Unpacking “Tibetan singing bowls”

Posted on 29/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

singing bowls

There is no credible historical evidence, whatsoever, of Tibetans ever having used singing bowls.

The Tibetan singing bowl doesn’t exist and isn’t real, but the racist mythologization of Tibetan people most definitely is.

For the sake of our collective sanity, it’s worth spreading far and wide recent exposés debunking the myth of “Tibetan singing bowls”. Two online articles are especially relevant, by Tenzin Dheden and Ben Joffe—do please share!

The orientalist fetishisation of the Mystic East comes into its own with the suspicious package of New Age healing, meditation, and “spirituality”, of which the bowls makes sonorous emblems. [1]

In recent decades, through shrewd marketing they began appearing in curio shops and New Age boutiques—and Tibetan refugee stalls. Fed by Google, Twitter, and Amazon, the myth just won’t go away—a field day for muddled hippies, along with crystals and chakras. Don’t get me wrong—do what you like (It’s A Free Country—Oh, hang on…): just don’t pretend they’re part of Tibetan ritual practice. Or that they’re “ancient”.

As Tenzin Dhoden observes:

This Western practice of essentializing Tibetan culture and capitalizing on that cultural commodification forces marginalized Tibetan refugees into a tricky situation—they get the economic opportunity to sell some metal bowls to fascinated white people but at the cost of being a willing participant in the orientalist imagination of Tibetanness, which in turn causes great cultural trauma and pain to the Tibetan people.

Eager hippies are undeterred by the lack of evidence—Joffe notes:

Tibetans’ silence or disavowals of knowledge are interpreted in three typical ways:
1) the Tibetans to whom the author spoke were not privy to the deepest secrets of their own culture, and therefore unable or unqualified to speak
2) These Tibetans had forgotten or lost the secret knowledge of which the bowls are a part, or
3) These Tibetans are hiding something, guarding their knowledge from prying outsiders or for fear of persecution by ‘orthodox’ Buddhist authorities.

He refers to a passage by “French-Belgian anarchist-feminist-opera-singing-esotericist-explorer” Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969), that turns out not really to support the hippies’ argument. And he cites Robert Beer:

Brass or bronze bowls first began to appear on Tibetan refugee stalls during the 1970s, but these objects were actually the eating or offering bowls of these impoverished refugees. Over the last few decades, these Tibetan singing bowls have been widely manufactured for the tourist markets of India and Nepal, but stories of their employment in ancient Tibet as mystical musical instruments are a modern myth.

The bowls seem to have made their debut in a 1972 recording by Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings. Joffe cites Choetso Amnyetsang on Miley Cyrus, and Austrian anthropologist Agehananda Bharati’s “pizza effect”. He ends on a tolerant, nay enlightened, note:

As Tibetans continue to discuss the potential meanings and consequences of these sorts of cultural commodification pizza-effect-meets-cultural-appropriation scenarios, singing bowl enthusiasts continue to strongly resist acknowledging their own “off-label” use of the bowls. As an anthropologist, rather than throw down some gauntlet and declare that singing bowls are or aren’t Tibetan, I would much rather focus on the complicated social and political lives of these deceptively mundane/deceptively sacred objects. If the anthropological literature on religious movements has taught us anything it’s that cognitive dissonance need not spell disillusionment and cosmological collapse. Rather, cognitive dissonance, epistemic “murk”, and excess themselves spur reformulation, and promote innovation, religious creativity, and change. Which totally feels like a vibe anthropologists can get into.

Tenzin Dheden is more candid:

If you find “sound baths” healing, great! Good for you! But if you can, however, please kindly stop mythologizing and exoticizing Tibetans, and leave us out of your pseudo-scientific New Age nonsense. We are quite preoccupied resisting China’s violent settler colonial rule and fighting to preserve our rich cultural heritage as it is.

Not only are the bowls doing a disservice to Tibetan culture generally, but they detract from our understanding of the social life of Tibetan ritual and its soundscape of complex vocal liturgy accompanied by drums and cymbals, shawms and trumpets. [2] Here’s the Lyrichord album Tibetan ritual music (1967):

Consecrating the sacred space

Posted on 27/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Votive chapel of the New Cathedral, Linz.

Further to Buildings and music, and with Bruckner 7 featuring in my posts on Trauma: music, art, and objects and Celibidache, I recall Bruckner’s wonderful sacred a cappella motet Locus iste, composed in 1869 for the dedication ceremony of the votive chapel of the New Cathedral, Linz.

It made an impression on me while singing it in my school choir in the 1960s, but somehow all these decades later, hardly having heard it since, I still remember every note.

Locus iste a Deo factus est,
inaestimabile sacramentum,
irreprehensibilis est.

Here’s Harry Christophers with the Sixteen, a century after the first recording in 1907:

John Eliot Gardiner with the Monteverdi Choir is slower and more ponderous:

* * *

Short and simple as Locus iste is (cf. The art of the miniature), even the wiki page gives a substantial analysis. Discursive analysis is so basic to the whole fabric of WAM, enshrined in academies, programme notes, and so on (see e.g. Heartland excursions); but it’s tangential to world and pop music—where it is no less (and no more) valid, but audiences in general feel less need, if any, to use it to valorise their direct experience (for world music, see Analysing world music, and Dream songs; for pop, see e.g. Abbey road; and for the schism between discursive and experiential approaches to Chinese religion, see Chau on “doing religion” in China).

So we can take or leave analysis of the hymns of the Li family Daoists (such as my Daoist priests of the Li family, ch.14—see e.g. here; or you may prefer just to watch my film), or I say a little prayer.

A cappella, harmonic, choral singing can be exquisite (e.g. Barber and Bach here). By contrast, choral singing in other cultures is usually monophonic, or heterophonic; and in his Cantometrics project Alan Lomax suggests cultural features of societies that may lead to a mellifluous or harsh timbre (among instances of the latter, see e.g. flamenco).

While Western culture also has its ceremonial fanfares, in Chinese ritual the consecration of temples and their statues is an exuberant and noisy affair. As Daoists perform the Opening to the Light (kaiguang 開光) ritual, the soundscape is filled with shawms and percussion “rousing the hall” (naoting 鬧廳). Here’s an instance from Malaysia, performed by emigrants from Yongchun in Fujian (cf. Fujian, 1961 and onwards) before an elaborate altar:

A new handbook on religion in China

Posted on 25/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

cover

In recent years several overviews of the diverse manifestations of religious activity in changing modern China have been published, such as those of Goossaert and Palmer (The religious question in modern China), Adam Yuet Chau, and Ian Johnson. Now we have a substantial collection of essays,

Stephan Feuchtwang (ed.), Handbook on religion in China (2020).

As Feuchtwang observes in his thoughtful introduction, the many expectations raised by the word “religion” are misleading. While there are indeed institutions and “churches”, most religious life takes place in the context of folk life-cycle and calendrical events (“diffused”, by C.K. Yang’s definition), not conforming to any doctrine or any one textual tradition.

