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.