On visits to Istanbul, the curious outsider like me may be inclined to sample a menu of traditional Turkish expressive culture—steering well clear of the commodified Whirling Dervishes, I’ve dabbled in the rituals of the Sufi tekke and Alevi cemevis, rejoiced in the ezan call to prayer (as no locals seem to do), the exhilarating sounds of davul-zurna drum-and-shawm, and so on. Jazz clubs also beckon, and the less geriatric might seek out hip-hop and club culture (see under Landscapes of music in Istanbul).
Back in London, alongside the thriving “world music” scene, I haven’t grown out of my classical background, still regularly attending WAM concerts—but somehow this makes an unlikely choice for me in Istanbul. Still, it’s all part of the city’s cultural scene, with its own history since the late Ottoman and Republican eras (see two articles on the useful History of Istanbul site, here and here).
So I sallied forth to the Süreyya Opera House in swinging Kadiköy for a concert in which Cem Mansur directed the strings of the Gedik Philharmonic Orchestra.
The conductor (şef!) Cem Mansur trained in London, and as a student of Leonard Bernstein in Los Angeles. Besides wiki, here we read:
Mansur is passionate about the importance of music as a powerful tool for affecting change. Through his concept “The Laboratory of Democracy” (an open rehearsal session) Mansur engages both orchestras and audiences in issues such as co-existence, different levels of leadership, the nature of authority, of individual and collective responsibility as well as the difference between hearing and listening, leading and following. The sessions explore the basic concepts of democracy: individual worth, majority rule with minority rights, compromise, personal freedom and equality before the law, all demonstrated through the model of the orchestra as a miniature society. Mansur’s work on the peace-building role of music has also found expression of his conducting of the Greek/Turkish and Armenian/Turkish [youth] orchestras over several years.
He expounds this philosophy in an eloquent informal talk published bilingually as Müzik, İnsan ve Barış / Music, Mankind and Peace (2013), adducing the examples of El Sistema, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and MIAGI in South Africa.
Apart from appearing as guest conductor around the world, Mansur has devoted himself to cultivating the WAM scene in Turkey—most admirably as founder of the Turkish Youth Philharmonic Orchestra (wiki; website; Cornucopia), with major support from the progressive Sabanci Foundation. This 2017 performance of the Sinfonia from Verdi’s Forza del destino gives an impression of their vitality; and here they are joined by Gökhan Aybulus at the Berlin Konzerthaus in Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto (cf. Historical ears and eyes):
My own training in WAM having taken wing in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, notably under Pierre Boulez, I can just imagine the inspiration that young Turkish musicians gain from such experiences and opportunities.
At the concert last week, Mansur opened by introducing the programme, as he often does—such a good way of establishing rapport with the audience, reminding me of his mentor Bernstein; his remarks were enthusiastically received by the audience (and even by me, although I doubt that he employed any of the dozen eccentric words that I have mastered in Turkish). He was joined on stage by composer Sadık Uğraş Durmuş (b.1978), the world premiere of whose Çengi no.2 opened the concert. Trained in the Netherlands, Durmuş is now on the faculty of Istanbul University. The çengi of the title referring to female dancers of Ottoman times, he evokes an imaginary dance scene, with singing and some shouting from the orchestra.
The new Turkish work led aptly to the neo-classical Concerto in Dfor strings by Igor Stravinsky (aka Gran visits York!), composed in Hollywood in 1946, commissioned by Paul Sacher for the 20th anniversary of the Basler Kammerorchester. Though not designed as a dance piece, it’s akin to the “Balanchine” works of Stravinsky’s middle period—and Mansur recommended the fine ballet The cage that Jerome Robbins set to the concerto in 1951.
The concert ended with the substantial Concerto for piano, violin, and string quartet by Ernest Chausson (1855–99). To the uninitiated, Chausson may seem like a one-trick pony—and even as a violinist I was somehow immune to his Poème—but it’s good to be reminded of the bridges leading to Debussy and Ravel. The soloists Gökhan Aybulus and Esan Kıvrak were accompanied by the string orchestra; even in the original version with string quartet, the piano tends to dominate over the solo violin. Here it is with Kathryn Stott and Janine Jensen in 2011:
I admired the audience’s enthusiasm for such a niche programme; and maybe I’m just in a good mood, but emerging into the nightlife of Kadiköy, I relish the relaxed confidence of this diverse society.
I can’t remember how I came across the name of Éva Gauthier (1885–1958) and the story of how she presented arrangements of Javanese music in her concert recitals.
By the late 19th century the sounds of gamelan were regularly heard at grand exhibitions in the West; Paris 1889 (Exposition Universelle), Chicago 1893 (Columbia Exhibition), and San Francisco 1915 (Panama–Pacific International Exposition) all had a “Javanese village”.
By contrast with Berlioz’s aversion to the music of the Mystic East, Debussy was entranced by the gamelan he heard at the 1889 Exposition. He wrote to a friend in 1895 of “the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades… which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts, for use by naughty little children.” And in 1913, in a much-cited passage:
There used to be—indeed, despite the troubles that civilization has brought, there still are—some wonderful peoples who learn music as easily as one learns to breathe. […] Their traditions are preserved only in ancient songs, sometimes involving dance, to which each individual adds his own contribution century by century. Thus Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint which make Palestrina seem like child’s play. And if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a travelling circus.
(Ravel is also sometimes said to have been impressed by the gamelan at the 1889 Exposition, but he was only 14, and I haven’t yet found a source.)
As to gamelan studies in later years, Michael Church devotes chapter 12 of Musics lost and found to the immersion of Jaap Kunst (1891–1960) and Colin McPhee (1900–1964) in the musics of Java and Bali. On his return from Indonesia to Amsterdam in 1934, Kunst established gamelan as a major theme in ethnomusicology. The Canadian-American composer McPhee lived in Bali through the 1930s; he found the engaging A house in Bali easier to write than his monumental study of the island’s music: “I did not live in Bali to collect material. I lived there because I wanted to, for the pleasure of it”. As Church comments,
he disdained the paraphernalia of scholarship, wanting to purge the book of “all stupid jargon-like aeophones [sic], idiophones beloved by Sachs and Hornbostel”. Yet as Oja points out, his approach to research was fastidious and scholarly.