Feuchtwang considers the role of religion under the secular state of the PRC:

we have as everywhere to understand how religions and ritual practices and associations have been adapted to the growth of capitalist economy, participation in commercial enterprise, to dwelling in cities, and to different nationalisms, secular governments, and systems of mass schooling and the teaching of history, geography, and mathematized empirical sciences. All entail the new temporality of national narratives and the project of modernization.

Reflecting on rising prosperity and urbanization since the 1980s, he notes:

Urban planning and development, including the urbanization of villages, has transformed most dwellings into apartments, with less space for domestic altars and banquets, and turned most neighbourhood temples into dust under property developments of housing, headquarters, industrial and commercial districts. Banquets for life passage ritual occasions have become more widespread, but in professional catering establishments. Diviners, some using statues of seities, provide services independently. The bigger Daoist or Buddhist temples and their monks and nuns look after lamps for the souls of the dead; churches and mosques outside Xinjiang perform services for their dead. Most ritual services are performed in homes and they have been shortened as the tastes of the young have changed. But the disciplines of self-cultivation brought into the present through transmission of the various ritual traditions in China have flourished, have become global in their reach, alongside academic interest in them, and have been nurtured by new masters.

The nineteen essays are arranged in four sections:

State policies, civic society and cultural revival
Revitalized and modernizing traditions
Daoism, Buddhism, Tibet, the Naxi
Islam and Christianity.

Thus the survey deserves to be widely read. It’s designed to be accessible, like the surveys of Johnson and Chau. But whereas the latter volumes appear in affordable paperback editions, the new handbook’s price of £155 will deter not just individuals but cash-strapped libraries too: one might reasonably expect its 472 pages to be illuminated in gold (cf. The Golden-Character Scripture, a staple of north Chinese ritual ensembles). And it doesn’t even include any photos. Still, it’s another useful introduction to a complex topic.

Mingus

Posted on 23/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Mingus cover

Charles Mingus (1922–79; see website, and wiki) was not only a great bass player (and here’s a jazz bass joke), but also (like Bach) an inspirational composer and bandleader—perhaps the least celebrated of the “Three M’s”: Miles, Monk, and Mingus.

Jazz biographies rarely stint on the sensational, and autobiography can never be “objective”. Deep in a dream, a life of Chet Baker, is mainly a chronicle of his constant sordid search for fixes; by extension, Ladies and gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!! is a work of art. Miles Davis’s autobiography, though far from comfortable, is relatively sober, evoking his constant musical explorations alongside the gritty details of the lifestyle.

But Mingus’s own take on his life—mainly on his first three decades—is highly novelistic, impressionistic, fantastical. Probably what I need is

Brian Priestley, Mingus: a critical biography (1984), or
Gene Santoro, Myself when I am real: the life and music of Charles Mingus (1994).

Instead, I’ve been reading his curious quasi-autobiography

Beneath the underdog (1971/1995/2005), written in the early 60s and mercifully abbreviated for publication—well reviewed here.

While Mingus offers few details of his musical journey, the book does at least expose the psychic ravages caused by racism. The opening sets the tone, with the first of sessions with his psychologist, splitting his childhood personality into three. Throughout he refers to himself in the third person as “my boy”.

Punctuating the tortured self-analysis and catalogue of degrading sexual encounters are occasional vignettes such as his early experience of learning the cello without notation. His itinerant teacher

would teach anyone how to play anything even looking like a musical instrument that poor folks might beg or buy second-hand or on the instalment plan. Maybe he didn’t even admit to himself that he cheated his pupils but the truth was he took no time to give the fundamental principles of a good musical education [sic!]. His short weekly sessions had to result in satisfying sounds that proved to parents their children were really learning something in a status-building money-making field. So Mr Arson by-passed the essentials that even the most talented child must master if he is ever going to learn to read music well, and the parents, as usual, were paying for something their children were not getting.

Mr Arson saw at once Charles could sing the sounds he saw on paper. Without bothering to name the notes, he showed him where to put his fingers on the cello to make that sound. It was as if a bright child who could easily and rapidly pronounce syllables was never taught how syllables fit into words and words in syntax. I’m sure Mr Arson hadn’t any idea his shorthand method would turn out to be great for jazz improvisation, where the musician listens to the sounds he’s producing rather than making an intellectual transference from the score paper to the fingering process. Using simple scales and familiar tunes, Mr Arson would count as he bowed his muted, gypsy-sounding violin with its resin-caked surface and Charles would follow as best he could by ear, knowing only how it sounded and having no conception of the technical processes he should have been learning at that time.

He goes on to play in the LA Junior Phil, where he meets the angelic Lee-Marie. Through their teenage years it was a rather chaste relationship; later she came to embody his Madonna–whore complex.

Still in his teens, Mingus emerges from being bullied while becoming ever more disturbed by racism, and also discovers mysticism. He moves onto bass:

Not even knowing the names of the strings or how to tune his instrument, Charles began practicing hour after hour standing by the RCA Victor console radio in the front room and after a few weeks he began to get the feel of it.

He studies with Red Callender, learns piano with Lloyd Reese, and begins getting gigs. A constant parade of demeaning sexual encounters is graphically described in passages of explicit porn worthy of the Bad Sex Award. In a rare interlude, while working with Bird and Miles he discusses the world of sax mouthpieces with Lucky Thompson (cf. Keef’s rhapsody on open-string guitar tuning):

“Let’s catch a smoke outside, Mingus.”

“I wonder if Buddy still thinks Merle Johnson mouthpieces give a bigger sound. Some teacher’s been telling him that coloured cats don’t get big sounds with open lay mouthpieces.”

“Haw haw, Mingus! It takes effort is what they mean. Work. They don’t like to sweat. The white man ain’t satisfied till they take all the human element out. Like Bird—they made it this far and they give him horns with soft action. He says, “What for? Too late.” He likes working. He plays an old Conn with a number thirty open lay mouthpiece. I remember some kid telling Bird he heard Negroes used trick mouthpieces to make things easier. Bird reached in his case and said, “Here, try this Berg Larsen, son.” The kid put it on his horn and blew. Wheee! Nothing came out but air. He turned red and blue in the face. Not a sound came forth. Bird said, “Give it here, let’s see what’s wrong with it. Oh, the reed’s too soft.” He took out a fifty-cent piece and held the reed to it and burned around it with a cigarette lighter—burned it down almost to the stem. The he tries it out. “Plays beautiful,” Bird said. “Still a little soft but it will do.” If that kid had tried to blow a reed that stiff he’d passed out or died before he got it to play. You know who that was? A kid named Lee Konitz [R.I.P.]. Ask him when you meet him if you ever get to New York…

In 1947, working for the Lionel Hampton band, Mingus meets Fats Navarro, whose early death in 1950 deprived him of a soulmate.

Meanwhile, like Miles, he becomes a more or less inadvertent pimp, with a little help from Billie Holiday. Meeting up again with the erstwhile angelic Lee-Marie, he recruits her to his harem. Still his encounters with Bird, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Roy Eldridge take a back seat to all the relentless balling.

