While I always gravitate towards the ethnographic nitty-gritty of local fieldwork, it seems time for a succinct roundup for some general posts on society and soundscape—a theme pervading this blog, for China (see below), sundry world music traditions, and WAM alike (see world music category, under “general“).
Most authoritative and accessible are the works of Bruno Nettl—essential reading:
Among many fine chapters in the stimulating 1997 volume Shadows in the field: new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology, I recommend those by Nicole Beaudry (on fieldwork among the Inuit) and William Noll(on fieldwork in the Ukrainian past). For a wise discussion of fieldwork in contested sites for Tibetan culture, see
Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, “Easier in exile? Comparative observations on doing research among Tibetans in Lhasa and in Dharamsala” (see also Echoes of Dharamsala),
Here’s the deal: if we come to your party, you have to come to ours too:
Just as “music scholars” have learned to consider all kinds of social elements as they study performance, so scholars of ritual too must include in their brief all kinds of issues arising from soundscape, rather than coyly farming it out to musicologists.
As Adam Yuet Chau observes, this is related to the whole scholarly bias towards discursive, scriptural analysis. Indeed, within China studies more generally, expressive culture, and musicking as a vital aspect of social activity, still seem to be considered marginal themes, with research dominated by silent written texts and immobile visual culture. It’s as if sinologists only consider music as a legitimate part of culture when it’s dead and mute, imprisoned in a museum or text. The ethnomusicological mindset should offer us valuable perspectives on Chinese studies (cf. China’s hidden century).
What makes it even more hilarious is the utter deadpan focus of the performer. Like listening to the baroque horn (allegedly), our appreciation is heightened by imagining how very difficult it must be to play.
* On a personal note: I played the straight version of the hapless canon on a US tour with Peter Holman in the 1990s, most memorably at the Schenectady Fuchs Festival (yeah, I know). Our visit was enriched by a locally-renowned waitress who unerringly took complex orders, entirely without taking written notes, from parties of up to twenty seated around long tressle tables. That was the tour where Paul O’Dette told me the hemiola story (right at the end of this post)…
My vignettes from Gaoluo, taken from my book Plucking the winds, have featured both performing members of the village’s amateur ritual association (Cai Fuxiang, He Qing, Cai An) and supporters like the venerable Shan Zhihe. The name of Shan Fuyi has already cropped up in several posts, but he deserves a separate account.
Shan Fuyi (right) with my trusty colleague Xue Yibing, 1996.
Shan Fuyi (b.1940) is considered the village’s xiucai talented scholar. Amateur historian, painter and calligrapher, he is widely admired for his intelligence and artistic bent. He was given the task of writing the village history in 1965, and in between making donors’ lists for the opera troupe and the ritual association he did artwork for the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Troupe. Latterly he became a trusted employee of Boss Heng, the village’s own nouveau-riche entrepreneur.
We had heard so much about him, but since he was based at Boss Heng’s workplace near Laishui county-town, we never coincided in the village—he seemed elusive, and we even joked that maybe he was a figment of our imaginations.
Finally in 1996 we sought him out in his work-unit. He affably sat us down and, without any preamble, launched into a detailed account of the village from its founding through to the 1990s, instinctively understanding our brief without any need for the long justifications which we sometimes have to give cadres or even ordinary villagers. Indeed, later we did indeed meet up back in the village. Our hopes were well rewarded, and we had many edifying sessions with him, learning from his wide-ranging and impartial knowledge; his detachment in observing the vicissitudes of the village’s history was of rare value.
He is the main source of my account of the village’s early history (Plucking the winds, chs.1–3); indeed, his work gave us valuable perspectives on the history of the whole area, not least the terminology of village names and the she parish network.
Shan Fuyi is not a ritual specialist, and regards himself as a “thorough atheist”, but he takes a keen yet dispassionate interest in all aspects of human behaviour. He’s never been the leading type; unlike most Chinese, who are long accustomed to public speaking, he is petrified of such occasions; with my own stammer, this further endears him to me. He seems to float above the village, observing with detachment and perception. He understood our mission implicitly. He is at once down-to-earth and transcendent. Unassuming, introverted, yet humorous, he never bothered with the empty platitudes of Party-speak. Still, recalling his experiences in the Cultural Revolution and since, he reckons “I keep right up with the way things are going”, a charmingly ambiguous comment; perhaps his very detachment has enabled him to ride all the storms.
Shan Fuyi’s early years Born in 1940 to a virtually illiterate father, Shan Fuyi attended private school in Zhuozhou county just north for half a year during the civil war when he was 7 sui. With quiet humour, he recalls:
Our texts were The Hundred Family Surnames and The Three Character Classic; when the 8th Route Army passed through we recited “Long live Chairman Mao”; when Nationalist troops passed through we recited “Long live Chairman Jiang” [Chiang Kaishek]; having not offended either of them, when they had both left we could get back to reciting “Zhao, Qian, Sun, Li” [The Hundred Family Surnames] again!
His godfather was Sun Xiang, a spirit medium and folk healer. In 1949 he entered 2nd grade at the village primary school. He recalled the village’s last rain procession that summer. From 1955 he attended the No.1 Secondary School in Laishui county-town, graduating from the junior department early in 1958. He then passed an exam to study surveying at technical college in distant Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province to the west. In 1960 he began training at the Shanxi Machine Building Factory, but like many villagers, he was forced by the grave national economic hardships to return home to South Gaoluo in the autumn of 1961, cutting short a promising career. He now served as book-keeper for the brigade orchards.
Meanwhile the village ritual associations continued to adapt to the new regime. After the Great Leap Forward and the famine, the revival of the early 1960s (however short-lived) was significant for the transmission of traditional culture. Not only were the village’s ritual associations reinvigorated, with a substantial group of new recruits training, but the opera troupe also revamped their equipment (Plucking the winds, pp.143–5). Like the ritual associations, they too sought donations from all the village households, shown on Shan Fuyi’s donors’ list dated 2nd moon 1964. In 1996 the musicians took it out to show us:
Writing a village history In 1965 the Four Cleanups work-team ordered Shan Fuyi to compile a history of the village up to Liberation in 1948. This may seem like an unlikely task, but their purpose of this was frankly political: in order to “cleanse the class ranks”, they needed a definitive version of the village’s history (for more, see here).
In north China, apart from county gazetteers (from imperial, Republican, and reform eras), and in some counties one finds slim volumes of “material on cultural history” (wenshi ziliao); but with rural literacy low, this is the only history of an individual village that I have seen compiled by a local scholar.
As I observed here, in my work with the Li family Daoist in Shanxi I mainly talk with one extended family, seemingly detached from politics, and with hardly any contact with local leaders. Indeed, the experience of “freelance” household Daoists was different from that of peasants tied to the land, and they were always straining to gain some independence from the production teams. Though inevitably deeply affected by political vicissitudes, they had little investment in the public affairs of the village. In Gaoluo, by contrast, several sources helped me to put the village’s ritual and social culture in political context: many of the members of the association held positions of authority under all three periods of 20th-century history, so we naturally talked with the village leadership. With their detailed knowledge of the modern history of the village, several men were able to offer clear accounts of major events in the area and to connect them to the village’s ritual association. But some of our most detailed material came from our talks with Shan Fuyi.
Back in 1965 he conscientiously set about the task of compiling the history. Though the avowed focus would inevitably be the modern political background, he avidly sought evidence for the early history of the village, right back to its founding in the Yongle reign-period (1403–24) of the early Ming. Apart from documenting oral traditions, he consulted several steles: those of the North Baibao temple from the Ming-dynasty Jiaqing era (1522–66), the temple of North Gaoluo from the Qianlong reign (18th century), and the Wenpu si temple in South Gaoluo from the Daoguang era (1840s). All these steles were soon to be destroyed. Still, even by the 1990s considerable material evidence for the history of both North and South villages of Gaoluo survived, supplementing Shan Fuyi’s research.
The opening of Shan Fuyi’s village history.
After our first meeting with Shan Fuyi in 1996 we all sought the history everywhere in the village and in the county-town, but it didn’t surface. In 1998 he finally brought out a revised version of the history for me, with a mere twenty pages; as he told me, his 1965 version was rather more detailed but also couched in more revolutionary language, full of criticism of “bad elements”, while for his new version he used a more natural style. In a charming reversal of one’s preconceptions, he was apparently giving the foreigner a version from which Communist propaganda had been censored!
In fact our detailed conversations with Shan Fuyi were much more honest and complete than any official version could possibly be. Moreover, his written history went only as far as 1948, whereas our sessions together took the story on to the present. Indeed, he was a thoughtful source for the Maoist and reform eras too.
One topic on which I was able to find considerably more detail in sources from outside the village, unavailable to Shan Fuyi, was the 1900 massacre, which turned out to be a major episode in Boxer history (Plucking the winds, pp.37–42 and p.387 n.42). A team from Tianjin University even came to carry out interviews in 1974. Similarly, while elderly villagers still recalled the Italian missionaries before 1949, I managed to document them further through the Stimmatini archives in Verona.
Inevitably, the representation of events surrounding the complex struggle for Liberation was particularly sensitive and controversial. In 1965 Shan Fuyi was still able to interview most of the protagonists in the revolution, including long-serving Party Secretary Heng Futian—despite his recent demotion—and the traumatized Cai Fuxiang.
The brigade gave work-points to those taking part in the meetings—I had to note them down. We met sometimes at Cai Fuxiang’s house—the meetings were held anywhere convenient.
