Banner Region, 1996. Musicologist Xiao Mei is one of the funniest and most fiercely intelligent people I know. When she goes on fieldwork trips across China she describes her experience as something "akin to a baptism" as if she is initiated or purified by what is about to unfold. She is inspired by a number of theoretical models, but her writings "in the field" are all about the human dimensions, the human interactions. Echoes in the Field: Notes on Musical Anthropology (Tianyede huisheng—Yinyue renleixue biji) published in 2001, reads like a musical travelogue. She tells her then six year-old daughter that she has a dream to travel across China to document musical performances. Her daughter tells her that she also has a dream to travel the world when she grows up. Xiao traverses back and forth from her fieldworks to Beijing and Shanghai comparing herself to an astronaut returning home to planet earth. She returns to her home in Beijing, but has yet to regain her sense of gravity. The first thing she does is to head straight to Haagen Dazs. It's the ice cream that grounds her. Xiao has been on many journeys over the past twenty years—she has trekked across many regions of China to document music performances, worked with UNESCO on "endangered" living musical traditions, collaborated with Dietrich Schüller, Director of the Phonogrammarchiv at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on sound and video recordings in China, and gathered a large international circle of friends including the American-based musicologist Bell Yung, the distinguished author and scholar of Indonesian music, Margaret Kartomi, and the American composer Eli Marshall. Chinese music scholars have collected and compiled the nation's living music traditions for over a century. This is not to say that Chinese historiography did not document music, but the official dynastic histories contain virtually nothing on the living music traditions of the day, recording instead the musical styles and practices of bygone dynasties—specifically yayue (lit: "refined, elegant music")—court music that had to be strictly maintained and preserved in accordance with time-honoured musical practices. The early twentieth century changed all that. Chinese intellectuals began the task of compiling histories of Chinese music that included the music of ordinary people. In time, musical performances, the voices of elders and the custodians of music traditions were recorded. These traditions were not necessarily found in notated scores, but invariably transmitted over time through a process of oral transmission. Yang Yinliu (1899-1984) considered by many to be the doyen of ethnomusicology in China, and his cousin Cao Anhe (1905-2004) worked together on some of the most important fieldwork recording projects from the late 1940s onwards. Moon Reflected in the Second Spring (Erquan yingyue), one of the most popular of all Chinese tunes, recorded by Yang and Cao on a Webster Chicago wire recorder in the summer of 1950, was performed by Hua Yanjun (A'bing) several months before he died. Other recordings supervised by Yang included the twelve muqam—large-scale suites consisting of sung poetry, dances tunes and instrumental sections—in 1951, and wind and percussion music in Wuxi in 1962. These recordings, as many others became part of the Chinese Traditional Music Sound Archive at the Music Research Institute in Beijing. It is not only the Chinese who have conducted fieldwork and documented musical performances. Stephen Jones—long smitten by the rustic soundscapes of northern China—has done extensive fieldwork on the music associations in Nangaoluo village in Hebei province. He has collaborated with Xiao Mei and other Chinese musicologists that spans some twenty years. Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (2004) has given Nangaoluo a past that otherwise would have been lost to English-speaking audiences. These stories celebrate village life and the music rituals that give meaning to that life. These stories also celebrate elemental things, the rhythms of the working day, the labour of the fields, the lighting of the cooking fire, and the preparation and eating of food. The writing of such stories is also a biography of Jones himself, his encounters and interactions with local villagers. "If England had colonized Hebei province instead of Hong Kong," Jones has jokingly commented, "I'd be its governor. Music that accompanies funerals, ritual festivals and temple rites would be performed in my residence every morning..."* The young American composer Eli Marshall is another musical explorer who has done fieldwork recordings in China's southwest. He's blown away by all the musical treasures this country has to offer. "Fifty-six official ethnicities, each with their own internal differences, each a little sound universe and then there are the popular or 'modern' manifestations, and a rich history of Western classical music as old as America's.