A recent talk at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul, when Ara Dinkjian (son of the great Onnik) and Vahé Tachjian introduced early recordings of Armenian classics, led me to the impressive website
Houshamadyan: a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life.
With navigational aids, including useful context here, the site covers local Armenian communities and families on the eve of the 1915 genocide, largely through diasporic records— family histories and memoirs, images and recordings. The site is trilingual in English, Armenian, and Turkish—and the audience within Turkey seems to be significant, as explained in this review.
For a documentary introducing the musical world of Dinkjian father and son, click here.
For more of my dabblings in the cultures of west/Central Asia, click here. For another remarkable online archive, see Nicolas Magriel’s work on the sarangi. For diasporic communities in the USA, note Annie Proulx’s wonderful novel Accordion crimes. And for attempts to counteract state-induced amnesia in China and Tibet, see e.g. here.
The SOAS rebetiko reader: a selection of papers associated with the Hydra rebetiko conferences 2000-2020 and seminars held at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London (2025) (online here), edited by Ed Emery, tireless aficionado and organiser of rebetiko events.
A substantial English addition to the mainly Greek literature on the topic, it’s the fruit of several conferences over the years (notably the annual gatherings on the island of Hydra), and the creation of various bands.
Rebetes in Karaiskaki, Piraeus, 1933. Source: wiki.
The volume contains contributions from well-established academics and informed amateurs, with original source materials in translation, plentiful song lyrics, discographical notes and links to YouTube clips. Besides Istanbul and Athens, topics include the (mostly bygone) rebetiko cultures of Smyrna/Izmir, Saloniki, Crete, and the USA, along with the Jewish connection; BulentAksoy unearths Turkish lyrics in early recordings. Two chapters by Gail Holst-Warhaft (on world music and the orientalising of rebetika, and the nationalising of the amanes) sample her thoughtful work since Road to rebetika. Also intriguing are excerpts from the autobiographies of Rosa Eskenazi and Markos Vamvakaris, and chapters on the criminal underworld, addressing heroin, cocaine, and morphine in rebetiko song; coverage of the connection with Sufi tekke lodges; zeybekika dances with zurna shawms feature in articles by PanagiotisAgiakatsikas and Muammer Ketencoglu, and a field report from west Anatolia by Ali FuatAydin.
Zurnas play for zeybek dancing, Aydın 2006. Source.
On Sunday SOAS hosted a grand celebration of the life of the great ethnomusicologist David Hughes (1945–2025), who died in May. Among many notices online, see this by Rachel Harris and Hwee-san Tan; Frank Kouwenhoven wrote eloquently in the CHIME newsletter.
After embarking on a PhD in ethnomusicology at Michigan under William Malm, from 1977 David thrived on fieldwork in Japan, together with his wife Gina Barnes. In 1981 they came to Cambridge (England!) to further their research, and it was there that I first met him as we consulted Laurence Picken. David went on to teach Japanese and Southeast Asian music at SOAS, becoming Head of Music and building a vibrant performance culture in a wide range of genres (he covered some of these topics, engagingly as ever, in this playlist). So the SOAS event resembled a retrospective of three decades of world music at SOAS and in Britain, with many of David’s former students performing; apart from copious Japanese music, among other featured groups that David supported and inspired were lively renditions of Cuban music and gamelan. And videos of his own performances were on display at the reception.
David was a co-founder of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and offered wise perspectives as a member of the CHIME board. Along with his in-depth research on Japanese folk-song, he had an authoritative grasp of Japanese musical cultures, as shown in his co-editing of The Ashgate research companion to Japanese music and his chapter on Japan for The other classical musics; he received several awards in Japan for outstanding contributions to Anglo-Japanese understanding. His lively and informal presence offered a welcome antidote to the more traditional British style of academic presentation—as a jovial performer, he was the life and soul of the party, delighting in language, an inspiration to many students. As is the nature of such things, the one person who would most have relished the event could not be present. David is much missed.
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: 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.
Having not exactly been hibernating, I now find myself in what doesn’t merit the term of “sabbatical”. It’s partly that I’m beset by a lack of focus; while it’s good that I currently feel no need to inflict my ideas on others, it’d be nice if I had something to say. Still, this may come as a relief to some readers.