Mingus finds a sympathetic friend in Nat Hentoff, “one of the few white guys you could really talk to in your life”. He checks himself into the psychiatric facility Bellevue, begging the guard to let him in. While there he digs a radio broadcast of the Juilliard quartet playing Bartók. When it turns out to be even harder to get out than in, he turns to Hentoff rather than his psychologist to help him get discharged.

Here’s Lock ‘em up (Hellview of Bellevue, 1960):

After another session with his psychologist, the book ends with Mingus going all mystical on Fats Navarro. But his most creative years were yet to come.

Now here’s a thing:

When Dizzy Gillespie ran his spoof presidential campaign in the early 60s, he nominated Duke Ellington for Secretary of State, Miles Davis for head of the CIA, Max Roach for Minister of Defence, Malcolm X for Attorney General, and Mingus for Minister of Peace.

If only the current lineup were so well qualified…

* * *

After such a pitiless exposé of Mingus’s troubled psyche, it comes as a relief to retreat to the amazing freedom and energy of his music—here’s a fabulous playlist, starting with the extraordinary Moanin’ (1959):

Hog callin’ blues (1962), starring Roland Kirk, is Something Else too:

Going back, here’s his legendary 1953 gig at Massey Hall, Toronto, with Bird, Dizzy, Max Roach, and Bud Powell:

Miles Davis’s own autobiography always has vivid and illuminating comments (p.83):

After Bird went off the scene, I would rehearse with Mingus a lot. He wrote tunes that Lucky and him and me would rehearse. Mingus didn’t give a fuck about what kind of ensemble it was; he just wanted to hear his shit played all the time. I used to argue with him about using all those abrupt changes in the chords in his tunes.

“Mingus, you so fucking lazy, man, that you won’t modulate. You just, bam!hit the chord, which is nice sometimes, you know, but not all the fucking time.”

He would just smile and say, “Miles, just play the shit like I wrote it.” And I would. It was some strange-sounding shit back then. But Mingus was like Duke Ellington, ahead of his time. […]

Mingus was something else, man, a pure genius. I loved him.

And it’s always worth going back to Paul Berliner, Thinking in jazz—not only for the social aspects of learning and performing, but for technical analysis of all the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic detail of the various instruments.

Mingus’s life and music are well evoked on film, notably Triumph of the underdog (Don McGlynn, 1998):

as well as Charlie Mingus 1968 (Thomas Reichman):

Do follow up with The spiritual path of John Coltrane!

Narrative singing in the Pearl River delta

Posted on 21/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Blind singer Dou Wun (right) with Bell Yung, c1975.

I rarely presume to cover south China, but further to my series on blind performers such as bards, a counterpart to the fine work of Bell Yung 榮鴻曾 on the elite qin zither is his study of folk narrative-singing from the Hong Kong region—notably naamyam 南音, [1] as well as the related styles of baan’ngaan 板眼, lungzau 龍舟, and yue’ou 粵謳.

Bell Yung has produced eight CD sets of naamyam songs, mainly his 1975 recordings of the blind singer Dou Wun 杜煥 (1910-1979) accompanying himself on zheng zither. Each set includes a booklet of essays and the complete song texts.

The first CD set was recorded live in 1975 at the Fu Long teahouse in Hong Kong. The second set, Blind Dou Wun remembers his past: 50 years of singing naamyam in Hong Kong, is remarkable for consisting of a six-hour autobiographical song created at Bell Yung’s request. As he comments, it is both ordinary in its story of “displacement, alienation, trials, and triumphs” and extraordinary in that he was the last surviving professional singer of an important genre; and it gives a folk perspective on a turbulent period of Hong Kong’s history.

CD 5 The Blind Musician Dou Wun Offers Auspicious Songs for Festive Occasions contains songs from old Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou, sung for calendrical festivals, opening of a business, and private family celebrations such as birthdays and weddings—including The Eight Immortals’ Birthday Greeting and The Heavenly Official Bestows Blessings.

CD-set 6 The Birth of Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy, with three discs, contains songs that Dou Wun sang for Guanyin’s birthday celebrations on 3rd moon 19th.

For more, the instructive article

Bell Yung, “Voices of Hong Kong: the reconstruction of a performance in a teahouse”, Critical zone 3 (2009)

has thoughtful reflections on the history and cultural identity of Hong Kong, as well as Bell’s own early background growing up there after the family fled from the Communists in 1948, still largely estranged from Cantonese culture. As Dou Wun’s stories seemed increasingly out of step with the glossy skyscrapers, pop music, and the modern educational system, he was discovered by intellectuals who realised his art was precious but did not quite understand it, and his performing venues moved from opium dens, brothels, and teahouses to concert stages and colleges.

In 2004 Bell also issued a fine documentary, A blind singer’s story: 50 years of life and work in Hong Kong.

Note also Bell Yung’s recent book with Sonia Ng on the life and art of Dou Wun.

For the Cantonese diaspora in the USA, note

Bell Yung, Uncle Ng Comes to America: Chinese narrative songs of immigration and love (2013),

a translation of six Toisan (Taishan) muk’yu 木魚 songs sung by Uncle Ng (Ng Sheung Chi, 1910–2002), with four introductory essays, audio recordings, and a documentary. And for temples of early emigrants from the region to California, click here and here.

For fine recordings of Italian immigrants in 1960s’ America, including zampogna and ciaramella in New York, click here! Cf. Accordion crimes. For Cantonese music in London, see here.

Bell introduces the folk music and local culture of Hong Kong in this lecture:

In Chinese, for the sheer variety of local narrative-singing traditions all around China, a good starting point is the vast Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples 中国民族民间音乐集成, province by province, under the separate headings of Zhongguo quyi zhi 中国曲艺志 and Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng 中国曲艺音乐集成. See also my roundup of posts on narrative-singing.

[1] Not to be confused with the Hokkien nanyin in south Fujian, or other genres around south China that use the term!

Script to an iconic head-butt

Posted on 19/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

headbutt

Since I mentioned Zidane’s iconic head-butt in the 2006 World Cup Final—one of the supreme sacrifices in the cause of performance art—further footage has come to light enabling us to reconstruct one side of the, um, conversations leading up to it [Yeah right—Ed.].

The angle of the grainy amateur video (filmed on one of those new-fangled contraptions that I believe are known as “smartphones”) only allows us to see Zidane’s own reactions to Materazzi’s foul-mouthed torrents of abuse. I hereby translate them, reconstructed with the help of a dedicated team of lip–readers:

Funny you should say that, Marco baby, but I Think You’ll Find that my mother is in fact somewhat conservative in the range of her social engagements. Please allow me to suggest that you must be mistaking her for someone else—might a trip to Specsaveurs be in order? I do also note that you seem to confuse my legs for the ball.