By no means all the meetings were group sessions:
To understand the situation with “negative characters” (those with particularly bad historical problems) we usually did one-to-one interviews—viewpoints could be so different, you couldn’t sort it out in group meetings.
The next stage was to seek corroboration:
After absorbing the statements we’d taken from people in the village, we needed to corroborate them with historical material, so we sent to the county-town for old police statements. We were very conscientious about seeking proper evidence. Whenever I needed any material, I wrote a note for the work-team, and they sent people to get it.
Cai Fumin, one of the large group of young men who had just begun learning the ritual music, was secretary of the village Youth Corps. He recalled,
The work-team wrote a letter of introduction, and me and Ding You went down the county police station to copy a load of statements, like He Jinhu and He Jinshui’s confessions (they’d been executed as counter-revolutionaries), about how they’d fled, how they’d organized the Return-to-the-district troupes and stuff.
The Cultural Revolution Shan Fuyi remained largely aloof from factional upheavals. He was known as a good writer and artist, and just as in 1964 he had made the donors’ list in traditional style for the opera troupe, now he inevitably got roped in by both factions to write the inscriptions for armbands and flags, and to paint cartoons of “class enemies”. “Large-character posters” were pasted up on the wall of the brigade just opposite maestro Cai An’s house, beside Shan Fuyi’s spirited cartoons showing Capitalist Roaders in dunce’s caps and ratlike figures carrying sedans. As he recalled:
I criticized Deng Xiaoping, criticized Confucius, criticized Liu Shaoqi, criticized the Gang of Four—I criticized everyone except Chairman Mao!
The activities of the village Red Guards were both farcically infantile and casually vicious. While factional strife was not as yet too serious, the Red Guards now singled out not only cadres but helpless individuals with bad class backgrounds.
One main target of the Red Guards’ mission to destroy the “Four Olds” was the demolition of the Catholic church. But they had to work harder to find other icons to smash. The statues in the old temples were so decrepit that no-one had cared much when the brigade finally got rid of them in the early 60s. As Shan Fuyi observed caustically,
The Red Guards were searching for more things to destroy, but there was nothing left, so they had to fight each other instead!
Meanwhile stalwarts of the ritual association scrambled to rescue what artefacts of the village’s tradition that they could, like the Houtu scroll.
Shan Fuyi helped out in the village’s Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Troupe, painting scenery and doing make-up. Still, petty rivalries persisted. Shan Fuyi recalled the troupe going to perform in nearby Fuwei village in 1967 or 1968. Just like a traditional association, they sent someone ahead to issue a red “paper of homage”; the host village then made preparations, setting up the opera stage and matting tent, and making arrangements for feeding the performers. When the day arrived, the hosts walked to the entrance of the village to receive the Gaoluo troupe:
The United faction managed to put the boot in that day. They spread a rumour that the opera troupe was only going to perform there so they could cadge a free meal. The performers had no choice but to display their revolutionary fervour by nobly declaring that they wouldn’t perform at all if the village insisted on feeding them; they had brought their own rations, and they would absolutely not eat other people’s food! It was late at night by the time the performance came to an end, but they stuck to their guns and went home with empty stomachs, honour intact.
For more on the Cultural Revolution in Gaoluo, see Plucking the winds, ch.6.
Shan Fuyi’s wedding Meanwhile, at the height of factional conflict, Shan Fuyi got married on the 29th of the 10th moon in 1966. The wedding was a sign of the subtle obstinacy of tradition. Though no great traditionalist himself (his historical erudition is quite dispassionate), as he recalled it for us thirty years later, it was the resistance to imposed modernity which he stressed—he didn’t mention the correct “revolutionary” part of the ceremony at all. They naturally wanted to invite the school percussion band (“gong-and-drum brigade”, luogudui) to give them a lively send-off.
Although these bands were widely used by work-units everywhere to “report joy”, at the time the use of such music for private celebration was considered feudal—indeed, loud percussion in China commonly serves an exorcistic function to “chase off ghosts”. So at the time the school band was not supposed to play for weddings: the revolutionary slogan went “new affairs must be conducted in a new way”. But they weren’t putting up with that: the evening before the wedding they still borrowed the instruments, and our friends suave Shan Ling and upright teacher Shan Rongqing got up a band to play on the edge of the village; on the big day they played in Shan Fuyi’s courtyard.
Incidentally, the blowers-and-drummers from Shiguzhuang just north (who had escorted Shan Zhihe‘s bride in 1937) had still kept active in the 1950s, but after the Cultural Revolution broke out they too were silenced; during wedding feasts some families now asked the blind Shan Jiuhong to sing a few stories instead.
The other area of conflict between tradition and revolution in Shan Fuyi’s wedding was the custom that the couple should ride horses. The chief of the Women’s Association had dutifully informed them that the bride must not observe this feudal custom; but again they got round the problem. They got hold of a couple of horses and rode the three or four hundred metres from his bride’s house to his own, led by villagers taking the bridles. There were five or six tables at the feast, mainly for the two immediate families.
The response of the village cadres was also a sign of the times. They diplomatically stayed away, making excuses that they had business to do outside the village; if they went to the wedding, they’d have to criticize it, or else they’d be criticized themselves later, so it was better just to stay away and feign ignorance. Such “one eye open, one eye closed” behaviour has ever been a major part of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”: within the village, ideology and policy have always been sensitive to local conditions.
Since the reforms Through the 1980s, after the collapse of the commune system, Shan Fuyi farmed his own land. He also found outlet for his artistic talents by painting landscapes for the corridors and gardens of a hospital in the suburbs of Beijing.
Shan Fuyi enjoys painting and calligraphy—as with his penchant for local history, he is self-taught. He did traditional paintings on the walls of the houses of his musician friends Cai Ran, Cai Yurun, and Shan Ling, a rare sighting in such villages. Maestro Cai An told us:
He did four paintings in his house showing the quarrels between his mother and grandmother, like a sort of cartoon. And he wouldn’t let his family take them down, so everyone could see—that takes a lot of guts! The women quarrelled less after that.
Quite soon after the 1980 restoration, Shan Fuyi made a painting for the ritual association. Depicting Dizang, god of the underworld, it was displayed at for funerals and also for the New Year rituals:
During this period while he was quite free, he also wrote a lengthy novel, “Dream of the spring boudoir”, aka “Miasma on the river of love”:
It describes illicit young love and wedding customs against a background of a village opera troupe and the reclaiming of village land during the Cultural Revolution. He sent it to the Literature Association of the regional capital Baoding, who responded frankly that while it was well above the level demanded for publication, it wasn’t commercial enough since it was “pure literature”, not like the popular martial-arts romances that people wanted to read nowadays; if he wanted to publish it, he’d have to put up the money himself. So he put it back in his drawer. But in a poor rural society where literacy was still low, it’s impressive.
It was Shan Fuyi who made the ritual association’s handsome new donors’ list in 1990. Though we didn’t meet him until 1996, he was well aware that our first visit in 1989 had acted as a stimulus for a reinvigoration of the association. His phrase on the list, showing that the decrepit nature of their ritual building seen by a foreign visitor “lost face” for the Chinese people, turns out to have been sincere. For his story about the sexism of such donations, see here.
Shan Fuyi’s circumstances were transformed in 1991 when Boss Heng invited him to work at his embryonic tourist complex north of Laishui county-town, where he was made responsible for designing and organizing architectural and horticultural features.
Shan Fuyi’s wife sometimes looked after the luxurious mansion of Boss Heng in South Gaoluo—a remarkable contrast with the lowly dwellings of other villagers. Of their four children, one son, training for a post in the air-force, married Boss Heng’s daughter on the politically-correct day of 1st October 1997, anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Though his connection with Boss Heng seems an uneasy alliance, this match must have confirmed his position as Heng’s protégé.
In 1995 my Gaoluo friends asked Shan Fuyi to do the calligraphy for a poem they had composed for me, which is one of my most treasured souvenirs:
One day, at a quiet and informal lunch with him and his family in the village, feeling utterly relaxed, I even broke my rule never to touch the lethal baijiu Chinese liquor, so free was he of the usual pompous macho ceremony which accompanies a drinking bout, and A Good Time Was Had By All.
Edifying commercial break: the highly palatable and efficacious Chongzhi Spirit, like Laishui county-town’s most enterprising institution, the Chongzhi Secondary school, is named after the great local mathematician Zu Chongzhi (430–510), who made what was to be the world’s most accurate measurement of Pi until the 16th century. A lot more accurate than if he’d been imbibing his eponymous spirit, I mused as I staggered out into the alley.
* * *
Again we see how the ritual association involved the whole village, serving its ritual needs both before and after Liberation. While Shan Fuyi was not an active member of the association, his research made major contributions in unearthing its history, and his artistic talents were in constant demand. We learned a lot from him.
The language of my publications has long chafed subtly at the bit of academic conformity. But now, liberated from such pressures, I still regularly interrogate my use of vocabulary.
On a site like this, for a surprisingly global audience, you might think I’d settle for the LCD [trad as he is, that’s “Lowest Common Denominator”—Ed.] style to which academics disingenuously pretend, despite wilfully introducing a barrage of eye-watering neologisms—shooting themselves in the foot in a way that competes with Tweety’s assault on Comey’s testimony.
Anthropologists tend to drizzle ethnology in a rich jus of technical vocabulary, as if to assuage their guilt at stating the bleedin’ obvious—and I should know. Academic language seems to be founded on the sound principle of being “neutral” and thus intelligible, not least to non-native speakers—the expression of personal linguistic idiosyncracy is taboo. This tends to produce an arcane kind of language that yet prides itself on being as far removed from everyday usage as possible. Yet the neologistic mouthfuls belie this. It is as if every McDonalds order is liberally sprinkled with a compulsory dollop of foie gras.