Such pioneers lay the groundwork for the later gamelan craze; since the time of Mantle Hood few self-respecting ethnomusicology departments are without their own gamelan…
In 1910, disillusioned by being replaced in the opera Lakmé at Covent Garden, she travelled to Java, where she inconsequentially married a Dutch importer and plantation manager. Until 1914 she was based in Surakarta; besides performing there, in 1911 she toured Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Peking, followed over the next two years by Japan, Siam, and India.
But while in Surakarta Gauthier was granted permission to live in the Kraton palace to study its court music. She gained an introduction to this world through the composer and pianist Paul Seelig (1876-1945), former conductor of the royal band, chronicler of gamelan and kroncong. As she learned the basics of gamelan theory, Gauthier’s relations with the all-male gamelan musicians of the court were mediated through the royal wives.
She was taught, for example, that the drum was the “chef d’orchestra”, and that the vocal part “is merely a tone colour in the ensemble, and the singer’s voice counts as another instrument in the orchestra”.
Here’s film footage of a performance at the Kraton from 1912 (part of an interesting playlist):
And here’s the album Court music of Kraton Surakarta (King Records), recorded in 1992:
I sang to them a bit of colorateur and they thought the screaming on the high notes was hideous; they thought I was going to burst. Then I sang to them a melody. But they looked bewildered. They could not grasp it in the least. Then I sang Debussy to them, and they went into raptures.
Anyway,
She became such an enthusiast of Javanese performance that she hatched a plan to produce a tour of Javanese dancers and gamelan to Europe. She was convinced that the srimpi dance would captivate European audiences as much as it had her.
When this plan was thwarted by World War One, Gauthier moved to New York, and began to give recitals of arrangements by Paul Seelig and Constant Van de Wall, inserting short talks on Javanese courtly culture into her programmes. Her 1914–15 recordings of two songs were reissued in 1938:
For a gruelling vaudeville tour of the States she teamed up with the exotic dancer Regina Jones Woody (“Nila Devi”) with an item called Songmotion. As the latter recalled,
We were booed, laughed at, and made targets for pennies and programs. Almost hysterical, Eva and I changed into street clothes and sat down with Mr. Smith [the stage manager] and the conductor to discuss what to do. We had a fifty-two-week tour ahead, but if this was a preview of audience reaction, the Gauthier-Devi act wouldn’t last two minutes in a big city.
The stage manager, Mr Smith, was outspoken. He took Madame Gauthier apart first. “Take off that horse’s head thing you’re wearing and get rid of that sarong with its tail between your legs. Scrap that whiny music. You’re a good-looking woman. Put on your best evening gown, sing the Bell song from Lakmé, and you’ll get a good hand”. Madame promptly fainted.
On being revived, she stalked out of the room, announcing, “We’ll close before I prostitute my art”.
I came next. According to Mr. Smith I look bowlegged as I moved my feet and legs in Javanese fashion. Even he had to laugh. My native costumes were ugly. Why did I have four eyebrows? And if I could really dance, why did I just wiggle and jiggle about? Why didn’t I kick and do back bends and pirouettes?
Substituting Orient-inspired songs by composers such as Ravel and Granville Bantock, they only retained two songs by Seelig and Van de Wall. Gauthier withdrew from the year-long tour after five months, but for Songmotion in 1917, with Nila Devi no longer available, she found another dance partner in Roshanara (Olive Craddock!). This led them to perform in Ballet intime, an altogether more classy affair directed by Adolf Bolm, formerly of the Ballets Russes.
Having premiered Stravinsky’s Three Japanese lyrics in 1913, Gauthier loaned her Java notebooks to Ravel and Henry Eichheim. In November 1917 she premiered Five poems of ancient China and Japan by the talented young Charles Griffes (1884–1920).
and that same year she supplied him with material for his Three Javanese songs:
Much drawn to both French modernism and American popular music, in 1923 Gauthier gave a seminal recital of “Ancient and modern music for voice” at the Aeolian Hall in New York—an early challenge to the boundaries between high and low cultures. In the first half she sang pieces by Bellini and Purcell, as well as modernist works by Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud, and others. The second half was still more daring, including pieces by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin (who accompanied these items on piano). This was the first time Gershwin’s music was performed by a classical singer in concert, and led directly to the commissioning of Rhapsody in blue (1924) and his later jazz-classical syntheses.
Through the 1920s Gauthier often performed her “Java to jazz” programme, which typically began with her Seelig and Van de Wall songs, continuing with Beethoven, Bliss, Debussy, and Ravel, and ending with Gershwin, Berlin, and Kern. **
Birthday party honouring Maurice Ravel in New York, 8th March 1928. From left: Oscar Fried, Eva Gauthier, Ravel at piano, Manoah Leide-Tedesco, George Gershwin.
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Griffes is cited as saying “In the dissonance of modern music the Oriental is more at home than in the consonance of the classics”. Cohen again:
Gauthier’s encounters with traditional Asian music, and particularly Javanese and Malay song, at a pivotal point in her career opened her mind to the diversity of world music and made her rethink her cultural values. As she remarked, “It was actually a serious study of all Oriental music that enabled me to understand and master the contemporary or so-called “modern music”.
* For the riches of regional traditions, note the 20-CD series Music of Indonesia (Smithsonian Folkways, masterminded by Philip Yampolsky)—this playlist has a sample.
** From the days before newspaper typesetting rejoiced in the terse and gnomic, the wiki article on Gauthier cites a 1923 headline in the Fargo Forum:
Eva Gauthier’s Program Sets Whole Town Buzzing: Many People Are of Two Minds Regarding Jazz Numbers—Some Reluctantly Admit That They Like Them—Others Keep Silent or Condemn Them
Cf. the over-generous title of an 1877 book cited by Nicolas Slonimsky (in note here). And this roundup of wacky headlines.
Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a fur coat(serialised 1940-41, first edition 1943)
in a translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe (2016),
with an introduction by David Selim Sayers.
The teacher Sabahattin Ali (1907–48) (wiki; fuller Turkish version), a protégé of the Sertels and Nazım Hikmet (see The struggle for Turkey), contributed to literary magazines, going on to found and edit the satirical weekly Marko Paşa. Perceived as a dissident author critical of Atatürk and the Republican state, he spent periods in prison. In 1948, while seeking a new life abroad free of state intrusion, he was murdered at the Bulgarian border, apparently at the behest of the Turkish National Security Service.