[…]

And as to my sister (and again, I’m not sure this is strictly relevant to the matter at hand)—well, Sir, I think you will concur with me that it ill behoves us to cast judgement on the explorations of young people as they negotiate the rules of social interaction of this complex world in which we find ourselves. Doubtless you are au fait with the ouevre of my esteemed compatriot Simone de Beauvoir—indeed, I believe your own country has some fine discussion groups on gender issues. Perhaps I might remind you that the behaviour of men might also be subject to such scrutiny—with their own all-too-human foibles, they cannot always be renowned as bastions of moral probity.

Anyway, With All Due Respect, I suppose we really should tear ourselves away for a while, however reluctantly, in order to display our athletic prowess in this Beautiful Game of ours for the benefit of the assembled multitudes. It’s been absolutely super chatting with you, little Marco—I must say how much I enjoy our little tête-a-têtes

BAM@@*

See also The c-word. For an off-pitch bust-up, and a brilliant headline, click here; for Daoist football, and men moving the goalposts, here. For more on women’s football, see here.

The Celibidache mystique

Posted on 17/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Celibidache with the Berlin Phil, 4th December 1945.

Following on from my posts on conductors, and their fortunes under Nazism, another conductor who contributed greatly to the “maestro myth” was Sergiu Celibidache (1912–96; see here, wiki, and many articles, e.g. here).

In his chapter on “The mavericks” in Norman Lebrecht’s stimulating book The maestro myth, he compares Celibidache—revered as “an idiosyncratic idealist, almost a musical saint”—somewhat unfavourably with Karlos Kleiber and Klaus Tennstedt. While some of my own comments here may seem less than reverent, the intensity of Celibidache’s vision made a welcome antidote to the blandness of many identikit maestros.

A Romanian, he trained in Berlin under the Reich from 1936. After the defeat of Germany, the Berlin Phil (“never a Nazi orchestra”—see this detailed article, on a useful site), struggled to revive in a city devastated by the war. Leo Borchard was temporarily appointed as chief conductor; but when he was accidentally shot dead by an American sentry at a checkpoint on 23rd August 1945, and with other local conductors tainted by their links with the Nazi regime, the young, inexperienced Celibidache, as an “untainted neutral citizen”, was soon chosen to take charge.

From 1947, when the great Furtwängler was deemed sufficiently de-Nazified to return to the stage, they worked harmoniously together, although Celibidache’s efforts to remould the orchestra met with resistance.

His last concert with them was the Brahms Requiem on 29th November 1954—the day before Furtwängler died. Karajan, a streamlined corporate prospect (cf. Stravinsky’s reported comment on his Rite of Spring) despite his well-attested links with Nazism, was chosen to take over as chief conductor, whereupon Celibidache flounced off in a 38-year huff. He went on to work with several orchestras, notably the Munich Phil from 1979—a fruitful relationship marred by the ignoble episode of his dismissal of the trombonist Abbie Conant.

The Celibidache myth was cunningly burnished by his refusal to make commercial recordings after 1950 (“listening to a recording is like going to bed with a photograph of Brigitte Bardot”. Discuss)—though a lot of his performances have since surfaced. Lebrecht’s conclusion is typically reserved:

He is a showman, pure and simple, with an eccentric, though effective, mode of self-projection.

* * *

From 1939, in the unlikely context of the Nazi regime, Celibidache had learned about Zen under the influence of his guru Martin Steinke (Daojun 道峻)—cf. other early Western Zen devotees such as R.H. Blyth, Eugen Herrigel (the latter a genuine Nazi supporter), and J.D. Salinger, and later worthies like Gary Snyder and Alan Watts. Perhaps pundits made more of Celibidache’s interest in Zen than he did.

Celi with monk

Apparently in Japan, 1980s? Source here—anyone know more about this image?

Celibidache was among several fine conductors who performed from memory. Here he is with the Munich Phil in Brahms St Anthony variations—a wonderful piece:

and while we’re about it, here’s Furtwängler’s version with the Berlin Phil in 1954, shortly before he died:

Passing over Celibidache’s rare excursions into the baroque, such as Bach’s 2nd orchestral suite (here) and the opening of the B minor mass (here), he favoured slow tempi for the romantic repertoire too—his rendition of the first movement of Tchaik 6 lasts no less than 25 minutes:

Bruckner 7 was perfect for him (cf. this article by Tom Service, as well as my post Trauma, including Furtwängler conducting the Adagio in 1942 and my own memories of playing it in the NYO under Rudolf Schwarz). Along with many treasures such as the Rattle–Sellars–Padmore staged Matthew Passion, another boon of the Digital Concert Hall site (currently offering free access for a month) is Celibidache performing the symphony in 1992 on his return to the Berlin Phil after an absence of 38 years.

Coda of the Adagio, with magical pizzicato in the bass.

On the same site, do watch this documentary, featuring interesting comments from the musicians on Celibidache’s relationship with the orchestra following the war—with archive footage such as Menuhin rehearsing the Brahms concerto in 1946 (more here). But the core of the film is Celi’s detailed rehearsing of Bruckner 7 for the 1992 concert; in extreme contrast to the great Rozhdestvensky (and, you might suppose, to Zen), he demanded a lot of rehearsal time. *

The concert is also here:

And here’s a live performance with the Munich Phil in 1990:

Call Me Old-Fashioned, but Celibidache’s laborious approach to achieving a “transcendent experience” made a novel take on Zen and the Art of Rehearsal that the Tang masters would hardly have recognised. S-Simon Rattle, the orchestra’s chief conductor from 2002, adopted a very different style of working with musicians; click here for their Bruckner 7 at a 2014 concert in memory of his predecessor the great Claudio Abbado.

* OK, now I’m going to don my Jaded London Muso hat (indeed, here it is )—German musicians may be more accustomed to lengthy rehearsals than we Brits (Celi’s relationship with the LSO was not always smooth, a possible source for one of musos’ favourite maestro-baiting stories). Still, in the Bruckner rehearsal, as he goes over and over the opening few bars of the symphony, one can almost see them muttering to each other, “FFS, at this rate it’s gonna take us another 38 years just to get to the end of the movement…” (cf. this story). For more on rehearsal, click here.

Celibidache’s interminable instructions (sometimes evocative, sometimes less so) are just the kind of thing that orchestral players resent, helpless captives of a monologue. With a London orchestra such verbosity may lead to passive resistance. Small and Nettl have likened orchestras to factories or plantations in their unquestioning submission to an all-powerful boss in the service of a Higher Cause.

As conducting has come to be considered a less dictatorial, more collegiate task, nowadays many conductors try to work out how to achieve the result they envisage by relying more on their own gestures rather than on words; when the whole object is to achieve rapport, didactic cajoling can be alienating. It’s as if some conductors keep having to stop to tell musos how to play because they can’t manage to express it by conducting effectively. It doesn’t seem like a good way for a conductor to endear himself to them—

or maybe Celibidache was just exacting his revenge on them for having chosen Karajan instead of him…

Still, it’s good that he made an effort to get them to control their vibrato (film, from 25.08). And the concert sounds great—the orchestra must have been so relieved that they could finally just get through the whole piece without constant interruptions from the maestro.