On one hand, I want to write in my real voice. But also my fieldwork experience, whose most fruitful material resides precisely in the local dialect of my masters, encourages me to persist in rendering my own voice faithfully too—which, as you see, is a personal pot-pourri [“enough with this potpourri!”) [That’s not quite how it goes, but hey—Ed.] of my whole life experience—Alan Bennett, Monty Python, Flann O’Brien, Stella Gibbons, WAM, and so on. I gave a little guide here.
Sure, this will be as much of a challenge for my international readers as Yanggao dialect is to me; but it is where you will find any such riches as there may be. In other words, if I can make the effort to understand Li Manshan, then you try understanding me…
Indeed, even when writing with a certain sobriety, one’s text can still be mangled.
Relaxing in the scripture hall between rituals, Yanggao. From my film.
A brief introduction to the origins and history of smiling by Antony Manstead leads me to ponder China. As even a glance at wiki tells us, it turns out to be just as complicated as all others kinds of human behaviour. Here are some preliminary, random notes, awaiting a more thorough study.
Manstead concludes:
Turning points in social practices over time, such as the emergence of dentistry in 18th-century France, the rise of the advertising industry in 20th-century America, changes in social norms regarding the appropriateness of emotional displays and changes in immigration have all contributed to observable differences in how and when we smile.
One common Russian proverb translates as “smiling with no reason is a sign of stupidity”, while a government leaflet on working in Norway warns that you’ve been in the country too long if you assume smiling strangers are drunk, insane, or American.
Smiles have been classified under many headings, such as fearful, miserable, dampened, embarrassed, qualified, compliance, coordination response, listener response, contempt, angry-enjoyment, fake, flirtatious, and the famous Duchenne smile.
Laughter may seem like a more spontaneous reaction, but it too may be classified under a variety of headings (etiquette, nervous, cruel, and so on). Laughing from amusement is not the same as smiling as a habitual social lubricant, a sign of good will.
Bill Bryson notes how humour is basic to social interaction in Britain. In a passage of Notes from a small island from which I’ve already cited, he observes:
Watch any two Britons in conversation and see how long it is before they smile or laugh over some joke or pleasantry. I once shared a railway compartment between Dunkirk and Brussels with two French-speaking businessmen who were obviously old friends or colleagues. They talked genially the whole journey, but not once in over two hours did I see either of them raise a flicker of a smile. You could imagine the same thing with Germans or Swiss or Spaniards or even Italians, but with Britons—never.
This may be a pertinent comment on the British bourgeoisie, but it will only take us a moment to realize that their habits are anything but universal. We need to unpack different contexts and moments in social interaction—degrees of acquaintance, between friends and within the family; initial greetings and sustained conversation, formal situations, propaganda, and so on.
Bryson’s typical British scenario will not only involve friendly smiles upon meeting, but the whole opening exchange too is likely to take a jocular form. However, the voluntary “social” smile—a form of social signalling—is variable across cultures. Age, class, and economics are clearly important factors: even in Britain, teenagers and poor people don’t feel such a need to express friendliness thus. Smiling is by no means a simple indicator of happiness, but in much of the world—poor societies and war zones, for instance—there’s not much to be happy about. Under state socialism, propaganda only blurs the issue; it’d be interesting to explore how the experience transformed personal interaction. For the USSR, the work of Orlando Figes provides material. None of this maps precisely onto the global happiness index…
China Like Bryson in Britain, among friends in China I often marvel at their humour; but even observing their social life as a fly on the wall rather than in my exchanges with them, I find much less smiling as social lubricant. Still, again, this is no simple matter.
One would seek to consider diverse social groups, both urban and rural—for the latter, peasants, cadres, entrepreneurs, teachers, traders, vagrants, and so on (for some instances from my own fieldwork, see here).
So here I’m more interested in the incidence of smiling within social groups. However, while outsiders in urban contexts may be able to observe social interaction without intruding on the scene, in smaller rural communities they—whether foreign or Chinese—may not make reliable observers. The arrival of a stranger in such a setting may cause anxiety; but even long-term acquaintance doesn’t bestow insider status. I also think of this wonderful story from Liu Xin. Maybe rural insiders like Mobo Gao would have pertinent remarks.
It will be even harder to document historical change. I look forward to an erudite tome on smiling in the late Tang dynasty. Even analyzing smiles through the 1930s, 1950s, and 1990s may prove difficult, with much of the material based on images rather than ethnography. Under Maoism, as in the Soviet bloc, humour was commonly expressed in the form of bitter jokes (e.g. here, with links; many more instances under Chinese jokes).
For rural China I noted the lack of terms like hello, thankyou, please, and sorry (Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.23–4, cf. here). By contrast with the British jocular small-talk about the weather, a common rural Chinese greeting is: “Have you eaten?”—suggesting a historical anxiety about famine.
Meanwhile the sullen, automatic, negative response “Meiyou” from shop assistants, still standard in the 1980s, began to give way to more friendly exchanges by the 1990s.
As has been well documented, smiling for portraits developed only quite recently even in the West. In China, putting on your best face for the camera has rarely been perceived as requiring a happy smile; posed photos there still typically show serious, unsmiling subjects. This used to bemuse me. While I try to take informal photos, we have also taken many posed group pictures of ritual specialists (see posts under Local ritual), which rarely show anyone smiling.
The Qiao family, Yulin city 1962, in a lull between major social traumas. Showing a range of expressions, it hardly contributes to the discussion—I just love the image.
Photos from the Maoist era (and indeed since), showing workers and peasants smiling or engaged in their work, with no hint of conflict or coercion, are clearly flawed evidence (see e.g. this chapter by Covell Myskens). Most flagrant are images of ethnic minorities singing and dancing—not least the shameful recent CCP propaganda of Uyghurs singing “If you’re happy and you know it”, worthy of Terezin.
More recently photographers sometimes encourage a smile with the Chinese version of “Cheese!”: “Qiezi!” (aubergine).
Since we’re discussing social interaction here, film footage should be a major database, though again the degree of intrusion of the outsider on the scene will be an element. Apart from documentary, verité feature films are worth considering, such as The blue kite, The story of Qiuju or the work of Jia Zhangke.
Besides class, we should consider gender. Rural women tend not to interact in public, still less with men. Outside the family, smiling may be perceived as indecorous, and their behaviour is highly reserved. Again, one seeks to document their daily interactions among each other. At the same time, social media and the selfie have produced new poses.
As I said, these are just a few preliminary thoughts. Anyway, we obviously have to guard against taking traits that are familiar within the narrow confines of our own society as some kind of benchmark. As I write, the All Black haka shows a distinctive form of social greeting…
I’m still entertained by this poster that I saw on an Irish train in the 1990s. I imagine a response from the archetypal miscreant, confused by the options, might go:
Let me see now, that’s a teaser.* Can I have both?
* As in the Japanese particle Saa, helpfully explained in the wacky Teach yourself Japanese.
To follow the monumental orchestral works Turangalîla and Des canyons aux étoiles, the other day I went to hear S-Simon Rattle conducting the LSO in Messiaen‘s final masterpiece Éclairs sur l’au-delà …, and it’s every bit as enthralling. *
Programme notes here; BBC Radio 3 broadcast here (for a limited time—unlike Eternal Life).
The title translates as “Illuminations of the beyond” or “Lightning over the beyond”; for éclairs, “epiphanies” seems to work well too. ** Written from 1988 to 1991, the piece was commissioned by the New York Phil and first performed by them in 1992 under Zubin Mehta, shortly after the composer’s death.
The recordings of Myung Whun Chung with the Orchestre de l’Opéra Bastille (1994), and S-Simon with the Berlin Phil (2004) are much praised. On YouTube the former appears movement by movement, starting here. Here’s a continuous version from Sylvain Cambreling, enhanced by some well-chosen visual images:
But as always, it’s even more immersive to hear it live. First S-Simon came on stage alone to introduce the work, a personal touch to prepare us for the enormity of the experience.
Like listening to Bach, whatever our relationship with Christianity (under the Messiaen tag, note also The right kind of spirituality?), it’s a deeply moving, ecstatic work—the unique melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic language of Messiaen’s spiritual vision achieved here without piano or ondes martenot. The movements are:
Apparition du Christ glorieux (Apparition of the glorious Christ) La constellation du Sagittaire (The constellation of Sagittarius) L’oiseau-lyre et la ville-fiancée (The lyrebird and the bridal city) Les élus marqués du sceau (The elected ones marked with the seal) Demeurer dans l’amour … (To abide in love …) Les Sept Anges aux sept trompettes (The seven angels on the seven trumpets) Et Dieu essuiera toute larme de leurs yeux … (And God will wipe every tear from their eyes …) Les étoiles et la gloire (The stars and the glory) Plusieurs oiseaux des arbres de vie (Several birds of the trees of life) Le chemin de l’invisible (The way of the invisible) Le Christ, lumière du Paradis (The Christ, light of paradise)
Following the hieratic opening brass chorale, the piece is majestic, sensuous, and exhilarating. As ever, the divine messages of birdsong punctuate the work—Plusieurs oiseaux des arbres de vie, with avian wind soloists dispersed around the hall, was glorious. Confession: in some of the faster passages with zany xylophone I can’t help hearing echoes of Tom and Jerry.
Like the solo movements for cello and violin of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, in addition to the intensity of Demeurer dans l’amour (a slow central movement akin to the Jardin du sommeil d’amour in Turangalîla), the finale is another long, slow, sustained meditation for luminous strings, now with the distant halo of a triangle. Brilliant playing throughout the orchestra!