* In the summer of 2002, Marshall heard a peasant wind and percussion ensemble in Nangaoluo village which opened up a world of sonic colours. "It was a wall of sound hitting me in the chest, so many timbres in a cymbal, something we were not taught in orchestration class in the United States." Almost a century earlier, the American violinist, conductor and composer Henry Eichheim (1870-1942) was dazzled by a wind and percussion ensemble in Wuxi, Jiangsu province: "I can't imagine that with only eight people, music of such depth and richness can be created: I am an admirer of this music, but with no understanding."* Fieldwork is very personal. It gives us a deeper appreciation to understand music as an integral part of social and cultural life with a value that transcends aesthetics or entertainment. We also observe that music making is not a spectacle, but a ritual where participants explore and cultivate relationships. When Marshall was in the Yongning Basin in southwest China in the early autumn of 2004, he was reminded of how music can articulate some of our deepest values and impulses. "I talked to many older people who in their youth had sung as part of their daily life. They were in touch with something special, something genuine, where every sound and nuance had a real meaning in their lives."*  Yi instrumentalist at a Yi Cultural Tourism Fair, Meigu county, Da Liangshan, August 2005. (photo: Olivia Kraef) Olivia Kraef, who has done fieldwork research on the Yi people in Liangshan since 2004, recalls that it was the singing that drew her in, but she says it could have easily been the people she interacted with first, then the singing. "I went from listener to participant observer, to performer and back again. I've lived with them: the mountains that generate the songs, the drinking, sharing and the emotions transformed again back into these songs. For me, Nuosu songs are so real; they are a living testimony to the spirit of a great people."*  Wallace wth mourners at a village funeral, Shanxi province, September 2005. One of the most exciting stages for me in fieldwork is to just observe the sonic gestures, the latent musical possibilities of what might happen. In the summer of 2005, I accompanied a music discovery tour group from the US who included the composer Stuart Wallace and the writer Amy Tan to Guizhou (Wallace has collaborated with Tan to write an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter's Daughter). We were in the heartland of a northern Dong (Kam) village. It was a hot muggy late afternoon, the humid air laden with the smell of ox dung. A group of us were walking along a narrow path and commenting that a "mosquito happy hour" would soon eat us all. An old woman carrying a bundle of firewood stopped and began to sing. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was trying to filter emotions, hidden narratives of this old lady's past. Raw emotion from any singer always hides the technical effort, the discipline and training of the voice. It was a direct display of natural reflexes, but it was obvious that this old lady had been singing for most of her life. Her nuances of her voice spoke of the land, the mountains and rivers. I was here and now in the present, but her voice took me back to some distant past, long ago and far away. Note 1: Quoted in Yang Yinliu. "A Bewildered Western Musician." Chinese Music 7(1), 1984:4 |
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Comments on Soundscapes of Memory: ethnomusicology in China
Fantastic post, thank you. It's been one of the great pleasures of my time in China to experience some astoundingly good music in a variety of settings. One that still stands out is being sent off back down the mountain by a chorus of Yi villagers some years back (just north of Liangshan).
Great post. I wonder if the early ethnomusicologists were another branch of the "folklore" movement in the first decades of the 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, scholars such as historian Gu Jiegang 1893-1980(a student of Hu Shi's) traveled the country recording old stories and comparing variations in similar stories told in different parts of China. Gu saw China as a pluralistic, multi-ethnic country and was in hard debate throughout his career with Pan-Hanists in the KMT such as Dai Jitao. His ethnographic studies were part of his attempt to capture the pluralism and diveristy of China rather than trying to shoe-horn all under Heaven into a narrowly defined and state-prescribed notion of "Han Civilization."
Anyway, thanks for sharing this wonderful essay.