In Turkey, as Sayers comments, Ali is “a figure of gravitas […], a devastatingly incisive observer who harnessed the power of his prose to expose the country’s social and political injustices”. Writing in 2016, Maureen Freely explains Ali’s enduring relevance:
The fate of Marko Pasha, his satirical weekly, calls to mind the almost 2,000 prosecutions by President Erdoğan’s of those who have dared to mock him. Ali’s murder, allegedly at the hands of an offended patriot, was echoed by the 2007 murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. It also calls to mind the foiled shooting of the main opposition newspaper’s editor, Can Dündar, as he walked with his wife into court to receive a five-year sentence for publishing an article about the ruling party’s involvement in the secret arming of jihadi groups in Syria. This was only a few weeks ago. And it was just the latest episode in a series of increasingly savage attacks on independent publishing and journalism. The suppression of critical voices is now as harsh, if not harsher, than it was during the fascist-dominated single party state that crushed Ali and so many others. When Ali’s readers cry for him, they are also crying for themselves.
By contrast, Madonna in a fur coat is the semi-autobiographical story of a doomed liaison, set largely in Berlin, where Ali himself studied from 1928 to 1930 before returning to Turkey to teach. The protagonist Raif is a “rather ordinary” man “with no distinguishing features, no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a single day”. As this article explains, by the 1970s interest in Ali grew as he began to be considered as a forgotten author coming to light, now distanced from his ideological identity and turned into a “mystical and romantic” figure adopted by both left and right. And the novel’s recent popularity in Turkey is attributable to its promotion by publishing houses amidst changing copyright laws alongside the power of social media, as well as reassessed images of the author himself. But as Freely observes, while Ali’s admirers have regarded the novel as a “puzzling aberration”, a mere love story,
his least acclaimed novel has become Turkey’s most celebrated love story today because it refuses the traditional gender roles that Turkey’s president seems hell-bent on enforcing, not just in the religious heartlands but also in the cities and towns that have been secularising, and liberalising, for almost a century. Anyone who departs from his retrograde norms, he decries as traitors or terrorists in the making. During last year’s election campaign, he went so far as to accuse Turkey’s LGBT community as being in league with Armenians, Kurds, and the hostile foreign powers that funded them. Hardly a day passes without his saying what a woman should be, and what a man—a real man—should do to keep her in her place.
Sayers too makes a determined case for Madonna in a fur coat. While apparently apolitical, the novel subtly critiques the Republican dream. Raif falls in love with Maria ” in the most Ottoman way imaginable, by looking at her picture rather than her person”. As their intense, complex platonic relationship unfolds amidst the decadence of Berlin nightclub life, Maria laments:
Do you know why I hate you? You and every other man in the world? Because you ask so much of us, as if it were your natural right… Mark my words, for it can happen without a single word being uttered… it’s how men look at us and smile at us. It’s how they raise their hands. To put it simply, it’s how they treat us… you’d have to be blind not to see how much confidence they have, and how stupidly they achieve it. […] And our duties? To bow down and obey, and to give them whatever they want….
Such a “refreshingly unorthodox dissection of gender” lies “firmly outside the norms of Western and Turkish society alike, whether in the 20s, the 40s, or today”. Still, while lacking a background in Turkish culture and politics, I tend to side with those who prefer to value Sabahattin Ali for his more avowedly political writings.
For two other Madonnas of whom you may have heard, click here and here.
Uyghur anthropologist Rahilä Dawut, “disappeared” since 2017.
But we also need to pay constant attention to the plight of the Tibetans and Uyghurs (both within the PRC and in exile), as well as the perspective from the independent island of Taiwan—a trio for which I’ve just alighted on the handy acronym TUT, sounding like an absurdly genteel and futile English rebuke to CCP excesses.
Roundups—part of my attempts to educate myself:
Uyghur culture: over a dozen posts on shrine festivals, Sufi groups, muqam, and so on, featuring the research of Rahilä Dawut, Rachel Harris, Mukaddas Mijit, Musapir, Darren Byler and others
Tibet—for Amdo, Kham, TAR, and Dharamsala: over thirty posts on the ravages of Maoism, biography, expressive culture, ritual, opera, and so on, reviewing the work of Jamyang Norbu, Robbie Barnett, Tsering Woeser, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy and others.
Talking with Chinese people, when one doesn’t understand a bit of dialect or an obscure term, they sometimes adopt a device that supposedly solves the problem, as the wise Victor Mair describes in his recent post on Language Log:
Countless are the times I’ve seen people writing Chinese characters in the air to tell which of dozens of homophones they might be referring to. They say, “You know, it’s this one”, and then their index finger goes flailing through the air. It never works, because there are no points of reference from one stroke to the next or between one component and the next, plus they are writing backward with regard to the person to whom they are trying to describe the character.
It works a bit better writing sinoglyphs in the air if the drawer and the viewer stand facing the same direction—but not much.
Writing characters with your finger works a lot better if you do it on a surface—your palm, a table, a car hood, whatever, but it’s still far from ideal, because the movements are ephemeral.
I would add that while the palm is indeed a surface (and I can usually just about work it out when someone “writes” the character in my palm), more often they write it in their own palm, which is facing them, not you, so you can’t even see it properly… As a foreigner one feels a certain obligation to pretend one has understood, perhaps to avoid losing face, or to reassure them that you are literate and “have culture”. So while gratified to learn that it can be a challenge even for such a master as Prof. Mair, when I’m perplexed in such a situation I still find it a tad embarrassing, since Chinese people together seem to find it a perfectly satisfactory solution.
For simpler cases, one is accustomed to widely-understood verbal descriptions of a character—whether by depicting its component parts, such as for the surnames Wu (koutian wu 口天吴 “wu with mouth and heaven”) and Li (muzi li 木子李 “li with wood and son”), or by stating its use as part of an unambiguous binome, like my own Chinese surname (zhongbiaode zhong 钟表的钟 “zhong as in clock”, a bit like “cat as in catastrophe”). * This can get pleasantly silly, like when I tell rural ritual specialists (or other friends who share my abstruse predilections) which character for kou I’m referring to: “Yuqie yankoude kou 瑜伽焰口的口” (“kou as in the Yogacara Flaming Mouth ritual“), establishing a niche complicity…
Left, Yankou shishi ritual manual, 1922 (see here, under Gaoqiao). Right, former monks performing a funerary yankou ritual, Beijing suburbs 1993.