Coronavirus in China: four posts

Posted on 15/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

LWL

To date I’ve published four posts on Coronavirus in China—two featuring songs critical of the official response, and two on local ritual activity. How strange it now seems to reflect that when I wrote these, the virus seemed like a distant problem.

Here I feature a song by blind bard Liu Hongquan in Shanxi, mourning whistleblower Li Wenliang—also including a harrowing account of rural poverty
and this post has some fine songs by Gansu singer Zhang Gasong, with a note on the traditional morality tales he studied with senior blind bards.

I made a digested version of these two posts into an article for the stimulating online magazine First of the Month, and an edited Italian version appears in the journal Sinosfere, also worth consulting.

sdr

Moving on to ritual life, here I explore temple activity behind closed doors in Sichuan
and this post details the uninterrupted activity of individual household Daoists in north Shanxi, “serving the people” as they meet the constant demand for routine burial services. In a recent update, I note that the full ritual sequence, with the whole Daoist group performing funeral liturgy, has now been restored.

See also the very end of my post on Navajo ritual and musical culture.

Chinese-Russian Muslims: the Dungan people

Posted on 13/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Source: wiki.

Among the many ethnic minorities of the former Soviet Union (see e.g. Cheremis, Chuvash, and Kazakhs), the Dungan people are Chinese Hui Muslims who fled in waves from Shaanxi and Gansu in northwest China by way of Xinjiang, following the uprisings of the 1870s. Mainly living in Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan, by 2003 they numbered around 100,000. Along with their traditional customs they preserved their original Chinese dialects, using Cyrillic instead of Chinese characters.

* * *

In the West, knowledge of the Dungan people sets forth from the work of the remarkable Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, great-granddaughter of the composer.* The following is adapted from this post. I do hope she’s been writing her memoirs.

Her father Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakoff, a high-ranking officer in the Czarist army, had fled to China after the 1917 Revolution. After the fall of St Petersburg he joined the Russian community in Harbin in northeast China, where Svetlana was born in 1931.

Later the family moved to the capital Peking, where the young Svetlana received a mixed Russian–Chinese education. During the Japanese occupation of Peking the family took refuge in the southwestern province of Yunnan, where they were eventually granted Chinese citizenship.

In 1945, after the retreat of the Japanese, the family returned to Peking. Svetlana’s second father, the last governor of Kamchatka under Czarist rule, took up a professorship of history at Tsinghua University. Svetlana enrolled at the Catholic Fu Jen University in Peking and became one of the rare foreigners studying and living among the local Chinese students, witnessing violent clashes between Communist and Nationalist troops. She was present during the siege of the campus by Communist troops, and was forced to attend anti-foreigner and anti-missionary campaigns under Mao Zedong.

Following the 1949 Communist revolution, the Rimsky-Korsakoffs were stripped of their Chinese nationality. A period of economic and psychological hardship began for the family. The father was forced to quit his professorship of history for ideological reasons, and to teach Russian instead. In the 1950s the family fled China by boat, along with the last missionaries expelled from China. Svetlana was now stateless, a plight that would only end many years later when she received Australian citizenship.

In 1960 she enrolled in the master’s programme for Asian languages at Georgetown University, Washington. Hoping to study Chinese proverbs, she sought the advice of Fr Paul Serruys, professor of Chinese philology at the university. But once he learned of Svetlana’s mixed Russian-Chinese background, Serruys promptly steered her to work on the language of the Dungan minority. In 1965 Svetlana submitted her master’s dissertation The Dungan dialect: introduction and morphology—the first scholarly work on the Dungans in the West. Virtually no other written materials on them were available in the West, and no fieldwork had yet been done among the Dungans themselves. Victor Mair pursues the Dungan language here, with links.

After Georgetown, Svetlana began teaching Chinese at Australian National University (Canberra) as she worked on a PhD. While still engaged in projects on early Chinese literature, her fascination with the Dungans remained.

In 1977, she embarked on the first of several stays with the Dungans, who were then living in kolkhoz collectives in the Kyrghyz and Kazakh republics. Svetlana shared their daily life, attending their weddings and funerals and recording their language. In the 1980s she also worked with the “national Dungan poet” Iasyr Shivaza.

Among her publications on the Dungans are

Soviet Dungan kolkhozes in the Kirghiz S.S.R. and the Kazakh S.S.R., Oriental monograph series, 25, Canberra (1980)
“Soviet Dungan nationalism: a few comments on their origin and language”, Monumenta Serica 33 (1977–8).
“Karakunuz : An Early Settlement of the Chinese Muslims in Russia“, Asian folklore studies 51 (1992), citing impressive early Russian ethnographies as well as later fieldwork under the USSR, with an Appendix on her own visits in 1977, 1985, and 1991.

Dungan 1

Karakunuz (renamed Masanchin in 1965), Kazakhstan, 1991, from Dyer, ibid.
Much as I’d like to offer a photo of the Dungans during the Soviet period, media images revolve predictably around weddings and cuisine.

More recently the Dungans feature in the work of scholars of the Hui Muslims, such as Dru Gladney, Jonathan Lipman, and Ha Guangtian. Inside the PRC, while the Uyghurs bear the brunt of recent persecutions, the Hui Muslims are not exempt.

On the cultural front, Vibeke Børdahl kindly alerts me to the work of the Russian sinologist Boris Riftin (1932–2012) on Dungan folktales, notably

Li Fuqing 李福清 [Boris Riftin], Donggan minjian gushi chuanshuo ji 東干民間故事傳說集 [Collection of Dungan folktales and legends] (2011, translated from original 1977 Russian edition), reviewed in CHINOPERL 31 (2012), along with the tribute
Rostislav Berezkin, “Academician Boris L’vovich Riftin (1932–2012): the extraordinary life of a brilliant scholar”.

Riftin first visited the Dungans in 1950, going on to work as a volunteer there in 1953—a period when ethnography of the changing times would have been instructive, yet impossible.

And now Kenneth J. Yin is publishing major collections in English translation:

Dungan folktales and legends (2021)
Mystical forest: collected poems and short stories of Dungan ethnographer Ali Dzhon (2023),

with more to follow.

* * *

As ever, what interests me in particular here is the lives of people, and their culture, through the turbulent, distressing period of Stalin’s regime (cf. The Ukraine famine, The whisperers, Svetlana Alexievich, and again the Kazakh famine); I’d like to read details of the early years of the revolution, the Great Purge, the Great Patriotic War and the aftermath. But it seems that such stories for the Dungans remain elusive.

Even in 2020 a violent ethnic clash occurred that resulted in more cross-border flight:

With thanks to Beth McKillop.

* For a superfluous yet wonderful link, do listen to my violin teacher Hugh Maguire’s 1964 recording of Scheherazade with Pierre Monteux and the LSO.