On the subject of the collection of folk music inside the PRC, and specifically the 12 Muqam, I recommend this article by James A. Millward. This issues it raises are particularly relevant to understanding the practice of ethnomusicology, anthropology and history in the PRC - issues which the article by Peter Micic above completely glosses over.
In the Millward article, Yang Yinliu is referred to as "an orchestra director from Nanjing", rather than by name - or as an ethnomusicologist - which I infer to be a caveat from Millward that we should maintain a critical vigilance regarding both Yang's methodology and bias.
Some excerpts:
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"In the mid-twentieth century, the muqam in Xinjiang consisted of a flexible tradition with many individual and regional styles (such as those of Kashgar, Ili, Dolan, and Qumul), passed on aurally from masters to disciples....
In the 1950s an orchestra director from Nanjing, together with scholars in the Muqam Research Group, were charged with collecting and organizing the suites, which in fact were extant as an unsystematic living tradition with more than twelve suite names overall, and with no one performer’s or regional tradition’s repertoire including exactly twelve complete suites. The collection and editing project thus focused on “reconstructing” an imagined former system of twelve and only twelve complete muqam suites, each consisting of about thirty songs and instrumentals....
his and subsequent editions (also based solely on the repertoire of Turdi Akhun) have become the foundation of most pedagogy and professional performance of the muqams in Xinjiang, while other variant traditions from Tarim Basin cities are dismissively treated as “local” or “individual.”...
Despite the success of this program of ethnic cultural codification and representation, the Uyghur muqam still presents certain problems for PRC nationalist ideology, problems that arise from its Silk Road history. Muqam (variously spelled maqâm, mugham, and so forth) as both suite form and music theory belongs to a Arabo-Irano-Turkic tradition that spans Central Asia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Arab countries (Chabrier 1960). Of the twelve names applied to the twelve standardized suites in Xinjiang today (Rak, Chebbiyat, Mushavrek, Chargah, Penjigah, Özhal, Ejem, Ushshaq, Bayat, Nava, Sigah, and Iraq), all but two are used elsewhere, and derive from Arabic and Persian, not Turkic language roots.... Even the notion of specifically twelve muqam (the number twelve having zodiacal significance) appears earliest in the thirteenth century Arabic writings of Safi al-Din (Light 1998: 30-31)....
Chinese musicologists have joined the effort to de-emphasize the obvious transnational nature of muqam and its association with Islam, while playing up evidence of local origin and development, as well as links to and mutual influences with Chinese music....
This version of muqam history thus attempts to isolate the “folk classical” musical tradition of the Uyghurs from Central Asia and Islam, even while glorifying it. Where the links across the Pamirs are too obvious to ignore, they are dealt with by assigning creative priority to the Uyghurs. Of course, one can easily find examples of similar ideological approaches throughout official Uyghur historiography from the PRC, and the history of linguistic and script reforms of Xinjiang’s Turkic languages is likewise one of consistent erection of orthographic barriers to communication among closely cognate languages and related peoples."
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In case that last bit sounds unreasonable, here's another very short excerpt from the beginning of the article:
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"By these building blocks I refer to the state identification of the Uyghur, Kazak, Kirghiz, Uzbek, Tatar, Tajik and other nationalities and instillation of these categories with political and cultural content, a process known to scholars of Soviet Central Asia as korenizatsiia (“root-ization” or “indigenization”). The korenizatsiia of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang peoples actually began before the PRC came to power. In the 1930s, warlord Sheng Shicai accepted Soviet military and economic assistance to quell rebellions and consolidate his hold on power, and in return fell into lockstep with many Stalinist policies. Stalin’s overriding concern in Central Asia was to undermine “Turk” and “Islamic” as general identities by subdividing them into smaller, mutually exclusive and competitive niches. Because the boundaries between these categories were in some cases more theoretical than real on the ground, cultural projects followed to collect, isolate, edit, canonize and promote the supposedly discrete language, dance, music and literature of each nationality (Roy 2000).... the PRC in turn adopted the same categorization scheme, with only minor modifications. After the Chinese Communist Party consolidated its control over Xinjiang, PRC “cultural workers” from party and government agencies at local, regional and national levels devoted themselves to codifying the cultural attributes and achievements of each minzu, or “nationality.”...