Talking of which, in the early 1990s I used to visit the elderly former monk Benxing in his bare room at the Zhihua temple, listening as he told me about the ritual life of old Beijing, and his own story. As I was taking notes, sometimes I had to query how to write a character that came up in conversation—not so much Buddhist terms as the names of people, streets, or villages. This was long before the days of mobile and internet, and he didn’t even have a little dictionary—but what he did have was a copy of the voluminous Flaming Mouth ritual manual, which he now used for the same purpose. Having learned thoroughly to recite it in his youth before Liberation (and still sometimes performing the ritual for patrons in the suburbs), Benxing was able to fast-forward mentally through the entire text until he came across the character in question, and then deftly flick through the manual to show me!
Back to oral descriptions: one evening in Shaanbei in 2001 with my two fieldwork colleagues at a grotty hostel in Jiaxian county-town, I was telling them how I’d been reading up on the origins of the county Jinju opera troupe in the nearby village of Mutouyu (木头峪, “Wood Gulch”) which had made important innovations before Liberation, performing for Chairman Mao at the Baiyunshan temple fair in 1947. ** I had great fun trying (with studied ineptitude) to explain how to identify the characters for the village:
木头的木，嗯，木头的头。。。嗯，木头峪的峪！ mu as in mutou [wood]—um—tou as in mutou [wood]… um [finding it a challenge to evoke the final character, and then triumphantly:]—yu as in “Mutouyu”!
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So much for mundane communication—an altogether more cosmic air-writing device is that of the Daoist priest at the altar during rituals, depicting complex fu 符 talismans that can only be understood by the gods. Brilliantly (if perhaps controversially?!), in his 2005 film Han Xin’s revenge, on Daoist ritual in Hunan, Patrice Fava renders the characters visible on screen as the priest depicts them!
Screenshots from Han Xin’s revenge: Left, Zou Qishan writes the secret names of the deity Wang Lingguan 王灵官 Right, Chen Demei inaugurates the puppet-statue of Han Xin.
In this clip Chen Demei depicts the taboo characters for the astral deity Ziwei 紫微讳:
* A distant English variant of this (though far more boring, rigid, and infuriating) is the NATO phonetic alphabet (F for Freddie, U for Uniform, C for Charlie…)—making a further gruelling ordeal when you finally get through to an institution on the phone, charmingly satirised by Bridget Christie. “Cat as in catastrophe, dog as in dogmatic” is part of a joke about trying to buy broccoli, which I’ll save up for another time…
** See e.g. the Shaanxi volume of the Monograph on opera in the great Anthology: Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shaanxi juan 中国戏曲志, 陕西卷, p.536 (above), and latterly online articles such as this. As ever (for Baiyunshan, see e.g. here), such an outline invites us to “read between the lines” to recreate the socio-political picture of the day.
Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018) may be flawed, but it’s a good watch, as long as you’re white.
It’s inspired by the true story of African-American pianist Dr Don Shirley’s fraught 1962 concert tour of the Deep South, for which he employed Italian-American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. On the road, Tony makes use of The Green Book, a guide for African-American travellers through the segregationist era.
Don is alienated from both his own culture (whatever that means) and from white society. Tony is himself no proponent of civil rights, despite being the object of a lesser racism—but as he experiences the shocking degradations to which his boss is subjected on tour, gradually they bond.
In the words of Rotten tomatoes, it’s “an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter”. Some reviews (e.g. rogerebert.com, and the Guardian) note the film’s problems but are inclined to downplay them, and sterner critics too concede that the portrayals from Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are compelling.
But several reviewers, like Melanie McFarland, have more detailed critiques of the “lazy, feel-good take on race”. She notes how the movie combines “the white saviour trope with the story of a bigot’s redemption”, and that the movie “presents violent manifestations of racial animus as an unfortunate element of a distant past” (cf. this even more scathing appraisal).
The climactic scene in a black blues bar (where Don begins by winning the crowd over with Chopin—really?) is both cheesy and exhilarating (still McFarland: “the part we’re meant to note is Shirley’s only natural expression of joy comes near the end of the movie when let loose on a cheap and worn piano in a deep-South blues joint among his own people. You know, where he belongs.”) Such
escapist Social Progress tales drawn from a mythologized version of history […] reassure mainstream white audiences of how far we’ve come as a nation despite the headlines about a spike in hate crimes, the rising white nationalist presence within law enforcement and in politics, racially motivated mass shootings and widening wealth gaps between whites and non-white minority groups.
It’s a not infrequent experience to enjoy a work of art before (and even after) someone quite rightly points out that you shouldn’t… However well-meaning (or canny) its attempts to atone for racism and sexism (cf. Barbie), Hollywood remains an unlikely source of enlightenment.
Among the “underground historians” highlighted by Ian Johnson in his latest book Sparks is the documentarian Hu Jie 胡杰. I mentioned his 2016 film The songs of Maidichong village (Maidichongde gesheng 麦地冲的歌声) in my introduction to the China Unofficial Archives site, but it deserves a separate post (for more, see this review by Max Berwald, cited below).
Here’s the film:
Opening strikingly with an elderly village woman singing the hymn Amazing grace to camera, the story is told without apparent rancour by stoic, quietly determined peasants and church elders; by an itinerant rural dentist—and in several thoughtful reflections, a veteran cadre, former secretary on the Yunnan Party Committee, who often visited the village on government business during the high tide of Maoist campaigns:
People’s hearts began to change. At first they were close to the Communist Party, because you brought them practical benefits—land reform. But then came the People’s Communes that actually deprived the peasants of what they were given. Moreover, the famine that followed was what they remembered most. I remember the embarrassment going down to the countryside to implement the minorities policy. We asked them to start by pouring out their past woes [suku 诉苦]. When they did that, they all began with the famine during the Great Leap Forward, all about the commune canteen that made people starve.
Screenshot
Screenshot
Maidichong, a Miao (Hmong) village just north of Kunming, was evangelized in 1903 by the English Methodist pastor Samuel Pollard.