Bach’s Matthew Passion, staged

Posted on 11/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Bach https://stephenjones.blog/2020/04/11/matthew-passion-staged/

For virtual Easter, among the many blessings of the Digital Concert Hall website (register for a free trial here, valid for a week) is

Bach’s Matthew Passion in the staged version by Peter Sellars, with S–Simon Rattle directing the Berlin Phil in 2013,

here.

The audio of their 2014 Prom isn’t currently available on BBC Radio 3, but do immerse yourself in the ritual drama of the filmed version from Berlin.

At its heart is the astounding Mark Padmore as the Evangelist (note his illuminating discussion with Peter Sellars). Also moving is the human role of the chorus, as well as the staging of the arias—such as Aus liebe and Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand. The entire “collective meditation” is overwhelming.

On “intersubjective tears” in 18th-century German religious music, see here. Further to “performative tears” (links here), for anyone who doesn’t know Bach’s two settings of the Evangelist’s cry of “und ging hinaus/heraus… und weinete bitterlich“, then listen and weep, along with Peter and the Evangelist—

in the Matthew Passion (Part 2, from 18.55), leading into Erbarme Dich (for which, also click here and here),
and it’s just as moving in the John Passion (again with Mark Padmore here, from 33.48; cf. this Proms performance).

Jonathan Miller’s 1993 staged version is wonderful too:

For background on the Bach Passions—and, um, Daoist ritual—click here; for the Pasolini film, here. My many posts on Bach are collected in A Bach retrospective.

Fassbinder’s bitter tears

Posted on 09/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Bitter tears

Tears feature in several of my posts, such as the Evangelist in the Bach Passions, Nina Hagen’s Naturträne, the Uyghur ashiq, and Yesterday (cf. the traumas expressed in flamenco cante jondo; see also What is serious music?!).

Yet another of those great arthouse films that captivated me in my youth (even if I could hardly have understood it) is The bitter tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972). Here’s a trailer:

With an all-female cast led by Margit Carstensen and Hanna Schygulla, the atmosphere is unrelentingly claustrophobic. The soundtrack includes the Walker Brothers, Jo Green Guiseppe Verdi, and The Platters—here’s the Smoke gets in your eyes scene:

While we’re on The Platters, here’s the wonderful Only you (1955)—I’m not sure how deliberate this vignette of the diners was in laying bare the hierarchical racial structure of American society:

And I can never resist the theremin:

Often described as a successor to Fassbinder is Pedro Almodóvar. And for a bonus, almost as perfect in its simplicity as Härlig Är Jorden is Orlando Gibbons’ Drop, drop slow tears (1623):

Precious recordings from imperial China

Posted on 07/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Berthold Laufer (left), Hankou c1904. Source here.

Wonderfully, the Indiana Archives of Traditional Music has now made available the Berthold Laufer China Collection of 385 wax cylinder recordings that Laufer made in Shanghai and Beijing in 1901 and 1902—in the wake of the Boxer uprising, as the collapse of the Qing dynasty was bringing two millennia of imperial rule to an end.

To explore the recordings, click here
(the link may take some time to respond)

The anthropologist Berthold Laufer (1874–1934) led the 1901–1904 Jacob H. Schiff expedition to China, also making a comprehensive ethnographic collection of objects used in daily life, agriculture, folk religion, medicine, crafts, and puppetry, including costumes and musical instruments.

The first 211 tracks in the collection were recorded in Shanghai (including many arias from Beijing opera, in chamber qingchang 清唱 form), tracks 212–385 in Beijing—the latter including drum singing such as Xihe dagu, Meihua dagu, and danxian. For more, see

Hartmut Walravens, “Popular Chinese music a century ago: Berthold Laufer’s legacy”, Fontes Artis Musicae 47.4 (2000)
articles by Laurel Kendall.

Of course, Laufer’s precious recordings are far from a general survey of musicking in late imperial China. Still, it would be most churlish of me to lament that he didn’t record other soundscapes such as temple and folk ritual…

For posts on Qing court music, click here; for rare moving images of religious life in 1930s’ Fujian, here; for archive recordings from before and since the Cultural Revolution, here. And for Laufer’s egregiously misguided praise of smoking, see under Vermeer’s hat.

Punk: a roundup

Posted on 05/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

slits

I may be an unlikely chronicler of punk, but it seems an important theme. Here’s a selection from the punk tag—starting with the great Viv Albertine:

moving on to

GDR 2 https://stephenjones.blog/2018/05/02/gdr-2/

and by way of Nina Hagen, I explore punk under state socialism:

as well as

La Movida Madrileña in Spain and
New musics in Iran.

Madrid punk

The temple of memories

Posted on 03/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Jing Jun cover

Along with my common themes of religion, Maoism, and famine, I plead for more studies of ritual life in Gansu (see Gansu: connecting social trauma and expressive culture). So I’ve been re-reading the ethnographic classic

Jun JING, The temple of memories: history, power, and morality in a Chinese village (1996).

The opening of the book is compelling:

The Kongs of Dachuan cannot forget that winter, more than three decades ago, when their village was effaced and life as they had known it had ended. For much of 1960 they had ignored, then resisted, the government’s declaration that their homes lay in the path of one of the more ambitious projects of the Great Leap Forward, and that by autumn’s end they would have to make way for a hydroelectric dam and reservoir. […]

So months lapsed, the deadline passed, and still the Kongs stayed on. And then, on a chill December night, the militia entered, shock troops of eviction, targeting first households without strong young men. Old women screamed and clung to their beds, refusing to leave. They were carried out bodily. The supporting pillars of the houses were roped to mules and pulled down. As dawn broke, the frightened villagers began dismantling their own houses in a scramble to salvage what they could to build shelter elsewhere. They hastily dug up the graves of immediate ancestors and close relatives, and, in violation of all tradition, unceremoniously threw bones in cement sacks or whatever other containers they could find for reburial on higher ground. “It was no time for being proper about such things,” an elderly villager recalled years later. Nor did they have the physical strength to save older graves; the trauma of dislocation was exacerbated by a debilitating famine, the worst in modern Chinese history.

While still a student in the Sociology department of Peking University, Jing Jun began fieldwork in Dachuan in 1989, prudently absenting himself from the tense atmosphere of the capital in the aftermath of the 4th June massacre (cf. Liao Yiwu). He is among several fine Chinese anthropologists and folklorists such as Guo Yuhua, Wang Mingming, Yue Yongyi, and Ju Xi.

Apart from fieldwork with villagers, he also unearthed material by consulting the county archives.

* * *

For some scholars such a topic might be a disembodied paean to the resilience of imperial grandeur, but for an ethnographer like Jing Jun it makes a telling prism on the traumas of the Maoist era. Noting the background of serious poverty, he goes on to detail the fate of the “community of suffering” (cf. Guo Yuhua) after the 1949 revolution.