The French ethnomusicologist Sabine Trebinjac has shown that this process of “rewriting” Uyghur music brings it from Xinjiang localities through Beijing and back out to the localities again where the music is taught to the next generation of professional musicians in its revised, “modernized” and state-sanctioned form. While both the process and results of this project resemble those in the Soviet Union and there are clear borrowings from Soviet korenizatsiia practices, Trebinjac also argues that deep Chinese roots underlie the PRC efforts to put a state imprimatur on music of the minority nationalities."
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Everything is political. This isn't to attack the heartfelt, dedicated and inspiring efforts of Yang Yinliu, Xiao Mei or others - just to take into account some of the ramifications of their actions, intended or not.
Personal disclosure: my original intended major as an undergraduate was ethnomusicology, and my personal collection of recordings includes both the ABing sessions and the 12 Muqam, and I feel with certainty I have benefited from both.
Cheers
That's a long comment filled a lot wild guesses that don't make much sense. "Chinese musicologists have joined the effort to de-emphasize the obvious transnational nature of muqam and its association with Islam" I wonder how it can be done, given the lyrics refer to Allah again and again? By replacing Allah with Chairman Mao?
If you dare, you go to Xinjiang and tell the Uyghurs that in fact they didn't create the 12 muqam, which everybody knows here, and you will be hornored for telling the truth that PRC tries to hide.
You know, "funny", if you bothered to take the time to actually read the article, rather than merely the excerpts, you would have prevented yourself from posting jibberish in public.
In fact, Chinese historians - including Uighur ones - have claimed the providence of the muqam to be both indigenous and pre-Islamic - both of which are contentious claims, to say the least. Moreover, there is a push to purge Persian elements from Chaghatay (the Turkic language of the Muqam, which is quite different from Uighur as it is spoken today), to make it more authentically Uighur. If you can't recognize this as an entirely politicized and historically revisionist undertaking, well, congratulations. A position in PRC academia awaits.
Cheers
Regarding public displays of gibberish, I shouldn't have posted on my way out of the office, as I seem to have made my own little contribution.
First, "providence" above should read provenance. I'm not claiming that PRC historians are taking a position regarding anything divine vis a vis the muqam, and neither is Millward, afaik.
Second, since it probably isn't apparent how someone would go about purging elements from a dead language, I should have clarified that this is a drive to revise the 'official' text of the muqam - really, this should be 'further revise', as its codification already derogates many variants, as mentioned above.
In any event, I recommend that readers refer to Millward's article directly, instead of my lexical errors.
Cheers
Indeed, there are many debates over and rethinkings on the relationship between Pan-Hanist and Minorities in recent PRC's scholarship circle of ethnomusicology.
According to Millward, scholars should maintain a critical vigilance regarding both Yang's methodology and bias. I would say, actually, many scholars outside PRC also convey a bias through their comments here on the posts.For example: What the foundation saying that Yang was an orchestra director from Nanjing in 1950s? I think so far, these above arguments are kind of over-simplification on scholarship of ethnomusicology in PRC, therefore there is necessary to probe deep inside into what and how they had done in their given time.
Sorry for the late response. I was out of town.
Regarding your first question, the assumption that the phrase "an orchestra director from Nanjing" refers to Yang is mine. I take it as a reference to his working method with both Turdi Akhun and ABing, among others. That is to say, it references his methodology rather than his biography, as the former exposes biases in his approach to musical documentation which the latter cannot. I infer Yang's many official titles to have been consciously omitted for precisely this reason. Again, this is just me reading between the lines. That said, I hope we can agree that appointing someone as the head of an official body, or the granting of one or more titles do not grant the recipient any particular expertise per se.