Under Maoism, serious repression intensified with the 1958 Great Leap Forward. We learn of the life, works, and martyrdom of Reverend Wang Zhiming, brutally executed late in the Cultural Revolution:
His death marked a moment of violent confrontation between two competing modernization programmes: Christian missionary modernization, itself part of a colonial project, and nationalist, communist modernization. Both were interested in bringing literacy and modern healthcare to Maidichong—both regarded as key social indicators of development to this day—and both claimed the authority to name the sacred.
Both movements, as Berwald comments, promised “modernity in exchange for loyalty to a political project”. He asks, “How can memories of Christian missionary work ever be mobilized on behalf of a history of resistance by oppressed peoples?”
As one Reverend explains to Hu Jie, Christianity appealed particularly to the Hua Miao subgroup, whom he describes as among the most exploited and impoverished of Miao peoples in the region in the late imperial era.
1980, when the central Party leadership finally implemented a more open religious policy.
A theme common among devotional communities: younger generations since the reform era, lured by material prosperity, modern pop and media culture, are losing commitment to the faith; “development”, which once led people to Christianity, is now drawing them away from it. Still, the Yunnan authorities remains wary of such groups, mounting periodic campaigns.
As Berwald observes, the film doesn’t come across as a portrait of a community in crisis; Hu Jie’s questions don’t force a reckoning with a traumatic past (I suppose this is a similar approach that dawned on me in my studies of Gaoluo village and the Li family Daoists). Berwald concludes:
The faith of this community appears starkly contingent, with the film offering neither an indictment of the imperialism of British missionaries or of any state formation. Rather, what we have is a Christian community freely practicing its faith and remembering particular histories. Songs From Maidichong does not stoop to preach, insisting only “this too”, and forsaking polemical fury as it does so. How radical such an approach appears depends on the audience.
Ian Johnson lists many of Hu Jie’s other documentaries in Sparks. I’ve also just been watching Remote mountain, an utterly bleak film set in the barren northwest, cited in n.1 of Social issues in rural Henan.
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The many rural Christian communities in Yunnan have attracted considerable research, not least from ethnomusicologists. Alongside his studies of Daoist and Buddhist ritual music there, Yang Minkang 杨民康 has published extensively on the topic, e.g. Bentuhua yu xiandaixing: Yunnan shaoshu minzu Jidujiao yishi yinyue yanjiu 本土化与现代性: 云南少数民族基督教仪式音乐研究 (2008).
For the story of a determined community of underground Catholics in north China, click here. Of course, indigenous religious groups too, and indeed the whole of Chinese society, have been subjected to severe traumas, both under Maoism and since the 1980s’ reforms: see e.g. Cultural Revolutions, China: commemorating trauma, and Memory, music, society.
One of the unsettling things about getting old is that I find myself using antiquated expressions that I always disdained, such as
“Well, this is a bit of a palaver…”
With that classic understatement of the English, the ideal context is when serious calamity strikes, such as when quelling a mutiny of the restless natives [As one does—Ed.]. Sure enough (cf. Tickety-boo), its etymology goes back to colonialism. Used in English since the early 18th century,
palaver, “profuse and idle talk; chatter”, comes from Portuguese palavra “word, talk, speech” by way of sailors’ slang. Portuguese was commonly used as a trading language on the West African coast, and palaver came into English first in the sense “a parley or conference, typically between Europeans and the Indigenous people of a region, especially in West Africa”.
One gathers that such discussions were not entirely on equal terms… The same source goes on:
Portuguese palavra and its Castilian counterpart palabra come from Latin parabola “comparison, explanatory illustration”, and in Late Latin (and especially in Christian Latin), “allegorical story, parable, proverb”.
And it elaborates on a widespread phenomenon:
Metathesis, the transposition of consonants, is common in Spanish and Portuguese: the syncopated form parabla (from parabola) becomes palavra in Portuguese and palabra in Spanish, just as Latin mirāculum “miracle” becomes milagro in Spanish and milagre in Portuguese.
The wiki entry on metathesis gives instances from a wide range of languages including Amharic, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Finnish, Hungarian, Navajo, Turkish—and English.
It’s just as mystifying to suddenly hear oneself using the word kerfuffle,
early 19th century: perhaps from Scots curfuffle (probably from Scottish Gaelic car “twist, bend” + imitative Scots fuffle “to disorder”), or related to Irish cior thual “confusion, disorder”.
Like Ogonek and Til, Palaver and Kerfuffle could be another “feisty yet flawed” pair of detectives.
I can’t see that kerfuffle is related to faff, another word I’ve weirdly adopted—not so much in the sense of “faffing around” as in “this is a bit of a faff”. Again, its etymology is interesting:
late 18th century (originally dialect in the sense “blow in puffs”, describing the wind): imitative. The current sense may have been influenced by dialect faffle “stammer, stutter”, later “flap in the wind”, which came to mean “fuss, dither” at about the same time as faff (late 19th century).
The stammering connection may now establish “faff” even more f-f-firmly in my vocabulary. I surmise that the emergence of such words denotes the transition from an adventurous, carefree youth to the desire for a tranquil life unruffled (unfaffled?) by the sundry ordeals of old age (passwords, call centres, stairs…).
So now we have Palaver, Kerfuffle, and Faff—a firm of solicitors. Colloquially abbreviated to Falafel.
Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇, led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire. All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1]
Yves Menheere, The Way and its powers: an ethnographic account of Taoist practice and religious authority in northern Taiwan (2020),
a lucid study which helps further my education on a topic that I previously found somewhat indigestible.
The Introduction sets the tone for Menheere’s enquiry:
Why do people put their faith in religious specialists? Why are some people considered to be more adept at communicating with deities, explaining scriptures, blessing objects, or solving problems with ghosts and other malevolent forces?
Contrasting rituals that are “supposed to work” with those that are meant to be carried out “in the correct way”, Menheere finds that “neither efficacy nor proper performance can explain why people put more faith in one particular priest and not another”. In exploring authority and charisma he considers the work of Max Weber, Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming, Vincent Goossaert, and Pierre Bourdieu.