* I’m generally most attached to the ellipsis (…), but here it plays the exalted role of symbolizing the infinite. Note for pedants like me: the ellipsis in the French title is indeed preceded by a space, which seems to be less common in French style than in English. “But that’s not important right now“.
** Cf. Ravel’s Chansonsmadécasses, where I note the tempting schoolboy translation trap of Le plaisir passe comme un éclair. Ah, the evanescent thrill of the cream bun.
Inspired by Stuart Cosgrove‘s Detroit 67 and Memphis 68, I’ve been reading his book
Young soul rebels: a personal history of northern soul (2016).
In all kinds of wonderful ways, this book does my head in. [1]
Quite rightly, devotees of northern soul will be underwhelmed if I describe it as a diachronic ethnography based on participant observation—which is just what it is, like some of the great works of ethnomusicology…
Cosgrove captures the buzz of his addiction:
Saturday passed slowly as I browsed around local market stalls. The night slowly fell and we walked through the backstreets of Stoke along cobbled terraces. The army of leather feet resonated like a drum solo, building percussion in our speeding heads and raising the adrenaline of anticipation. A swell of people hung by the door of what looked like a wartime cinema, and a blackout curtain seemed to have closed across the north of England. It was virtually impossible to make out faces or detail; everything was sound. A pounding noise escaped through the doorway and the wild screeching sound of saxophones pushed through the fire escapes, desperate for air. We paid at the ticket booth, but even in the foyer, an intense heat much like an industrial oven scorched through the thick aggressive air, and the noise was so pure, so fearless and so commanding, it dragged you inwards into a scrum of lurching bodies: hot, wet, and demonic. This was in every respect the Devil’s music, and I had travelled hundreds of miles from home to sip with the deranged serpents that slithered so gracefully on the floor. There was no going back. No music later in life would ever touch its uniqueness, no rock concert could match its energy, and no rave could come close to its latent illegality. This was northern soul: the reason they invented youth.
Themes Of all the diverse tribes of popular music, this scene is just as alien to me (and, I surmise, to Alan Bennett) as the spirit mediums of Guangxi are to a scholar trained at a Beijing conservatoire (for China, I broach the issue of insider/outsider status here, here, and here).
Ethnomusicologists like Nettl and Small highlight music as a social activity, and McClary valorizes the physical, bodily response to music as a caveat to the cerebral, disembodied, “autonomous” bias of WAM.
Basic to the northern soul experience were the all-nighters hosted by clubs throughout the north. They may evoke the “red-hot sociality” of festivals worldwide; but such club scenes also broaden our picture, in that live music is subsidiary. At the heart of northern soul was live dancing, athletic and technical—amazing dancers like car mechanic Frankie “Booper” New, at the Torch:
It was as if NASA had invented a device that could drill into the surface of the moon, and the device was a sixteen-stone guy from Widnes.
Some visiting live bands made memorable appearances, but recorded music was more common. After all, a multitude of bands, often inspired by old blues records, were being formed (not least in the north), creating all kinds of new music; but here the point was not to try and form your own soul band—the fetish for rare Motown discs was sacred. Nor did club-goers care to keep pace with the ever-changing tastes of black Americans, for whom both blues and soul were mere staging posts in a constantly evolving scene.
Thus DJing assumed a crucial role (akin to that of the conductor?), with fanatical, driven DJs like Ian Levine and Ian Dewhirst. Another basic element was the amphetamine scene. While not hesitating to depict its squalor (the Wigan toilets “resembling a war zone”), Cosgrove naturally refrains from moralistic prurience. Andy Wilson, a northern soul pioneer from Harrogate who spent much of his formative years at Wigan Casino, going on to become senior lecturer in Criminology at Trent University, “is now an expert in drug subcultures. He always was”. A model of participant observation, then.
Obscurity and obsession Alongside the sweaty hedonism of northern soul, just as important was the craving for obscurity—not just any obscurity, like seeking out early blues, but “rare soul”—rougher, less polished than the mainstream Motown sound. Even the origin of the term “northern soul” itself, commonly attributed to Dave Godin, is somewhat arcane (pp.25–6).
Cosgrove lovingly details the nerdiness of the scene: “compiling lists and recording obscure detail is part of the everyday autism of northern soul”. OCD was rife. He even provides a suitably nerdy Glossary.
One of the cardinal rules of the northern soul scene is a respect for obscurity and those who die young. […] Northern soul cherishes its role as savior of the neglected—rescuing some acts from being almost wholly forgotten while plucking others from semi-obscurity and giving them the status of gods.
Ill-fated singers like Linda Jones and Darrell Banks were idolized. Cosgrove also pays tribute to some of the casualties within northern soul itself.
He notes, and shares, the jihad mentality, “the Hezbollah rituals that defined the scene”:
Eclectic tastes were rarely tolerated on the northern soul scene, which by the mid seventies was hardening into a zealous sect with its own strict rules. […]
One night, a DJ was brought in front of the crowd charged with playing a Bowie record; he was given a stern warning and a second chance, but there was a noisy faction on the committee who wanted him hounded through the streets in sackcloth and then burned at the stake outside H Samuel. I was among that zealous throng and I have not mellowed since.
Northern soul devotees shared a virulent aversion to the mainstream as embodied in Top of the pops; they were creating their own charts. Meanwhile in a parallel universe, Morris dancing was enjoying a revival, and my own nerdy tastes were for Boulez and Zen scriptures. The northern soul collectors remind me rather of scholars poring over the cataloguing systems of the Daoist Canon, or WAM bores who can’t help citing Köchel numbers.
At a certain remove from the quest of Oxbridge academics for neglected Renaissance church music, northern soul addicts were on a different kind of “early music” craze. Trapped in a mythical past, they were also on a constant quest for new material from that past.
Cosgrove notes the importance of rail and road networks (“You can go everywhere from Wigan train station”, as DJ Richard Searling commented), the impact of immigration, and the scene’s distinctive fashion sense. Chapter 7, elegantly titled “Soul not dole” after a Doncaster club, explores the effects of the miners’ strike, with the story of pit closures running in tandem with the high points of northern soul. There’s a cameo for Grimethorpe, whose brass band was to be immortalized in the film Brassed off. And the heyday of northern soul coincided with the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror.
Unlike punk, which was more openly anti-authoritarian, the northern soul scene has often been written about as if it “floated free” from the politics of the day, but the reverse is true. The northern soul scene was rooted in the industrial towns and cities of Britain, which across the arch of time faced unprecedented waves of deindustrialization.
Britain’s two greatest subcultures had much in common. Both were underground and frequently misunderstood. Northern soul had grown up organically across a period of ten years since the height of the first-generation Mods and was a subculture that was more authentically the product of young people themselves, often hiding from authority, dodging the drug squad and attending self-managed clubs that were only sparsely advertised. Punk was largely contrived and skillfully managed in part by [Malcolm] McLaren, driven by his genuine love of New York garage bands and an opportunistic interest in anarchism and the Situationist movement.
He cites Paul Mason: “we were using the black industrial music of the late sixties to say something about our white industrial lives in the seventies”. I think also of the intriguing Finnish affinity for tango.
Though—like Daoist recluses—the northern soul crowd prided themselves on shunning outside attention, the scene was soon discovered by media moguls like Tony Palmer, whose 1977 film This England: Wigan Casino divided opinion:
added smouldering furnaces, decaying coalfields and derelict canals—overwrought historical imagery that the citizens of Wigan had long since tired of.
But amidst ongoing debate over “purists not tourists”, the Casino soon became a casualty of economic recession.
Cosgrove’s passion for the music is always evident too:
If the beginning of the night was hectic, the end was emotionally more subdued: it was regretful, solemn, almost elegiac. By 1973, it had become established practice that all-nighters would finish with “3 before 8”: these were three soul songs to mark the end of the night, played as the clock reached 8am and the morning light sliced through the skylight windows in the decaying roofs of the Casino.
Discussing them in sequence, he gives pride of place to the second-to-last song in the set, Tobi Legend’s “Time will pass you by”:
Venues The chapters describe the heydays of the legendary clubs in turn. In the early days they came up against another kind of fundamentalist, James Anderton (“God’s copper”), with his moral crusade to clean up Manchester. The Twisted Wheel there became “the template by which all subsequent northern soul clubs were judged: the intense atmosphere, the rare soul music and the extravagant dancers”. It was succeeded by the Golden Torch Ballroom, a converted cinema in the suitably obscure venue of Tunstall, near Stoke-on-Trent:
The interior of the Torch also told a story of change, not least the collapse of traditional religion and the rise of youth culture. It was a small hall with marble pillars and a balcony overlooking the wooden dance floor. It had started out as a church, before becoming a roller-skating rink and, in the immediate post-war period, morphing into the Little Regent Cinema. Local soul fan and businessman Chris Burton changed its use again and it became a Mod club, and then eventually an all-nighter whose influence stretched across the Potteries, to Lancashire in the north and the Midlands to the south.
Many clubs
aped the patterns of older working-class institutions—electing committees and treasurers, and holding nights in fading workers’ clubs, miners’ welfares and industrial social clubs.
Next the baton was taken by Wigan Casino and Blackpool Mecca, with their musical policies competing. Describing the rise and fall of seaside venues, their decline complementing the rise of foreign package holidays, Cosgrove gives an evocative portrayal of Blackpool, “a wonderland of donkey rides, kiss-me-quick hats and venereal disease”.