Regarding your last assertion, I would find it more convincing if you could provide some evidence demonstrating how professor Millward's article oversimplifies "scholarship of ethnomusicology in PRC [sic]". Otherwise, readers might understandably interpret it as nothing more than a weak dodge.
In reference to the practices of PRC academics, you close your comment with the assertion that it "is necessary to probe deep inside into what and how they had done in their given time". I couldn't agree more, and suggest that this is precisely what investigations by Millward and others intend to do. Here's a comment about Yang's magnum opus, 'The History of Ancient Chinese Music', taken from the Japanese publication Glocal Tenri, Volume 7, Number 12:
" The bible in the study of Chinese musical history is Yang Yinliu's The History of Ancient Chinese Music (published by Renmin Yinyue Chuban in 1981), which covers the history of music from ancient times through the Ming and Qing periods. This study covers a wide range of fields, from history of the philosophy of music, musical archaeology, study of rhythm, history of musical institutions, popular music, literati music, ritual music, and religious music; moreover, in the manner that all of these form a unity to create a musical culture for each period, the study takes a global perspective. However, we still wait the making of a new overall history of music that takes into consideration the recent accumulated discoveries in musical archeology as well as modern and contemporary musical history and interaction with minority musical culture and foreign music, which Yang had not included in his seminal study."
The omissions mentioned above are telling, and suggest an attempt to model a Chinese musical history and culture independent of foreign and minority influences - certainly a politically charged undertaking.
Finally, this page from a website dedicated to ABing might help provide some background on the socio-political context of Yang's endeavors. Here's an excerpt:
"Yang Yinliu published his materials on Abing just a few years into the People's Republic of China, led by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP put much emphasis on cultural matters in establishing their new state. Further, in his important cultural address in Yan'an in 1942, Chairman Mao had espoused the Marxist theory that claimed each cultural artefact was imbued with the class consciousness of its creator. In other words, had Abing been an aristocrat, his music would contain upper-class values; if Abing had remained a Daoist, his later music would reflect the world view of this social group; and had Abing been a beggar (classed within the category "social parasite") then his music would certainly have been parasitic in nature. Worse still, as it were, the CCP cultural authorities reasoned that music not only reflected its originator's class background but also that it projected this social content in a manner that might influence a listener's perceptions. According to this theory, whenever the unsuspecting prole is subjected to ideologically unsound music he (or she) is seduced into adopting an unhealthy value system.
Although they didn't agree that often, the Communist ideologists were unanimous in stating that this would be a very bad thing indeed. Thus it was that Comrade Yang, in order to get Abing's material published (and, indeed, to avoid getting himself arrested for pushing musical pornography [that should bring a few more browsers to this site] onto the unsuspecting masses) had to conduct some rather nifty footwork."
Finally, in reference to your comment that "actually, many scholars outside PRC also convey a bias through their comments here on the posts," I would like to mention that I personally have no animus toward PRC academia as an institution, in spite of the widespread plagirism, fabricated results and bogus diplomas which currently characterize how it is practiced, not to mention its historical and continuing tendency to subordinate research to political ideologies. In fact, I quite admire the work of certain PRC researchers, particularly given this context, and Yang Yinliu is one of them. Certainly, it behooves us to reconsider his foundational and voluminous contributions to Chinese musicology in light of the social and political currents of his time. If you're not satisfied with how foreign scholars are attempting to do exactly that, perhaps you could help to identify where their analyses fall short. Simply asserting that a deeper understanding is needed before any such analysis can be more than "superficial" does nothing to further such discussion - which makes sense, since such an assertion is nothing other than an obvious attempt to do exactly the opposite.
Or, what the heck - let's just say something like '70% good, 30% bad' and close the discussion. Keep moving folks - nothing to see here. I feel so much better.
Cheers
ci song de la francis Poutlet :( !!! ):