His useful summary of previous research starts with J.J.M. De Groot in late-19th-century Xiamen (in mainland Fujian); and for Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), studies by Japanese scholars and colonial administrators, notably a 1919 report under the supervision of Marui Keijirō. After World War Two, the pioneering work of Kristofer Schipper (on south Taiwan) and Michael Saso (for Hsinchu in the north) was continued by John Lagerwey for both north and south. Taiwanese scholars have also been industrious, from Liu Chi-wan and Lee Fong-mao to Lü Ch’ui-k’uan, followed by Lin Chen-yuan and others. As Menheere notes, the main focus of such studies has been the description of rituals and the search for the origins of particular practices and traditions; however, scholars adopting more anthropological approaches include Stephan Feuchtwang, David Jordan, John McCreery, Robert Weller, and Chang Hsun.
For ritual studies, I’ve outlined how by the early 1980s, as the PRC opened up after three decades of Maoist repression, the scope of fieldwork at last expanded to mainland China—fanning out from south Fujian (ancestral home of the Taiwanese Daoist altars) in a succession of major projects, mostly led by scholars with experience of the religious scene in Taiwan. So whereas previously the island was almost the only accessible site where scholars could study the riches of Daoist ritual, a wealth of local traditions now beckoned all over the vast expanses of the PRC, “if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective”, as I wrote (cf. The resilience of tradition).
However, it’s always worth paying attention to the ritual life of Taiwan, subject to fewer disruptions than in the PRC—with research now enriched by access to traditions shared with the southeastern mainland. And since scholarship on both sides of the strait, though based on fieldwork, has stressed the early origins of rituals rather than social ethnography (cf. Debunking “living fossils”—combining these approaches for Fujian, though, is Ken Dean), Menheere offers a fresh perspective.
* * *
The distinction between Redhead (ang-thau 紅頭) and Blackhead (o-͘thau 烏頭) ritual specialists is particular to Taiwan and Fujian; while much discussed, it remains complex. In north Taiwan, Blackhead priests specialise in performing mortuary rituals, and are either Sek-kau 釋教 Buddhists, or Daoists sometimes described by the name Numinous Treasure (Leng-po / Lingbao 靈寶). Redhead Daoists—Menheere’s focus, whom he describes as “the Northern Priests”—refrain from performing funerals. While belonging to the Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一 branch (like Daoists further south in Taiwan), they
carried out rites in ways that were broadly similar, and they were able to work together in ritual performances, which frequently occurred. Their way of working set them apart from priests from central or southern Taiwan, who performed rituals in different ways and were generally unable to work in concert with priests from northern Taiwan. These priests agreed that they belong to the same phai 派 or “branch” of Taoism and that priests from central and southern Taiwan belonged to a different branch. [2]
As Menheere observes, authority is relational: “it depends on the position of the individual priest in a wider network of priests, and it is always socially constructed and cannot be reduced to a particular priest’s personality or individual qualities”.
Between the Introduction and Conclusion, the book is arranged in six unnumbered chapters, to which I will award numbers here.
Chapter 1 (“Gods, ghosts and ancestors”) opens with a description of an exorcistic ritual intended to deter malignant forces of the road (lo-͘soah 路煞) from causing traffic accidents and other misfortunes besetting the community. Menheere goes on to give an overview of the religious environment in which the Northern Priests operate. Apart from large-scale temple ceremonies like the Chio / Jiao 醮 Offering, brief “minor rites” (sio-hoat 小法, or “little things” sio-su-a 小事) are also a regular part of the priests’ duties, often requiring only a single officiant. (I was glad to learn that priests in Taiwan describe the performance of ceremonies as “doing things” (cho-su 做事), cf. banshi 办事 in north China).
Always favouring practical grassroots perspectives above historical theory, Menheere unpacks the meaning of Cheng-it (Zhengyi)—”a term used by priests who shared their particular way of working, which presumed knowledge of two particular sets of rites; and did not perform funerary rites”.
By contrast with Schipper’s account for south Taiwan (e.g. his influential 1985 article), where “classical” and “vernacular” rites are carried out by different specialists, the Northern Priests practise a hybrid tradition, with two categories of rites, the “Way” (Tō / Dao 道) and “Methods” (Hoat / Fa 法): “two separate systems of rites, different in their performance, but referred to by the priests as complementary and sometimes even overlapping”. So Menheere ponders Schipper’s classical / vernacular dichotomy in the northern context, under the headings of language, pantheon, transmission, and the “mental states” of meditation and trance. Again working from the practical standpoint of the priests themselves, he confounds any simple distinction between the two types. Valuably, he notes contingency and modern change:
When we consider the meaning of Tō and Hoat and their associated ritual traditions, we must account for how the terms take shape in local practice and acquire different meanings, rather than ascribe them meaning devoid of social and historical context.
Still, “whether a rite was Tō or Hoat did not, for the priests at least, depend on its historical origins, but on the type of ceremony with which it was associated and on the way it was performed”. Noting that priests freely made use of the two categories during both exorcisms and offerings, Menheere illustrates this with Tō and Hoat versions of the “Worshipping the Lord of Heaven” ritual segment (pai Thin-kong 拜天公).
Chapter 2, a history of the Northern Priests from the Qing dynasty through the Japanese era to modern times, is full of detail on modern developments in their practice, showing that it is not immune to change. For the period since the 1980s, Menheere notes a shift away from healing rituals towards large-scale Offerings—which was attributed to perceived modernisation, notably in medical care. Thus “knowledge of the Tō rites for multiple-day Chio […] was slowly acquired by priests who initially performed mostly Hoat rites”. Moreover,
The expanding ritual market of the 1980s enabled several altars that at the time had only recently been established to rise to prominence. Indeed, some of the most successful and notable altars I observed doing fieldwork only began conducting offerings on a regular basis in the 1980s.
He also suggests a rather recent shift in the way the priests referred to themselves, with the autonym Cheng-it becoming more common.
Chapter 3, “Work and training”, looks at how ceremonies are performed and how the required knowledge to do so is transmitted. Menheere provides a good discussion of the role of “altars” (toan / tan 壇, an important term in south China that is seldom applied to household Daoists in the north), the physical and conceptual locus of a Daoist family tradition; and he gives a useful account of hierarchy and roles within the ritual group. As to personnel,
composition of groups varied from altar to altar and depended on the position of the priest in the field. Priests with more successful altars usually limited hires to their apprentices and a small group of priests that worked almost exclusively for them. Priests with fewer apprentices or fewer opportunities to organise ceremonies, however, had to look outside their immediate ties.