He sings the praises of the all-nighters at the Top of the World in Stafford, a late flourishing of the scene from 1982 to 1986, and serving as a bridge between the warring factions. By now he had moved on to a media career, joining the drift to London—a city pithily described by a friend as “just like Barnsley but with more wankers”. He continued to collect rare soul:
After a few days in Washington DC I had perfected a modus operandi that has served me well over many years in America. Written down on paper, it sounds like the machinations of a serial killer, but here goes…
In Birmingham, Alabama he has an epiphany as he discovers a rare copy of the DC Blossoms’ “Hey Boy” (Shrine, 1966) in an inauspicious-looking store minded by an inscrutable assistant:
For northern soul collectors there is nothing more visceral than a “find”. A sudden surge more emotional than meeting an old friend, more powerful than an away goal, and more satisfying than sex itself. I stared in wonder at the light blue label and the iconic burning Shrine logo. I checked for vinyl cracks and deep scratches, but whatever its wandering history, the disc was virtually pristine and had survived its orphan years with no damage. The paint that had splashed over it like semen on a truck driver’s T-shirt had stained the sleeve, but the record itself was flawless. It was a moment of sheer unadulterated joy. I had an uncontrollable urge to snatch the Kool cigarette from the woman’s hands, kiss her peachy lips, rip off her velour pants and make urgent love to her over the cash register. But sense prevailed. I calmly gave her another dollar bill and waited obediently for my fifty cents change. As she handed me the loose coins, her lips curled into a chubby smile, and she gave me the most generous grin I’d seen in three days in Alabama. It had the look of post-coital ecstasy—the look of true love.
Of course, as he notes, northern soul collectors were far from alone. Such initiatives had
a hundred-year history of collectors and black-music pioneers scouring the backwoods of America, visiting brutal prisons, outdoor chain gangs and hidden rural villages, searching for blues performers and for early recordings. […] Northern soul was not the unique leader I had imagined; it was part of a long legacy of trying to collect and catalogue the very best of the African-American heritage from jazz, to blues, and on to soul.
In 2009, just as Frank Wilson’s “Do I love you” came up for auction,
the National Gallery of Scotland had secured the £50 million it needed to prevent Titian’s 16th-century masterpiece Diana and Actaeon being sold at auction. Fearing that Kenny Burrell’s copy of Frank Wilson would also leave Scotland, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek feature for the Sunday Times arguing that northern soul was as worthy of public investment as high art: “Comparing a soul record to a masterpiece by Titian will seem ludicrous to the uninitiated. But leave aside the mores, prejudices and snob value that separate high art and popular culture, and the strange world of northern soul bears very deep similarities with art. Both are driven by collectors who are fixated by rarity, authenticity and the provenance of their collections. So far, both have also resisted the pressure of recession and the value of collections has either increased or held strong. Words like rare, original and limited edition exist in both communities. Respected dealers existed in both worlds and auctions are a familiar mode of transaction. Art and soul share a culture where fakes, bootlegs and shady attempts to replicate the look of original works are not uncommon.”
Cosgrove mentions the multitude of new underground subcultures, like warehouse parties, the Carolina beach scene, the Chicano low-rider scene, and the rare groove scene in London—where the 100 Club also played a major role.
By the millennium, there was a new and lasting schism within northern soul, the latest division in a series of civil wars: those who wanted to look back to the grand days of the past and saw northern as a revivalist and reunion scene; and those clubs that kept the torch burning and insisted on new discoveries and an upfront music policy. Each new era brought with it ever more demanding clubs. […] Many thousands of people who had drifted away from northern soul returned to swell the ranks of new faces who had discovered the music via the scooter scene and still more who had lasted the journey and never left.
The final chapter, opening with the excellent quote
Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born,
describes how social and digital technology has given the scene a new lease of life—YouTube, Facebook groups (where he notes in particular “I used to Go to Stafford All-Nighters”, a veritable popular history project), Mixcloud, and so on.
For all his fundamentalism, Cosgrove admires the new generation:
Younger and brasher than the survivors on the scene, are passionately engaged in the scene and its origins, but have a healthy disregard for its arcane rules: the chin stroking, the soul police regulations and the grumpy insistence that yesterday was always better. […]
The worldwide web has been kind to northern soul. What was once a scene restricted to cardboard boxes and wooden crates in a few obscure clubs is now a global phenomenon, and the footprint that was restricted to a few hundred miles of the industrial north of England now has worldwide reach.
As to gender, while many female singers from the Motown heyday were worshipped by aficionados (as long as they weren’t too well-known), there were few female DJs, and we find little portrayal of the lives of female dancers—like the young Pat Wall from Rochdale, an early denizen of the Twisted Wheel:
While swimming, she would imagine the body turn at the end of a length as part of a dance routine and would simulate the northern soul “swallow dive”. She often practised in the kitchen of her mum’s council house, mastering the smooth sliding style across uneven linoleum, and within a matter of weeks she would compete with any of the Twisted Wheel’s young men. Her dance trucks were mesmerising and her unassuming smile, whispering the lyrics as if she were praying, as if there were no greater music in the world, made her stand out in a crowd of older and brasher men.”
Another regular on the scene was none other than Jane Torvill, who described her 1984 Boléroat the 1984 Winter Olympics as “the dance of my life”—but as Cosgrove gleefully observes, “that had already happened nearly ten years earlier on the floor of Blackpool Mecca’s Highland Room.”
As the obscure civil war raged, a more benign figure on the scene was Mary Chapman, who hosted events at Cleethorpes Pier—also including a 1976 appearance of the Sex Pistols as the moral panic over punk exploded. And the much-loved Fran Franklin (1961–2014) gives perceptive insights in documentary footage. More recently, female DJs have become important on the scene.
On film As usual, however evocatively one writes about music (or ritual), it’s still a compromise: silent immobile text can never approach the sensation of the lived experience (cf. China). Among myriad finds on YouTube, following Tony Palmer’s 1977 This England, try
Paul Mason’s tribute Northern soul: keeping the faith (BBC, 2013):
Northern Soul: living for the weekend (BBC, 2014; some breaks in sound):
I’m rather envious that they coined the term northern soul 北靈 before I could use it for the ritual groups of Hebei and Shanxi, but ethnographies like this can inspire us (obscurely, as ever) in documenting pilgrimage networks and temple fairs in China. Echoing northern soul aficionados’ aversion to the mainstream, I essayed an arcane Strictly spinoff here.
And as I write, I also delight in the wondrous Bach orchestral suites in a live broadcast from the Proms, alternating with new compositions inspired by them. Though from an utterly different social milieu, devotees of Bach—whether amateur concert-goers or nerdy professors poring over manuscripts and watermarks—have more in common with the early music movement of the northern soul scene than one might think. Up to a point…
[1] Apart from numerous websites, other books on northern soul include
David Nowell, The story of northern soul: a definitive history of the dance scene that refuses to die (1999)
Elaine Constantine and Gareth Sweeney, Northern soul: an illustrated history (2013, complementing the former’s feature film).
Following my post on shawm bands of Lorestan, I went along to a fine concert of Iranian chamber music at the Purcell Room led by the unassuming ostadDariush Talai (b.1953).
In contrast to the loud outdoor soundscapes of rural ceremonial, which inevitably draw us towards local social life, outsiders are often attracted to the more “classical”, “refined” urban chamber genres. Such music is much better represented in recordings, and feeds into the WAM taste for “autonomous”, “absolute” music—a notion convincingly debunked by ethnomusicologists such as Nettl, McClary, Small, and Bigenho.
Amaneh Youssefzadeh provides context (in Michael Church, ed., The other classical musics, 2015; chapter here):
Until the 20th century most classical music was performed in private gatherings—for small circles of connoisseurs, at Sufi brotherhoods, for family and friends, or in festivities including poetry recitation; the public concert was essentially a Western phenomenon. Moreover, apart from military music, public musical performance took place mostly in the context of religious and ceremonial rituals which are not considered musical per se; these include events in zurkāneh (Iran’s traditional fitness-clubs), the recitation of the Qur’an (tajwid), the call to prayer (‘azān), the recitation of the national epic Shāhnāmeh (naqqāli), the Shi’a passion play (ta’zieh) and the singing of laments (rowzeh-khāni) […]. Such ceremonies require singers skilled in classical music, and they have been crucial supports for classical music during the periods of decline and discrimination. And in Iran, as in many parts of Middle East, classical singers have traditionally honed their skills in the call to prayer and the recitation of the Qur’an; many celebrated singers from the first half of the 20th century sang in the ceremonial mourning rites described above. Mohammad Reza Shadjarian was a noted qāri (reciter of the Qur’an) before gaining fame as a classical performer.
* * *
At the Purcell Room Dariush Talai, on tar and setar plucked lutes, was supported by his younger protégés Hooshmand Ebadi (ney end-blown flute), Kaveh Mahmoudian (tombak drum), and singer Hadi Hosseini. Like the Chinese qin masters of yore, they play for their own self-cultivation—the dedicated audience in the austere Purcell Room must have felt they were eavesdropping on a private gathering.
In the first half Talai played in duo—first on tar with sensitive tombak accompaniment, and then on setar with the breathy ney. The second half consisted of one long suite, with all three musicians joined by the singer Hadi Hosseini. While the progression of such suites is more episodic than the gradual acceleration of Indian raga from alap to fast sections, it’s always engrossing to follow long sequences—by contrast with the short snappy solos of the Chinese conservatoires!
