Silk-and-bamboo, Shanghai: teahouse 1987, conservatoire 2024.

Frank Kouwenhoven always writes engagingly about Chinese music. In the recent CHIME Newsletter (38; subscribe here) he contributes several useful notices , which I’ll discuss separately (for now, see Temple festivals in Gansu).

He introduces new initiatives in Jiangnan sizhu, the silk-and bamboo ensemble music of teahouses in Shanghai and environs. I outlined the style here; since Witzleben’s classic 1985 ethnography,  note also the Anthology fieldwork, and Qi Kun’s fine study. For Chinese updates, there is always much to learn on WeChat.

For at least a century, has been an aesthetic gulf between teahouse and conservatoire styles (see e.g. here, and here). As Frank explains,

the “academic” style of silk and bamboo playing at the conservatoire differs considerably from that of folk artists who play their music mostly in teahouses and at private homes: the conservatoire style is much more polished, less rough in its heterophony, and more rigid in its dependence on written scores. The near-absence of folk-style improvisations and the use of well-tempered (Western) tuning also make the conservatoire way of playing more arty, more “classical” in atmosphere.

There is also a gulf within the conservatoires, between “ethnomusicologists” and performers—the former (including foreign students) seeking to document folk traditions, the latter part of a more recent style modelled on the polished values of Western Art Music for the concert platform.

In 2023, at the behest of the brilliant music-anthropologist Xiao Mei, a project was initiated at the Shanghai Conservatoire introducing a more traditional style of Jiangnan sizhu to the curriculum. (I’m naively perturbed that such a modest undertaking should require funding “as an ICH-marked genre” from the Pudong Securities Asset Management Fund, the Shanghai Trust and the Aide Foundation.)

The students receive regular instruction from elderly musicians, participating in informal gatherings.

The only aspect in which the students are not yet on a par with their folk counterparts is that they never switch instruments. Many folk artists happen to be multi-instrumentalists, equally at home on lutes, fiddles, flutes, and perhaps even dulcimer or mouth-organ. They pick up a different instrument from time to time, to change perspective. But this would be too demanding for the conservatoire students, who already have a tough task, playing in traditional tuning, and on silk strings, and attempting to improvise. Very few professional musicians in China would readily accept such a challenge. […]

Notwithstanding the modest nature of the project, with just four students joining in, it may well mark the beginning of an important new trend in academia: to establish a closer rapport with tradition, to adhere more faithfully to historical aesthetics, and ultimately, to play more freely, and with more fun.

Meanwhile, Frank also reviews a recent studio album, with senior musicians of the Shanghai Changqiao Jiangnan Sizhu Ensemble joined by the young dizi-player Fan Linfeng. Trained in Shanghai (and a devotee of HIP early-music performance practice), Fan has formed her own Jiangnan sizhu group at the Central Conservatoire in Beijing, also inspired by the traditional style. For this repertoire it is easier to find recordings of conservatoire ensembles than of folk groups, but this one sounds rather different. Still, Frank’s review begins with suitable nostalgia:

How wonderful it was, the relaxed atmosphere of Shanghai teahouses in the early 1980s. Men, dressed in green or blue Mao suits, would chat away, smoke pipes, drink tea, and pay no more than casual attention to the group of musicians seated around a table in the corner, playing that easy-going, radiant ensemble music known as “silk and bamboo”: pleasing, mellifluous, joyful, an unmistakeable blend of nasal bamboo flute flourishes, plucked string sounds, hammered dulcimer, sonorous mouth-organ chords and small percussion. In those days musicians didn’t care whether you, as a visitor to the teahouse, listened or not, and the constant buzz of teahouse conversations formed a natural backdrop to the pieces, almost as if it were a part of the music.

This ambience can no longer be found in Shanghai, not quite in this way at least. Silk-and-bamboo still exists, but it has become serious business. Teahouses now tend to line up their chairs like in a concert hall, telling visitors to keep their mouths shut, pay proper attention to the music, and applaud at the end.

This may be largely true; anyway, I’d like to see a restudy of active clubs over this period of constant social change. Have informal gathering places over tea with a live musical background really been superceded? Are the pleasures of playing seated around a long table no longer valued?!

In another post I’ll introduce Frank’s comments on recent fieldwork in Gansu and Zhejiang.