Menheere notes that “family was the principal source of knowledge for a small majority of the priests I observed”, but “recognising a master” from an unrelated family was also rather common. As to training in practice, he again finds variety, followed by a section on how priests assess competency:
A priest’s skills were described with the word kang-hu [gongfu] 功夫, and priests who lacked the physical attributes of the ideal priests—priests that were too short, for instance—could compensate for such perceived shortcomings with their kang-hu.
He continues with a most salient reminder:
It is perhaps worth noting that being familiar with the intricacies of Taoist doctrine as found in its classical texts did not play a role in the training of the priests or judgment of their competency.
The following two sections discuss the major ceremonies associated with the two ritual traditions. Chapter 4 explores the links between authority and the correct performance of rituals through a discussion of changes in the programme of the Chio Offering over the past century (with rich material in Appendix A listing sequences for ten such rituals).
After introducing the old “orthopraxy” trope and considering factors inhibiting change, Menheere argues “that despite the importance attached to correct performance, priests did occasionally—at least to a certain degree—have the ability to change the contents of rites and ceremonies and that such changes would not necessarily affect a priest’s authority”.
While the structure of three-day Chio seems quite constant over the century for which we have evidence, five-day Chio (an expanded version of the three-day programme) have also become increasingly common. The main addition here was the fast chanting of various [nationally standard] jing 經 scriptures—which household Daoists in north China have tended to omit in modern times, even though they comprise a major part of their ritual manuals (e.g. Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.211–13, 375–8).
Menheere continues with a detailed account of versions of the recently-elaborated ritual segment Ascending the Platform (teng-tai pai-pio 登台拜表) as interpreted by three different priests (cf. my account of Li Qing’s Pardon ritual):
All priests who performed the versions of the rite had access to Zhang Enpu’s text, yet none chose to follow his text to the letter. Even Master Tiong, who adhered to it most strictly, chose to add elements, attempting to, as he indicated in our discussions, make the rite more “correct”. It is possible that the priests in the other two cases chose to perform a much shorter rite because it was more convenient, not only for themselves, but also for all lay participants, who had to stand and watch the rite throughout.
He concludes the chapter thus:
The example of “Ascending the Platform” demonstrates that priests did have flexibility in revising rites in ways that did not transform them altogether. They were the experts, and as long as the performance of particular rites fulfilled expectations, the patrons neither grasped minor changes nor challenged a priest’s authority.
Scene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual: the patron blows out a flame to send away the im 陰 fire.
Chapter 5 focuses on the links between authority and efficacy in the exorcistic Toa-po-͘un 大補運 Great Improvement of Luck, the major healing ceremony of the Northern Priests, when the patron often suffers from a serious medical condition. While careful not to add further layers of anthropological abstraction to the complexities of the ritual system itself, Menheere again begins with theoretical perspectives; [3] then, setting forth from the research of Hsu Li-ling, he moves on to elements in the adaptable programme for the Great Improvement of Luck ritual, and five vivid case studies from his own fieldwork (note the lists of ritual segments in Appendix C).
If patrons were not familiar with the logic of the Toa-po-͘un, they were generally free to interpret the ceremonies in ways not directly derived from the meanings enacted in the rites. For patrons, the “effective meaning” was found, not so much in the symbolism of the rite, but in the fact that a priest, possessing a body of specialised knowledge to which they had no access, was involved and employed his knowledge to interact with and implore deities to intercede. Such an attitude, combined with the spectacle of the ceremony and the impressions it left on the spectators, predisposed observers to connect the performance to any event during or after the ritual proceedings.
Menheere ends the chapter by considering efficacy (ling 靈)—the core of Chinese popular religion, according to Valerie Hansen and Adam Yuet Chau:
Patrons did not hire priests to conduct Toa-po-͘un because they knew the rituals would work. They hired priests because they believed in the potential of the ritual and that it was the right course of action. These beliefs were bolstered by, not so much prior successes in Toa-po-un performances, but by a priest’s connections with institutions and trusted individuals.
He argues that
efficacy was the product of authority, rather than the other way around. A priest did not become a great priest because he cured his patients, he came in the position to cure his patients—or not—because he had become a great priest.
The Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei, with Lin Ch’ang-tung 林昌桐 (1947–2019) presiding.
In Chapter 6 Menheere further ponders the way the organisation of ceremonies is distributed and how this relates to the idea of a field of priests. Recurring occasions include
ceremonies organised in honour of a deity’s anniversary; Worshipping the Dipper ceremonies, which many temples organised once or twice a year; ceremonies conducted for the construction of a new temple, the restoration of an old one, or the consecration of a new statue; and ceremonies held to feed the hungry ghosts during the seventh lunar month. Priests also commonly performed exorcisms […] as well as temple ceremonies held for the benefit of the ancestors of the faithful. On some of these occasions, temples could also choose to organise a Chio, but this was less common.
While he notes some exceptions,
more common, recurring ceremonies were typically conducted by the same priest; that is, the priest responsible for a ceremony on one occasion returned to perform the ritual again.[…] In some cases, relationships between temples and altars spanned multiple generations.
He finds that “patrons unconnected to either a priest or a temple resorted to other ways to find a priest”, mainly through local or personal networks.
Priests occasionally recounted how territorial claims were violently enforced in the past, but during my fieldwork, I was not aware of any violent incidents. Still, priests could be visibly displeased when they felt other priests were infringing on their perceived territory and would try to use their own local connections to displace the infringing priests if they felt that this was indeed happening.
Menheere details various procedures in organising the Chio Offering—“the most elaborate and important ceremonies in the Northern Priests’ repertoire”, which (nonetheless) few of them had a chance to organise during their career. There was considerable competition between priests for the task of presiding over this ritual. Temples might appoint a chief priest directly, solicit bids, or appoint through divination.
Knowledge of particular forms of ritual was a prerequisite to conduct ceremonies, but knowledge in itself did not guarantee success. The most knowledgeable priests were not necessarily those conducting the most ceremonies.