Here’s a track from Talai’s 1991 Ocora CD:
As a novice, while spellbound by the musicians’ artistry, it would require a thorough grounding for me to get a handle on the modal and melodic features of such pieces. Part of a widespread muqam family that also extends to the Uyghurs, each of the two hundred or so gushehs and the twelve dastgahs of the complete radif repertoire are individually named (cf. nanyin in south Fujian).
This music was one of the main focuses of the great Bruno Nettl. In chapter 7 of The study of ethnomusicology, “Contemplating musical repertories: a sampling of descriptive and analytical approaches”, he is as lucid as ever:
Iranian musicians taught the radif, the body of music that is memorized and then used as the basis for improvisation and composition. They labelled its sections (dastgahs) and their subdivisions (gushehs) clearly, although there was some disagreement on terminology and in determining which gushehs properly belonged to which dastgah. Musicians were willing to analyze certain performances, dividing them into sections and stating upon which sections of the radif each of them, in the improvised performance, is based. An ethnomusicologist who has studied with Iranian musicians can analyze such sectioned performances in this way but can’t be sure, on account of the lack of complete consensus, that the analysis will be accepted by every Persian master. This is the kind of analysis in which the ethnomusicologist does what the musicians of the culture do.
But one could go further. There are, for example, performances or sections that masters of the radif are not willing to analyze in this fashion, giving their equivalent of “he’s just improvising here”. They may say about such a performance that the musician does not know the radif, or he is purposely and expertly mixing materials from several sources, or he is simply playing avaz (nonmetric improvisation) in a dastgah in general, not taking account of the differences among the subdivisions of the dastgah that the radif provides. The first approach mentioned here would simply report these anomalies and perhaps point out the difference between the carefully sectioned and the other performances and refer to the fact that it seems to be readily recognized by Iranians. The second approach would take these unsectioned performances and, with the use of motivic analysis, determine almost moment by moment on which part of the radif each short bit of performance is based. Instead of just accepting that a particular five-minute segment is simply “avaz of the dastgah of Shur”, one could show that it is composed of materials from three gushehs (for example, salmak, golriz, and shahnaz), and makes fleeting references to three other gushehs. Now, certain Persian musicians, when confronted with analysis of this sort, pronounced it correct but found the information only mildly interesting, and not particularly relevant. It seemed that I had tried to take their way of looking at their own music further and had managed to avoid violating their way of approaching the analysis, but I had gone beyond where they were prepared to go, had divided their concepts into units smaller than those they were willing to use. I had gained some insights into how the music is put together; on the other hand, I could no longer claim simply to be presenting the system as it presents itself.
By comparison with my Chinese experience, I find it intriguing how the radif tradition in Iran seems to have been maintained more successfully under the umbrella of conservatoire training and concert performances. Again, Nettl’s templates for the various possible forms of change and responses to modernization are salient.
* * *
The concert inspired me to go back to the great senior masters like Mohammad Reza Shadjarian (1940–2020) and Mohammad-Reza Lotfi (1947–2014). Shadjarian, with his ecstatic singing and principled political stance, was a great icon; his death in October 2020 prompted national mourning (see e.g. here).
This live performance by Shadjarian is part of a playlist:
I’ve included a wonderful kemenche solo from Mohammad-Reza Lotfi under Indian and world fiddles.
* * *
For a general introduction to the musics of Iran, with discography, see Laudan Nooshin’s article in The Rough Guide to world music: Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and chapters in The Garland encyclopedia of world music, vol. 6: The Middle East. Note also the site https://mahoor.com/en/. For the “classical” tradition, see e.g. Jean During, Jean During, Zia Mirabdolbaghi, and Dariush Safvat (eds), The art of Persian music (1991), and Amaneh Youssefzadeh’s chapter in Michael Church (ed.), The other classical musics (2015).
To follow my posts on shawms in south Asia and Lorestan, travelling northeast (if one could, via Afghanistan), one reaches Xinjiang, where shawm bands are also common—for links to posts on shawms around the world (China, Tibet, south Asia, the Middle East, north Africa, Europe), click here.
Deplorably, since 2016 much of the rich culture of the Uyghurs seems to have become a historical subject.
The muqam suites are mainly sung and danced to the accompaniment of plucked and bowed strings, but they are also part of the repertoire of naghra-sunay bands, with paired kettle-drums and shawm. As elsewhere, these bands perform mainly for life-cycle events (notably weddings), calendrical rituals, and shop openings. The CD
contains brief tracks (#1 and #12), as well as a lengthier excerpt from the Charigahmuqam as played in Turpan (#8)—including a “limping” metre of 17 beats divided 7+6+6.
Incidentally, here’s an excerpt from Charigahmuqam as performed in Khotan by Chistiyya Sufis (for more, see here):
Here’s a 2006 clip of a naghra-sunay group in Kashgar playing Shadiyana to accompany sama dance at the Heyitgah mosque (longer audio here):
As always, studying such music soon leads us to consider the wider ritual culture—not least the great pilgrimages to mazar Sufi shrine festivals, at which bakhshi ritual healers who attend the mazar also play naghra-sunay. Again, we are drawn to the fine work of the anthropologist and film-maker Rahilä Dawut—and her outrageous detention.
[1] For transcriptions, in addition to the instrumental volumes of the Anthology for Xinjiang, see e.g. Xinjiang guchuiyue: Weiwuer suona he nagela hezou taoqu 新疆鼓吹乐: 维吾尔唢呐和纳格拉合奏套曲 [Drumming-and-blowing music from Xinjiang: suites for sunay and naghra] (Shandong wenyi cbs, 2002, 186 pp.), with introduction by Jian Qihua 简其华, and transcriptions based on recordings by him and Mao Jizeng 毛继增 from 1962 to 1963.
I’m not exactly in the mood to celebrate glossy official showpieces for Chinese modernity, but I appreciated the TV broadcast of the recent Prom by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Long Yu.
The Beeb still can’t help going to town on the unbeatable cliché “East meets West”—as if even now all this, um, International Cultural Exchange (oops, there goes another one) is some novel discovery, some audacious, exotic experiment (cf. They come over ‘ere, and China–Italy).
One of the most readable accounts of Chinese music,
Richard Kraus, Pianos and politics in China (1989),
gives some leads to the chequered history of the orchestra. It originated in the Shanghai Public Band, founded back in 1879 by a German professor with six other European musicians. In 1907 it became the Shanghai Municipal Symphony Orchestra, and in 1919 they hired the Italian conductor Mario Paci (1878–1946; see also here), a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire; his orchestra included many White Russian and Italian musicians.
In 1922 the orchestra was renamed the Shanghai Municipal Council Symphony Orchestra. Under Japanese occupation it became the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra. Among the Jewish refugees from Nazism who swelled the city’s expat population from the mid-1930s were many musicians.
Some Chinese players were admitted from the late 1920s, but by 1938 there were still only four of them in the orchestra; paid less, they had no social interaction with the European musicians. The audiences too were mostly Caucasian.
Among the Russian musicians in Shanghai was the composer Alexander Tcherepnin, who promoted both Western and Chinese music in Shanghai and Beijing from 1934 to 1937. Bach’s B minor Masswas performed in Shanghai.
Paci was a leading light in the founding of the Shanghai Conservatoire in 1927. In 1935 he invited the composer Xian Xinghai to conduct the orchestra for a concert, but they refused to play under the baton of a Chinese. Paci was in charge of the orchestra from 1917 until 1942, when the orchestra had to disband, with many foreign musicians and conductors leaving. After the 1949 “Liberation” it was re-formed in 1950, becoming the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 1956.
One of the protagonists of Kraus’s study is the pianist Fou Ts’ong (1934–2020), who studied with Paci from 1943. Seeking political asylum after the 1958 Great Leap, he made his home in London, where he became a great friend of my own violin teacher Hugh Maguire.
The orchestra inevitably suffered grievously as the Cultural Revolution exploded in 1966. Whereas Soviet orchestras had managed to maintain high standards, Chinese orchestras, even after the liberalizations from the late 1970s, took many years to develop.
I’m pretty sure most of the band would be bemused by my own tastes in musicking around Shanghai—Kunqu, folk opera, silk-and-bamboo, Daoist ritual… Meanwhile the more cosmopolitan aspect of musical life in swinging Shanghai before Liberation is covered in another fine book,
Andrew Jones, Yellow music: media culture and colonial modernity in the Chinese jazz age (2001),
It opens with a vignette on the African-American trumpeter Buck Clayton, leader of the Harlem Gentlemen in Shanghai on the eve of the Japanese occupation. Back in the USA he worked with Count Basie; Billie Holiday, no less, described him as “the prettiest cat I ever saw”.
The Harlem Gentlemen at the Canidrome ballroom.
Here you can watch a trailer for Marketus Presswood’s documentary Yellow Jazz, Black Music (2021(.
* * *
The Prom began with The five elements by Chen Qigang, (b.1951), a Messiaen pupil and one of the most meticulous and imaginative of Chinese composers. Eric Lu then played Mozart’s wonderful A major piano concerto.
And a suitable choice, reminding us of Shanghai’s Russian heritage, was Rachmaninoff’s final work, the Symphonic dances (1941). I’ve only been getting know the piece quite recently, but it already ranks with the 2nd symphony in my affections. Among noted recordings are those of Golovanov, Svetlanov, and Kondrashin; but given that the piece was composed in American exile, Mitropoulos’s 1942 version is a popular choice. Here’s Kondrashin with the Moscow Philharmonic in 1963:
Among the glories of the Symphonic dances is a solo part for alto sax—again suggesting Shanghai’s jazz background. As an encore, a smoochy and bombastic arrangement of Molihua (another perennial Chinese music cliché)—strangely endearing as a snapshot of a bygone age of Chinese symphonic writing—led into a stirring rendition of Hey Jude, with fine jazzy solos on sax and trumpet and an audience singalong (for the Beatles original, see Alan W. Pollack’s analysis; cf. A Beatles roundup).