Jing’s study makes a worthy complement to detailed accounts of turbulent events in individual villages under Maoism. He explores two main themes: suffering (both individual and communal), and means of recovery from political persecution, economic deprivation, and cultural disruption. Amidst state attempts to dictate and manipulate remembrance and forgetting, he focuses on the politics of social memory, suggesting three main topics: collective, official, and popular memory.

Stylistically, whereas obligatory academic citations of broader theoretical perspectives may be formulaic, Jing Jun has a rare gift for making such comparisons revealing.

* * *

In Dachuan village in Yongjing county southwest of the provincial capital Lanzhou, 85% of the villagers belonged to the Kong lineage, considering themselves to be descended from Confucius. Dachuan was the centre for an ancestral cult of many villages in the county.

The earlier history of the temple was not untroubled: it had been destroyed in 1785, rebuilt in 1792, looted and burned during the major Muslim rebellion in 1864, but only restored in 1934—it seems curious if the cult remained inactive over this long period. It was just at this time that the Kongs of Dachuan contributed to the compilation of a major genealogy documenting the nationwide lineage; Confucius and the major ritual site for his worship at Qufu in Shandong play a major role in villagers’ historical imaginations (cf. the fate of the Confucian ritual in Hunan).

After “Liberation”

The destruction of their village was the central event in a long procession of tragedies for the Kongs under the new Communist regime.

Following the Communist takeover in 1948, the prelude to a long period of state-organised violence was the siege of Dachuan by the PLA in December 1950 in response to reports that a rebellion was being organised by “secret societies” led by the Kongs.

All exits from the village were sealed off as soldiers went from one compound to the next, searching for weapons. After a full cartload of daggers, spears, swords, hunting guns, and old muskets were hauled away, a mass rally was staged and about fifty local people were paraded onto an improvised stage. These villagers, whom the government accused of being affiliated with “reactionary religious associations” (fandong hui dao men), were warned by military and government officials that any misconduct on their part would meet with severe penalties. Three Kongs, key members of a semi-religious and highly militant group known as the Big Sword Society (da dao hui), were escorted out of Dachuan, and beheaded.

The search for weapons and the executions at Dachuan heralded the new government’s crackdown on religious societies. Five months later, an “investigation-and-registration” campaign identified more than 11,500 people in Yongjing county as members of “reactionary religious associations”.

The divisive land reform campaign was implemented from 1951 to 1953. Under the commune system the system of lineage elders was destroyed. Even as the Kong lineage was being persecuted, they continued to provide the village leadership.

In the early years of Communist rule, many of those not targeted

engaged in clandestine activities in smaller religious groups attached to temples honouring various deities and community patron gods. […]
Geomancy and shamanistic healing were still secretly practised until at least the early 1960s.

But during the 1958 Great Leap Backward, police and militia forces rounded up 855 people in Yongjing county; temples were dismantled, and religious implements destroyed. The Confucius temple at Dachuan was sealed off. In August an armed uprising was quelled in nearby Dongxiang county. As famine escalated from late 1959, the villagers were relocated in 1960, as the temple lay decrepit and abandoned.

Large-scale hydraulic projects were a major part of the state’s efforts to generate electricity by creating reservoirs, despite the great suffering they caused—and their social disruption continues to concern anthropologists. On 31st March 1961, as the floodgate of the Yanguoxia dam was lowered, Dachuan was among many villages flooded. Though there was considerable resistance, most villagers were forcibly relocated, while some remained on higher ground there. One of the most traumatic violations of tradition was the loss of gravelands.

Such stories are also submerged under the “master narrative” of rosy state propaganda, seeking to legitimise painful experiences.

The remains of the temple, empty and waterlogged, were still standing until 1974, when it was destroyed in the anti-Lin Biao and Confucius campaign.

The 1980s’ revival
Such a history of Maoism at the grassroots needs telling anyway, but it’s also essential background to the revival since the 1980s after the collapse of the commune system. Jing Jun observes:

These ideas and practices are not mechanically retrieved from the past; they are blended with cultural inventions, shaped by the local experience of Maoism, and permeated with contemporary concerns.

In a similar pattern to that taking place throughout China, as the villagers began to retrieve what had survived of the temple artefacts, rituals were held at a provisional ancestral shrine from 1984. The Confucius temple was rebuilt in 1991.

Dachuan 1

Jing explores the backgrounds and moral authority of the new temple leaders, and reflects on the whole process of cultural invention.

In a situation in which the administrative power of Dachuan’s village cares was rapidly shrinking, leadership in ancestral worship could be a key step toward winning respect, popularity, and even trust.

But power structures were in flux, as grievances from the Maoist era became public, with petition drives and demonstrations common.

Since the surviving lisheng ritual performers had only distant memories of how to perform the ceremony, they gradually recreated its liturgical structure, actions, and vocal style, culminating with the compilation of a ritual handbook in 1991 (this is not quite a typical case, I’d say: in many regions of China under Maoism, household ritual specialists had managed to transmit a more substantial corpus of their ritual expertise.) As Jing notes, there were certain models for the literary style of the written texts in the fragments of wider religious life. And I might suggest that even the rhythms and high-pitched style of the chanted elegies were not recreated in a vacuum: the traditional soundscapes of folk-song, local opera and shadow-puppetry, and so on—which had persisted to some extent under Maoism (for Hunan, see e.g. here)—might offer piecemeal clues.

Jing addresses the complex issues in studying genealogies, again focusing on social memory.

Dachuan 2

In 1992 the nearby village of Xiaochuan restablished its own Confucian temple. From 1958 it had suffered a similar fate to that of Dachuan. In both villages the ceremonies were now opened to outsiders beyond the immediate lineage. Jing distinguishes “dominant” and “variant” ritual structures.

In the latter, women played a major role (again, this is typical of temple fairs more generally)—including a spirit medium who brought over thirty female followers from her nearby village. Women were particularly devout in making vows, burning paper offerings, and singing songs of lamentation.

An older woman whose vivid renditions of songs from qinqiang, or Shaanxi opera, attracted a thick circle of spectators was led away by men in charge of the festival’s security. Another circle formed around a middle-aged woman whose body jerked spasmodically and who mubled what sounded like poems as if in a trance. She was carried away by the security guards, who were young men from Xiaochuan. After these women clamed down, they were sternly lectured by the festival organisers for having performed “superstitious” acts that could draw unwelcome attention from the local government to Xiaochuan’s festival.

Jing notes hierarchies among those attending the festival, and in the food provided. He goes on,

The woman’s eviction displeased some visitors, since singing is perfectly acceptable at many temple activities. This incident thus indicates a clash between two different perceptions of the festival.

While the Kongs were as fond as anyone of combining the singing of local opera with the worship of local deities, they rejected it as a proper form during a service for ancestor worship. Jing suggests that their antipathy went back to an incident in the early 1940s, when community leaders had objected to the staging of an opera inside the Xiaochuan temple to celebrate a bumper harvest—their resentments partly based on a rich man treating the occasion as a self-serving display of wealth and generosity. But as he says, few would have been aware of that. Such incidents mainly illustrate multivocal interpretations:

Such negotations were precipitated by variations in historical experience, personal memory, understanding of religious symbols, and concepts of ritual propriety.