Still, “priests who inherited a successful altar had the best chances at claiming a dominant position in the field”. He ends the chapter thoughtfully by suggesting further factors that may need including:
It would probably be easier to develop new contacts and lead a flourishing altar in areas where fewer priests operated than in an area with many active priests. We must also consider historical conditions and change. The situation was quite different in the 1980s, when the market for religious services, including the ceremonies of the priests, was quickly expanding and a priest’s method of entering the field may have been less important.
In his Conclusion, Menheere reminds us that
terms like Tō, Hoat, Chio, and Cheng-it (and their Mandarin equivalents) have specific meanings that are locally and historically embedded, can change over time, and should not be taken for granted. […] Ritual practices can change, even if they are part of a tradition that highly values correct practices and sees immutability as a defining feature of what actually constitutes correct practice. While such changes can be triggered by external factors, specialists themselves do play an important role in shaping changes.
* * *
Time for my inevitable spiel: after silent, immobile text, nothing can compare to experiencing the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of Daoist ritual for real—here, for instance, is a “Great Improvement of Luck” ritual in 2022, just one of many online videos uploaded by the Wei Yuan Altar:
And to sample the more “classical” Tō tradition, click here for a 1977 introduction to a temple inauguration, filmed by Patrice Fava (another scholar whose grounding in Taiwanese ritual bore fruit on the mainland)—see his Un taoïste n’a pas d’ombre: mémoires d’un ethnologue en Chine (2023), pp.30–31, 53.
* * *
While I’m in awe of their erudition, some scholars of Daoist ritual seem so committed to the Wisdom of the Ancient Sages that their accounts may seem more prescriptive than descriptive, almost evangelical; in both Chinese and English, they can speak only to a highly limited audience. Instead Menheere, with his clear style, refrains from unduly mystifying either the priests or their rituals.
The Way and its powers is valuable for incorporating ethnography, modern change, and ritual theory—all largely absent from the field as it took shape—into the established concerns of scholarship on Daoist ritual, which (first for Taiwan, later for the PRC) has come to be dominated by the salvage of medieval ritual structures and texts. The study of ritual traditions in mainland China might look quite different if the ethnographic approach had found more of a voice in Taiwan.
[1] Sadly, Menheere’s original PhD thesis (2017) contains a mere three images (the published version has none!), so I’m grateful to him for helping me illustrate this post with some of his splendid fieldwork photos. Images by Patrice Fava are found in John Lagerwey’s attractively-illustrated book Le continent des esprits (1991); though the captions don’t give locations, I’m told that they show rituals and priests from both north and south Taiwan.
For transliterations of terms and names I have followed Menheere’s practice, based (for Taiwanese) on the “Church” romanization and (for Mandarin) on Wade-Giles, with some pinyin equivalents added for terms with wider significance (such as Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一).
[2] Menheere comments further: “Taoist Blackhead priests were active in different areas in northern Taiwan, but only in locations such as Hsinchu and Tamsui would they regularly carry out other ceremonies in addition to funerals. In both areas, however, they had to compete with the Northern Priests”. Michael Saso gave an early taxonomy of the ritual life of Hsinchu in “The Taoist tradition in Taiwan” (1970).
Similar distinctions are commonly found in mainland south China, e.g. in Hunan; in the north I don’t recall hearing of household Daoists who refrain from performing funerals—if there are any areas where they do so (also for regions such as south Jiangsu), then I’m keen to learn. In north Shanxi the Li family Daoists used to perform rituals for both the living and the dead, but mortuary rituals now comprise the great majority of their business (see Ritual change in north Shanxi, and my film). Note also my major rethink of the Zhengyi–Quanzhen dichotomy.
[3] Here, besides the sources that he cites, it’s worth consulting Catherine Bell’s surveys of the field of ritual studies.
In some European countries, armed with a mere smattering of French, German, Italian, and dimly-recalled Latin, one can take a rough guess at the odd word of Foreign; it doesn’t get you far, but it’s ever so slightly reassuring (cf. my Portuguese dream). But as I spend ever more time in Istanbul, though cosseted by wonderful multi-lingual friends, on the rare occasions when I have to fend for myself, though coming across the occasional French loanword (ekip, garson), it’s good to find that English doesn’t butter any parsnips—and that globalization isn’t quite as, um, global as we may imagine.
So I’m eventually beginning to realise (Hello?) that I really should make a bit of an effort to augment my tiny, eccentric Turkish vocabulary, consisting merely of a few niche nouns like “shawm”, “recluse”, and “call to prayer”. As an entertainer I’m now scoring a certain success with Türkçe konuşmuyorum (“I don’t speak Turkish”)—a phrase that my rubbish pronunciation renders most convincing. In one online tutorial that I consult I’m fond of the rubric “Var and Yok (Existence)”—deep, eh. It also has the worrying phrase
The chambermaid never comes when I ring
[…]
Are you the chambermaid?
Google Translate is a miracle, whether for texting or voice messaging—the latter a real blessing for illiterate Anatolian (or Chinese) peasants, though it still hasn’t quite got the hang of my stammer (kekelemek)… When using it, I like to mouth the words with comic ineptitude while the recording plays, awaiting the reaction of my victims audience with a certain trepidation—which reminds me of yet another Monty Python sketch:
Words are all very well, but the wonderful world of Turkish grammar, with its vowel harmony and zany agglutinative suffixes (düşünemedim, “I was unable to think”, Evinizdeyim “I am at your house”), having seemed utterly impenetrable, is slowly becoming a system that I can just about imagine younger people acquiring, with more free space on their mental hard drives.
My photo.
Mansur is passionate about the importance of music as a powerful tool for affecting change. Through his concept “The Laboratory of Democracy” (an open rehearsal session) Mansur engages both orchestras and audiences in issues such as co-existence, different levels of leadership, the nature of authority, of individual and collective responsibility as well as the difference between hearing and listening, leading and following. The sessions explore the basic concepts of democracy: individual worth, majority rule with minority rights, compromise, personal freedom and equality before the law, all demonstrated through the model of the orchestra as a miniature society. Mansur’s work on the peace-building role of music has also found expression of his conducting of the Greek/Turkish and Armenian/Turkish [youth] orchestras over several years.
Éva Gauthier, 1905. All images from 
Sabahattin Ali (left) with Nazım Hikmet. 
Scene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual:
The Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei,
Stephen Jones: a blog 