Now I dream of a Shanghai Daoist ritual at the Proms…
Learning with the Hua family shawm band, village funeral 2001.
Even now, all this time after the years I spent immersing myself in the wild shawm and percussion playing of the Hua family band in Yanggao (“Ming-dynasty bebop”), I still regularly find myself tapping out the slow 8-beat drum pattern that accompanies the opening sequence of melodies in their ritual suites.
Within a slow 8/4 metre, the recurring pattern on the drum is punctuated by one gong stroke and four cymbal clashes every measure. The drum pattern may be considered as beginning on the 3rd beat of the bar, with a little syncopated motif “calling for the beat” (jiaoban 叫板) alerting the gong player to sound the coming downbeat. Hua Jinshan often varies the first two beats of the bar. I’ve only attempted a rough rhythmic depiction of the drum part, refraining from an exhaustive notation of all the varied techniques, with rim-shots, single- and double-stick notes, and damped notes—here the slur sign denotes a roll before the beat:
The pattern is quite fixed, with only occasional minor variants—though there is a certain variation between different drummers.
An easily-followed instance is the opening of the Da Yanluo suite, whose melodies I analyse in detail—with video—in Dissolving boundaries. For the gradual accelerando and the cumulative effect of the pattern, do get to know the two versions of Shuilongyin on the CD Walking shrill (one of them also on the playlist in the sidebar, #5, with commentary here). Once you have the metrical framework in your bones, you can admire the long melodic phrases and the way their own syncopated rhythms constantly tug at the metre. This is AMAZING music—Trust Me, I’m a Doctor.
Meanwhile household Daoists take part in the same rituals; and though their instrumental repertoire is quite different, their use of percussion has certain similarities. As the first beat of the bar approaches (here it is the cymbal player who sounds the downbeat), drummers like Li Manshan play a syncopated motif similar to that of the shawm bands—and then tends to leave the downbeat to the cymbals (for the subtleties of the variants, see here). This example, from the slow, mournful hymn Diverse And Nameless Are The Bitter Roots, shows both the drum patterns and the yaoshuan syncopation on cymbals at cadences:
In my film (from 22.04) you can find clear examples in the Hymn to the Three Treasures, with the late Yuan Gaoshan on drum.
Along with memorizing the vocal texts and melodies of the liturgy, such unwritten rules are a substantial aspect of the nitty-gritty of what household Daoists have to learn in performing ritual.
As the end of this year’s Proms approaches, I went along to the “late-night” gig of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (CGS), hot on the heels of the Vienna Phil. Much as I love the Proms (and I recall some wonderful gagaku and raga in the Good Old Days), world music has never played much of a role there. This was another kind of Passion at the Proms.
Complementing Italy: folk musicking, this is the latest in a series of posts on taranta-inspired musicking in south Italy:
Based in Salento, the original CGS group dates back to 1975, led by Rina and Daniele Durante. The current leader is their son Mauro, on violin—which drew me back to the less polished fiddling on the extraordinary early footage of Ernesto De Martino.
Don’t get me wrong, I love loud music; but in the hall the volume seemed excessively loud and the sound rather fuzzy—it may work better on the radio broadcast (here, for the next month). With gutsy vocals, tamburello frame-drumming, organetto, wind playing, plucking, and dancing, the combo seemed more successful when they grouped more closely on the large stage.
Of course, it’s not just about sound. Pizzica—like Bach, The Rite of Spring, and Turangalîla, indeed—demands a physical reaction; with such pieces it’s hardly possible in concert, but in this case it’s an essential part of the experience. As large concert halls go, the Albert Hall makes a suitable venue; the prommers in the Arena, whether mobile or static, always enhance the occasion.
In LCD World Music fusion fashion (cf. my final rant here), guitarist Justin Adams and Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko joined the band—though I’d still rather hear the latter playing his own music…
On this eclectic playlist, featuring scenic tracks from CGS in full MTV mode, as well as other groups, the intoxication of their live gigs features only rarely:
For the other CGS videos on that list, you may prefer the audio tracks over the glossy visuals. Elsewhere, here’s a 2013 gig in New York:
I’m really not being an old purist fogey here, but maybe what I want is the original line-up—though of course they were always seeking to be relevant to the changing times. Among several tracks on YouTube (search for “vecchio Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino”), try this:
One is the work of Liu Xiangchen, a Han-Chinese director who has long documented the cultures of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Only three years ago, the Centre for Ritual Music at Shanghai was able to hold an event at which his film Ashiq: the last troubadourwas screened in full; and in 2017 he attended a screening at SOAS. Yet in this short time the climate has changed radically.
Infinitely more distressing is the case of the distinguished Uyghur anthropologist and film-maker Rahilä Dawut, who (along with countless others in Xinjiang) was “disappeared” in 2017 amidst the escalation of the tragic, all-pervading war that the Chinese state is now waging on Uyghur culture; her whereabouts remain unknown.
As with most if not all other detained academics and artists, this is not a question of engaging in some kind of “subversive” activity: as Darren Byler notes in his fine tribute, Dawut’s work has long been celebrated within the Chinese academic and political system.
See also e.g. here, and this 2021 article in Elle. At last in 2023 news of Dawut’s sentence to life imprisonment was revealed, prompting a new series of protests, such as this.
Among Dawut’s writings in English are:
Rachel Harris and Rahilä Dawut, “Mazar festivals of the Uyghurs: music, Islam and the Chinese state”, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11.1 (Red ritual: ritual music and Communism, 2002)
Rahile Dawut, Lisa Ross, Beth R. Citron and Alexander Papas, Living shrines of Uyghur China (2013)
Rahile Dawut, “Ordam mazar: a meeting place for different practices and belief systems in culturally diverse Xinjiang” [sic], in Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Birgit N. Schlyter and Jun Sugawara (eds) Kashgar revisited: Uyghur studies in memory of Ambassador Gunnar Jarring (2016)
Rahile Dawut, “Mazar pilgrimage among the Uyghurs”, in Rahile Dawut and Jun Sugawara (eds), Mazar: studies on Islamic sacred sites in Central Eurasia (2016).
Rahile Dawut and Aynur Kadir, “Music of the Ordam shrine festival” (here, part of a useful site).
See also
Rian Thum, The sacred routes of Uyghur history (2014), and this recent article.
From Rahile Dawut and Aynur Kadir, “Music of the ordam shrine festival”.
In her conscientious research, Dawut documented at least two hundred local Sufi mazarfestivals throughout Xinjiang. As in festivals everywhere (see also Calendrical rituals), a diverse cast of performers attends the mazar: alongside dastan story‐telling, muqam, and zikr rituals (with separate groups of male and büwi female ritual specialists), bakhshi ritual healers also play naghra-sunay drums and shawm.
“Mazar and political authority”, the final section of “Mazar festivals of the Uyghurs” (2002), now looks both prophetic and dated. The authors note that state authorities have long taken a suspicious attitude to such cults, but under the PRC they were rarely a target of systematic attack until recently.
The uneven situation across Xinjiang suggests that local decisions, rather than consistent state intervention, control the mazar. […]
In contexts less visible to the outside world, particularly in the case of the large-scale mazar festivals, policy has become more hard-line in recent years. The Ordam festival was first banned under the PRC in 1958 following the national Anti-Rightist campaign, a time when traditional cultural activities across the country but especially in Xinjiang began to be strongly circumscribed. The festival was revived after the end of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s, and at its high point in the mid-1980s it was attracting some 20,000 people each day. However, as Xinjiang’s political situation became increasingly tense during the 1990s, policy towards the mazar festivals became caught up in fears of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and Uyghur separatism, which are regularly equated in government terminology with violence and terrorism. This problem was undoubtedly instrumental in the new ban on the Ordam imposed in 1997.
In other parts of Xinjiang local authorities have preferred to implement policies of regulation and support, ensuring a degree of government control over the festivals.
Discussing official opposition to the mazar, they write:
It is less any real political threat that the mazar festivals may pose, and more the “disorderly” nature of their sights and sounds, which prove so alarming to the authorities. A few Uyghur scholars have recently dared to suggest that the banning of the mazar festivals fuels popular resentment against the authorities and have called for a redrawing of the line between “illegal religious activities” and the “folk customs” of the Uyghurs. There is currently little space for debate of such issues in Xinjiang and, sadly, it appears increasingly likely in the international climate at the time of writing, following America’s declaration of a “global war against terrorism”, that the space for such debate will become yet more limited.
Despite this sensitive background, the mazar pilgrimages, and Uyghur culture generally, managed to continued activity over the following years, and scholars like Rahilä Dawut were still able to pursue their research. Here, for instance, you can find a series of videos of dastan story-tellers that she and her students filmed in 2009 and 2010. The Imam Asim shrine was still attracting pilgrims too, but it was among many shrines and mosques razed since 2016, and as the brutal recent clampdown has intensified the fate of Uyghur culture—and Uyghurs who study it—looks bleak.
C.K. Yang, Religion in Chinese society: a study of contemporary social functions of religion and some of their historical factors (1st edition 1961; Chinese edition here).
The sociological approach to Chinese religion was slow to develop—partly due to the difficulty of access to mainland China after 1949, and partly because of the enduring scholarly bias towards discursive, doctrinal issues and early history.
