I was sad to learn of the death of the distinguished Chinese musicologist Du Yaxiong 杜亚雄 (1945–2024). Here I reproduce an eloquent tribute in the recent CHIME news bulletin:
One of China’s finest and most prolific ethnomusicologists and music educators, Du Yaxiong (杜亚雄), has passed away from illness on 7 October, 2024. We mourn his loss, not only as a fine pioneer scholar in realms of Chinese and ethnic minority musical studies, also as a warmhearted and flamboyant personality, a committed promotor of traditional music, a gifted and infectious speaker at academic conferences (including several editions of CHIME), and an author of many important studies (more than twenty monographs and 200 articles were published in English, in Hungarian and in Chinese). He was a respected scholar and very inspiring colleague. Du also had a big heart for primary and secondary music education in China, and was very active in this field until his very final years, greatly inspiring young people in Hangzhou and publishing a landmark set of his own teaching materials in 2016.
Du Yaxiong grew up in Lanzhou in a family of doctors. He graduated from the Music Department of Northwest Normal University in 1965, and received a Master of Arts degree from Nanjing University of the Arts in 1981 under Gao Houyong, after which he joined the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing as a Professor of Music. Later he studied at the University of British Columbia in Canada and obtained a doctorate in philosophy.
His parents did not understand music, but they respected their son’s professional career choice. They had noticed very early on how much music affected their son: during his years in elementary school, Du won the first prize in a children’s singing competition, and also learned to play the bamboo flute. As a flutist he acquired a preliminary understanding of structural principles of folk music. He eventually gave up any idea of becoming a doctor, instead joining music classes at the Lanzhou Art College, where he also began to compose songs and piano pieces. Later (when that college merged into Northwest Normal University) he shifted his major to music education. A defining experience was his participation in a folk-song collection mission in the Hexi corridor in Gansu Province. It set him firmly on the trail of ethnomusicological research: from 1963 onwards, he recorded hundreds of Yugur folk songs and mimeographed them.
At the China Conservatory, Du Yaxiong served as the Head of the Department of Musicology for thirteen years, and he maintained close connections with this institution also afterwards. From 2003 he was active as a lecturer at various institutions in Hangzhou, first at Hangzhou Normal University, and from 2014 at the Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua School, where his music-educational projects left a deep impression.
Du conducted extensive fieldwork on traditional and folk music, not just in China, but in over ten countries. He served as a visiting professor at the Institute of Music of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, the Institute of Folklore of Indiana University, and the School of Performing Arts of Youngstown University (Ohio) in the USA. In 1986, he was awarded the title of National Expert by China’s State Council for his outstanding achievements in teaching and research.
Among other things, Du explored at length the relationship between Chinese and Hungarian folk songs, and published a book on it in 1989: A Comparative Study of Chinese Folk Songs and Hungarian Folk Songs. The incentive for this went back all the way to 1963, when he began his long-time research on Uygur dialect songs in Gansu (he mastered the Uygur language to perfection) and found that it was not hard to detect the close relationships between local Uygur (Yugur) melodies and the Hungarian folk tunes collected and published by Bartók and Kodaly.
During his stay 1991-92 at the Institute of Folklore at Indiana University, he took the opportunity to study and collect Native American music. He was twice awarded the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency, in 1996 and in 2008, and it was in the USA that he completed two of his major publications, Traditional Chinese Music Theory (中国传统乐理教程) and Traditional Music Culture of Chinese Minorities (中国少数民族传统音乐文化). His range of research also included northern Chinese village rituals, music of the Silk Road, Hua’er folk songs of northwest China (about which he published in the CHIME journal), and analytical studies of Chinese pentatonic scales and a number of historical subjects.
We remember him for his excellent work and original mind, but also for his congenial smile and radiant presence in academic meetings. May he rest in peace.
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[SJ:]
I made a few brief fieldtrips with Du Yaxiong to the countryside just south of Beijing in the 1990s, when he introduced me to the Buddhist-transmitted ritual association of North Xinzhuang (see under Ritual groups of suburban Beijing).
Early morning procession to the soul hall, North Xinzhuang 1995. Photo: Du Yaxiong.
I often chuckle over a story he told me about his student years, just as traditional music and scholarship were reviving after the downfall of the Gang of Four. The great Huang Xiangpeng was delivering an erudite lecture on the arcane systems of modes and scales documented in ancient sources. In conclusion he encouragingly commented, “In fact, I’m just using a very complicated language to describe something very simple!”, whereupon the young Du Yaxiong put up his hand and said, “Excuse me, Teacher Huang, but could you possibly use a very simple language to describe something very simple?!”.
For some other luminaries of Chinese musicology, see my posts on Yang Yinliu, Qiao Jianzhong, and Yuan Jingfang.
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