Jing opens the impressive final chapter, “Finding memories in Gansu”, by encapsulating the tension between ethnography and history:

In an ethnography of the Kongs, one could take a synchronic approach, a type of analysis typical of the structural functionalists and French structuralists, that treats a society as if it were “outside of time”, that is, without reference to historical context.

Indeed, as I have noted, it’s more complex: in many field reports on local Chinese ritual, the fieldwork makes a pretext for timeless depictions that are dominated by early historical context while glossing over the current social picture.

Anyway, Jing gives ample reasons for placing the Dachuan rituals in their modern setting. He goes on to give instances of accounts of the memory of suffering in other societies, including Alan Mintz and Lucette Valensi on the Holocaust, and Anastasia Shkinlyk’s devastating study of the despair and agony of a relocated Ojibwa community (see here). He also cites Arthur Kleinman’s work on illness narratives among Chinese patients. And we can now add Stephan Feuchtwang’s study After the event (cf. China: commemorating trauma, including Wu Wenguang’s memory project).

He is right to note the official conformity of depictions in county gazetteers compiled since the 1980s—although in the accounts of Maoist campaigns and famine for some counties like Yanggao in north Shanxi (see e.g. my Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.122–3) one may discern a subtle resistance to state propaganda. He also sets forth from Frances Yates’s 1966 The art of memory to explore the historical memory embodied in religious artefacts.

As Jing Jun observes, the reinstated worship of Confucius in the Dachuan area is not an isolated case of religious revival in a rather remote part of China. He places it in the broad context of the religious revival in China, if not in Yongjing county. Thus while we find vignettes on other forms of religious expression (mediums, sectarian groups), his coverage might have benefitted from an outline of the broader fortunes of ritual life in the area through the 1950s, such as the fate of other temples in Dachuan and nearby, funerals and temple fairs, and the activities of household Daoists and bards. The story of the Dachuan temple make a particular but revealing case. [1]

For related reflections on memory in China, see here.

[1] Though focusing on ritual life before and since the Maoist era rather than on state initiatives under Maoism, a project on cults in Shaanxi and Shanxi led by Christian Lamouroux and Marianne Bujard, with Qin Jianming, Dong Xiaoping, and Patrice Fava, is also relevant. See e.g.

Marianne Bujard, with Dong Xiaoping, “Hydraulique et société en Chine du Nord: une coopération franco-chinoise en sciences sociales”, BEFEO 2001, notably the Yaoshan shengmu cult in Pucheng, Shaanxi:
Qin Jianming 秦建明 and Lü Min吕敏 [Marianne Bujard], Yaoshan shengmu miao yu shenshe 堯山聖母廟與神社 [The sacred mother temple and holy parishes of Yaoshan] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003).

Frozen brass

Posted on 01/04/2020 by StephenJones.blog

Wind bands, and brass bands, continue to play a major role in the soundscape of many cultures around the world (cf. New Orleans brass bands; see also trumpet tag; for early wind bands in Europe, click here).

A splendid project by Rob Boonzajer Flaes, with Fred Gales, Ernst Heins, and Miranda van der Spek, resulted in 2 CDs issued on Pan records in 1993:

Frozen brass: Anthology of brass band music, #1: Asia
Frozen brass: Anthology of brass band music, #2: Africa and Latin America.

They’re magnificently ear-scouring. Both are on Spotify, and the Asia tracks are on a YouTube playlist:

The liner notes give perspectives:

In the times of colonialism, when European soldiers, traders, and missionaries set out to occupy large parts of other continents, they were accompanied by brass bands. The brass band stood for more than just instruments, uniforms, and songs. The martial appearance, the loudness of the instruments, the discipline of the musicians, and its mobility made it a proper symbol of the culture of the conquerors. Technological developments, strict training, rationality, and standardization had produced this ensemble: a band that could play anything in the temperate scale, everywhere, and always in time; a multi-functional ensemble suitable for emperors and military campaigns, enlightening the masses and evoking edifying religious feelings.

The brass band conquered the world as a well-devised formula, as a musical weapon, and a thunderous proof of Western military and religious superiority. Western habits and customs were forced upon the colonized; traditional music, dances, and instruments were forbidden; and local musicians were trained on brass instruments to perform in church, in school or at public events such as national holidays, royal birthdays, and visits of dignitaries. But of course sooner or later, someone discovered that a brass band could do more than merely reproduce Western classics, and enterprising musicians started to use the instruments to music a local audience would listen to, dance to, and—even more important—pay for.

The rigid and uniform colonial brass band came to terms with local music, leading to a wide variety of popular band traditions. Musical hybrids developed, not as part of any grand cultural tradition, but as an ingredient of local popular culture. Nowadays in many countries brass bands (or brass band derivatives) have become indispensable for weddings, circumcisions, processions, funerals, and even for communicating with spirits and inducing trance-like states.

Similar musical hybrids, for example the Bleh music from the Balkans, klezmer from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and—most famous of all—the development of jazz in New Orleans attracted the attention of the recording and writing industry. Outside Europe and North America, however, brass bands are only locally known.

The African, Asian, and Latin American brass bands are in many ways different from their western counterparts: the instruments may be worn out, or replaced by replicas; traditional drums may be added; and the uniforms can be anything from the local postman’s cast-offs to the most elaborate pieces of art. Marches and hymns are replaced by local tunes, mesmerizing rhythms, or decorous funeral music: tokens of the creativity of thousands of nameless plodders who made the brass band formula their musical way of living.

CD 1 contains tracks from Nepal, India, Indonesia (Sumatra, Java, the Moluccas, Sulawesi), and the Philippines; CD 2 has examples from Ghana, Surinam, Bolivia, and Peru. The notes give useful introduction to genres and bands.

For a taste, how about this Batak hymn from Sumatra, for the second day of a 1992 Protestant funeral:

Such tracks are not mere curiosities, but a window onto the soundscape of social life. Of course, audio recordings can only hint at the “red-hot sociality” of people interacting for communal activities—indeed, at the moment one misses social interaction altogether.

* * *

Chang Wenzhou’s big band plays for village funeral, Shaanbei 2001.

Brass bands also became common in major Chinese cities from the 1880s, introduced by such Westerners such as Robert Hart, and in the Republican era warlords used them for their own armies. Since the 1980s they have developed out of folk shawm bands (my many posts on which start here), such as in Shaanbei (see my Ritual and music of north China, volume 2: Shaanbei, ch.9, and DVD). For links to posts on shawms around the world (China, Tibet, south Asia, the Middle East, north Africa, Europe), click here.

Left: funeral procession, Quanzhou 1990;
Right: Catholic band, Gaoluo village, New Year 1995.

As a bonus, click here for a wind band on ice in Tuva—opening with a Tsam masked ritual procession, to boot. This rather pre-empts my plan to stage the Matthew Passion On Ice.