Indeed, much of Yang’s analysis anticipates approaches since the 1980s’ reforms, including Chau’s “five modalities”. Yang already saw through the bias of the discursive/scriptural modality that still holds a particular allure for many in the West, at the expense of the other “diffused” forms.
This study is an attempt to answer the question: What functions did religion perform in Chinese social life and organization so as to provide a basis for its existence and development, and through what structural forms were these functions carried out?
Having trained at Yanching University in Beijing and the USA, Yang returned to China in 1948, carrying out fieldwork there before having to return to the USA in 1951, where he was to be based at Pittsburgh. Given that his book was published in 1961, it may seem understandable that, until the final chapter, it’s largely written in the past tense. In my book Plucking the winds I noted a similar lapse in accounts of the performance of baojuan “precious scrolls”:
During the years of Maoism, “armchair sinology” was the only option, as in many fields. Even by the early 1980s, Daniel Overmyer still found that “unfortunately there are very few materials available for a discussion of sectarian ritual”.
Soon after, there was a growing awareness of the persistence of ritual practice in mainland China, but lapses still occurred: “We know a certain amount about how baojuanwere [my italics] performed, although there are all too few good first-hand descriptions.”
South Gaoluo liturgists performing the Houtu scroll, 1993.
While Yang’s focus is on the late Qing and Republican eras, and he surveys the early roots of Chinese cultural traits, he introduces major themes that later scholars have been able to elaborate with the benefits of detailed fieldwork since the 1980s’ reforms.
Yang makes extensive use of Republican-era sources such as Grootaers and county gazetteers, notably for Hebei (later explored further by scholars such as Naquin and Duara) and the Shanghai region.
In his Introduction he observes how early-20th-century urban scholars dismissed the role of popular religion in Chinese society, from Liang Qichao to Hu Shi (“China is a country without religion and the Chinese are a people who are not bound by religious superstitions”). By contrast, he notes the importance of temples in the collective life of local communities, going on to observe all kinds of religious influence. And despite the secular views of many intellectuals of the day, the Republican era also saw the beginnings of fieldwork on folklore.
In Chapter 2 Yang notes the place of religion in the integration of the family, including ancestor worship and mortuary rites. Chapter 3 goes on to discuss the religious bond in social groups, and Chapter 4 communal aspects of popular cults—notably temple fairs.
Chapters 5 to 8 explore the political role of religion over the long historical perspective. In his account Yang includes both official and popular cults, with notes on cults such as those of the deities Zhenwu and Chenghuang. Chapter 8 discusses the administrative control of religion, later elaborated by Vincent Goossaert; and the persecution of “heterodox cults”, which he pursues further in Chapter 9 on religion and political rebellion—again, while he cites pre-1949 material, the issue continued to fester under Maoism despite fierce campaigns.
As Yang’s manuscript was largely complete, the 1958 Great Leap Backward led to an appalling national famine, and religious sects rose in resistance over a wide area. The state’s partial withdrawal from extremist policies from 1961 produced a short-lived cultural and religious revival.
Former monk Daguang with village disciples, North Xinzhuang, Beijing suburbs 1959. For more images of Maoism, see here.
Yang was not to know of the maintenance of traditions among village-wide ritual assocations in Hebei through the first decade of the PRC, for instance, or the revival of “ghost operas” in Hunan and elsewhere; but his conceptual framework allows ample room to accommodate such grassroots activities.
In Chapter 12 Yang (inspired by Joachim Wach and Emile Durkheim) makes an important distinction between diffused and institutional religion, with the former dominant and the latter weak in Chinese society. In Adam Yuet Chau’s summary (Miraculous response, pp.143–5) he goes further:
C.K. Yang (1961) famously proposed that in China elements of popular religion are diffused into core secular social institutions such as the family, socioeconomic groups such as trade guilds, communities such as villages and native-place associations, and the state. He argued that the diffused religious ideas and practices provided an air of sanctity to, and thus helped uphold, these core institutions. I suggest that the symbiosis between secular institutions and religious life is even more intimate, that the same principles and mechanisms for organizing ordinary social life are used in organizing popular religious life.
Yang’s chapter concludes:
The lack of a powerful priestly religion did not mean the weakness of religious influence in social life. The Chinese common people, especially the women, hardly passed a day or faced a crisis without resorting to religious assistance. Burning incense to the house gods in the morning and evening, going to the temples to pray on numerous public and private occasions, visiting a classical priest for guidance on big or little problems, attending temple fairs and religious festivals, consulting the religious sections of the almanac for an auspicious time for making a major or minor move, and reflecting on the supernatural influence on life and the universe—all these added up to an intimate relationship between religion and life under the traditional social order. Yet all these activities proceeded without the organized direction of any priesthood. People visited a particular temple, worshiped a particular spirit, called on a particular priest, all in accordance with the practical function of religion for the particular occasion. To what religion a temple belonged might be a puzzle to many academicians, but such questions had no functional significance in the religious life of the common people. Hence, weakness in the structural position of institutional religion was not synonymous with the functional weakness of religion in social life.
See also the festschrift
Wenfang Tang andBurkart Holzner (eds), Social change in contemporary China: C.K. Yang and the concept of institutional diffusion (2007).
In Chapter 13 Yang uses detailed material to show the changing role of religion through the Republican era, noting the limited impact of the secular views of urban intellectuals and state campaigns. I’m happy to see him citing the maxim attributed to Confucius “When the rites are lost, seek throughout the countryside”, which later became a popular refrain with my fieldwork colleagues.
In Yang’s final chapter he looks beyond “Communism as a new faith”. While analysing the secular rituals of the new Party-state, he takes into account the coexistence with both diffused and institutional theistic religion in both policy and practice. He notes the radical assaults on “superstitious practices” and the destruction of religious properties, but always takes a nuanced view—such as this account setting forth from Wudangshan:
On this scenic mountain were eight palaces; thirty-two temples; twelve shrines; a “golden palace”, the largest existing bronze structure in China; and thousands of bronze Taoist images, many of which were unsurpassed works of art. In 1955 and again in 1956, county officials broke up hundreds of “scattered, damaged, or duplicate” bronze images and sold them as scrap metal to help provide funds for the county budget. Over 50,000 catties (about 65,000 pounds) of bronze were collected. In the 1956 campaign it took forty-eight days to destroy the images, one of which weighed over 3,000 catties or nearly two tons, and a large number of which had been preserved in good condition. Leading Taoist priests, some even with limited political status, could only watch the heart-rending destruction helplessly. Afterwards, as news of the wanton destruction reached the provincial authorities, several of the county officials responsible were given demerits as punishment, which seemed to be an insignificant gesture to placate the rising popular protest. Although the Wutangshan case was brought to public attention because of its prominence as a national religious center, the destruction or selling of the properties and sacred objects of innumerable obscure temples in villages remained unnoticed or unrecorded.
Although antireligious riots and destruction on temple property and images were partly inspired by the anti-supernatural attitude which characterized the Communist ideology, they were nevertheless scattered local occurrences without organized direction from the central Communist authorities. Furthermore, such actions were largely restricted to the destruction of religious properties without direct harm to believers. But when religious beliefs formed an active part of a “reactionary” social system, such beliefs became the object of drastic and systematic elimination in order to overthrow the social system which the religious beliefs supported. In such cases, professional practitioners of these beliefs would face persecution.
Yang also unpacks the state policy of preserving the art and architecture of major temples (cf. Wutaishan):
It should be kept in mind that the restoration work is limited to large, well-known temples in each locality, while innumerable humble ones are left to deteriorate or converted to nonreligious uses. The wholesale impressing of priests into secular production work and the conversion of most temples into secular quarters would seriously reduce the already weak foundation of Chinese institutional religion, an effect not canceled by the restoration of large temples.
Of course, worse was to come, but Yang must have welcomed the revival after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the new tide of research.
Even while describing campaigns against sectarian groups (on which we now have much more material), he suggests that
it is probably incorrect to assume that the Communists, although they have recently won success by their mastery of underground techniques, possess fully effective countermeasures against the underground sectarian societies. While the Communists can infiltrate into any of the known societies at will, they may not be able to penetrate into every one of the numerous isolayed small units in a highly decentralized organizational system. Furthermore, as one society is suppressed, others continued to rise spontaneously. The root of the matter lies in the popular belief in the gods and their magic to bring deliverance from suffering, and in the popular tradition or organizing religious groups to offer resistance to an oppressive ruling power against which the individual seems helpless.
His conclusion is prophetic, yet largely free of simplistic flag-waving for the supposed triumph of eternal, sacred values which some Western reviewers read into the more recent revival:
Communism’s probable inability to cope with all social and personal crises that may arise in the future would compel the people, when subjected to extreme distress, to continue to reach beyond the finitude of empirical experience and rational thought for relief. Should this be the case, even if the Communist ideology were to endure as a sociopolitical doctrine, it would have to develop permanent tolerance of theistic religion so that theism could perform the moral integrative function of stabilizing the new social order. The gods might then emerge from their eclipse to play a familiar role under the dominance of a disbelieving political orthodoxy, a situation reminiscent of the long and often stormy co-existence of theistic religion and Confucianism, whose excessively earthly quality invited the development of theistic faiths.
* * *
Through the 1950s few scholars were able to undertake fieldwork on the survival of local ritual traditions—with the laudable exception of considerable projects under the cloak of music studies.
But despite the paucity of material then available on the contemporary situation, Yang didn’t see the 1949 revolution as the end of the story. Though he was writing at such a traumatic time for Chinese society, when it would have been easy to take a black-and-white view, his book contains mature insights.
Stephen Jones: a blog 