Monthly Archives: July 2025

Red ritual

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Before my diachronic ethnography of Gaoluo village was published, I surveyed the modern fortunes of amateur village ritual associations on the Hebei plain south of Beijing in “Ritual music under Mao and Deng”, British journal of ethnomusicology 8 (1999).

The same journal soon elaborated on the theme of ritual under Communism in a useful special issue (11.1, 2002) edited by Rachel Harris and Barley Norton, entitled “Red ritual“. Predating the Intangible Cultural Heritage razzmattazz, which further thickens the plot, it includes chapters on carnival in the Peruvian Andes (Jonathan Ritter), god processions in Cuba (Katherine Hagedorn), spirit mediums of northern Vietnam (Norton), Uyghur mazar festivals (Harris, with Rahilä Dawut—cf. this roundup), mortuary rituals in Fujian, China (Hwee-San Tan), and the Jewish service in Communist Hungary (Judit Frigyesi).

In their cogent Introduction the editors outline approaches to ritual, the contexts and functions of “ritual music” (focusing on performance), as well as revivals and recycling. Since they mention Kundera’s polemic against the state “bastardisation” of folk culture, we might now add the movie Cold war (see Resisting fakelore). See also Shamans in the two Koreas, Madonna pilfrimage in Communist Poland; and note Maoism tag. With local ritual practices often perceived as a counter-hegemonic threat to the state and a vehicle for political resistance, such studies confirm “the failure of Communism’s modernising mission. Ritual music continues to play a central role in religious expression and has the capacity to enact social memory, to forge ethnic identities, and to both propagate and challenge political and nationalist ideologies”.

The maintenance of ritual practice under authoritarian regimes is a theme that continues to engage me. Still, I find myself ever more wary of the rubric “ritual music”. While soundscape is always a crucial element animating ritual, and some of the most apposite fieldwork on performance comes from ethnomusicology, I still wish that scholars of religion and society could naturally consider soundscape without it having to be pigeonholed under “musicology” (cf. Bigenho). If the study of ritual subsumed soundscape and society, then it would be unnecessary to create a separate niche for “ritual music”.

Instrumental lives

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I’ve been admiring

  • Instrumental lives: musical instruments, material culture, and social networks in East and Southeast Asia (2024),

edited by Helen Rees, professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, who, besides her long-term work on ritual groups in southwest China, also edited the useful book Lives in Chinese music.

The chapters offer original perspectives, going far beyond dry organology, revealing “how musical instruments interact with their environments and societies”, and treating them as living organisms, with their own life cycles. Preceding Rees’s fine Introduction is an outstanding Foreword by Xiao Mei. Besides the book’s abundant further references, the publisher’s website has useful supplemental material, including audio, video, and photos.

The book is organised into three sections. The first explores the characteristics and social roles of various categories of instruments. Terauchi Nauko describes the aesthetics of silk versus synthetic strings for the Japanese koto zither (a debate highly relevant to modern Chinese history, but which I suspect is unlikely to resonate widely today outside academia). And Tyler Yamin contributes an admirable chapter on an extinct Balinese wooden clapper, “The cålåpitå past and the “dull edge” of extinction: a shaggy dog story of repatriation and refusal in Bali”. Splendidly, he ends by citing a venerable senior musician, to whom he presented a painstakingly-restored clapper, long obsolete in practice:

No thankyou. I don’t like it. Just take it back with you.

Section two includes yet another brilliant article on the elite qin zither by Bell Yung, tracing the life story of his own qin (“b.1640”, a fine characterisation) and its illustrious owners. And Jennifer Post introduces her fieldwork on end-blown flutes in rural western Mongolia.

By comparison to practice in local communities, instrument collections of museums and university music departments, removed from their natural habitat, may seem like a minor theme. But as Rees observes, the three essays of the final section “treat instrument collections not as mausoleums or specimen drawers for pinned butterflies but as dynamic entities that redirect their charges into new habitats and new social roles”. After essays on an exibition in Laos and the Thai instruments at UCLA, the volume ends with a splendid account by Rees herself of the role of Asian instruments in the founding of the UCLA collection.

For my own topic of folk ritual groups in north China one can see and feel the performers’ deep attachment to their wind instruments—like the beauty of older sheng mouth-organs, worn around the finger-holes, although they have a limited lifespan (see e.g. here and here). Some players have requested that their guanzi oboes should be buried with them.

While environmental concerns often feature, coverage of China, at least, might be further informed by the role of politics—not only campaigns but the general decline through the decades of Maoism, besides the determined resolve of communities to maintain their local traditions amidst the destruction and neglect of temples, ritual paintings, and other material artefacts. However, under the current regime even scholars outside the PRC are likely to show tact in discussing such topics.

In all, this is a most valuable volume.

End of an era

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So, the drama of Wimbledon again (“Phew what a scorcher”)!

This year the tournament, like most of the other majors, has replaced line judges with electronic line-calling. As I wonder on what planet some demented sartorial arbiter might consider the former judges “best-dressed“, the courts are now depleted of what to one friend seemed like gatecrashers.

While this largely deprives the players of the frisson of dissent, and the melodrama of audience oohs and aahs as the Hawkeye screen zoomed in to assess a challenge, the new system does seem to be widely accepted. Still, as one comment reflected on the Guardian live feed:

Something felt off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until you just reminded me about the absence of the line judges. Not only does the court look empty, but I’m surprised to find I also miss their shouts and shrieks, like a supply teacher trying to assert authority. This feels like a minor tournament without them, and it’ll take some getting used to.

See also this article. Since I wrote this, a succession of comments has appeared lamenting the change.

You can find plenty of intriguing posts on tennis under my Sporting medley.