As to China, I remain intrigued by Zhang Zhentao’s review of my Gaoluo film. So far I haven’t found sources unpacking foreigners’ supposed proclivity for representing the “ugly” side of China, which is well worth refuting, seeming to imply that honest depiction of rural life is to be censored—but I welcome leads.
On my visits to Istanbul, while trips along the Bosphorus on the vapur ferry continue to delight, I’m ever more diffident about my random delvings into Turkish culture. One remarkable recent addition to the pleasures of the Kuzguncukmahalle is a little basement cafe where young Sufi singers and instrumentalists get together to practise the makam.
Presenting my film on Gaoluo at SOAS the other day, and the following discussion, thoughtfully led by Rachel Harris and Feng Jun, prompted me to try and rework some of my thoughts.
My book on Gaoluo was published in 2004, the result of frequent fieldtrips ever since 1989, and it’s full of detail on the lives of villagers through all the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. But I then moved onto other projects, and I only returned to the topic recently, to compile this film from my footage of the 1995 New Year’s rituals, which makes a nice succinct subject—and already a historical one, as I say in the film.
I see ethnography and film as essential complements to library work on imperial history (see here). This kind of subject, though vital to folk society, can’t be addressed only by reading old books in libraries. Actually, the topic hardly appears at all in old books—it’s only revealed by fieldwork. Until the 1950s almost every village in the region had an organisation like this; and many of them still do. While I eventually focused on this one village, we also did a survey of over a hundred village associations nearby (see e.g. under “Hebei” in the main menu, including this survey).
Religion The whole topic of the Hebei ritual associations was only “discovered” by Chinese musicologists in 1986, and it has become a major theme within that discipline—but alas, not in religious studies. I think there are two main reasons for this.
First, terminology. These groups are now commonly known by the umbrella term yinyuehui, which seems to translate simply as “Music Associations”. But it’s confusing: in these villages the term yinyue refers very specifically to the melodic instrumental ensemble that accompanies the rituals of Buddhist and Daoist temples. That indeed was our initial interest, but it’s only one aspect of the associations’ ritual activities, their “instrumental department”, if you like. The term does have an authentic historical pedigree, but tous (both in the West and for urban-educated Chinese) it suggests an unfortunately secular image, like some kind of folk club for entertainment, which encourages Chinese attempts (both in the media and in academia) to downplay the pervasive role of religion (or “superstition”!) in folk society. So I obstinately insist on calling them ritual associations. Despite the gradual decline of vocal liturgy in the region, associations preserve many ritual manuals. And while the melodic instrumental repertoire now dominates, many groups regard these pieces as “scriptures”.
Apart from terminology, folk religion is a sensitive subject. There are some fine scholars in China, but they mainly write about earlier history and written texts, and are cautious about documenting events since 1949, or current activity; whereas we who study expressive culture incline more towards fieldwork. At least, scholars of religion could choose a few villages to clarify the transmission (whether “Buddhist” or “Daoist”) from early temple priests, and study early artefacts such as ritual manuals (not least the “precious scrolls”) and god paintings. While it may now be hard to establish a different image to that of the ICH (see below), the system has legitimised such associations, and they are not subject to the taint of “superstition”—even if scholars of religion may choose to exercise a certain discretion about the early sectarian connections that we documented.
These associations on the Hebei plain are devotional, priding themselves on providing ritual services for their home village without payment. Their ritual sequences are not very dense, but their purpose is to appease the gods. I again put them in the context of other manifestations of religious behaviour in China (such as sects, occupational groups of household Daoists, and spirit mediums). Like my film on the Li family Daoists (which I also encourage you to watch!), this film is set in the north; the soundscapes of the two films are similar, but their social contexts are rather different.
After the end of the main film, the Appendix gives some clues to the workings of the majestic percussion suite, ending with the most moving complete rendition. This is the most convincing illustration of the inadequacy of text, audio recordings, and photos, and it shows the villagers’ deep commitment to the tradition.
All this is a good illustration of how ethnomusicology is based on society and soundscape. Ritual in performance is always animated by sound, so soundscape should always be a major element in our study of ritual. Indeed, most local traditions of “Chinese music” depend on ritual—folk-song, opera, narrative-singing, and dance. One might compare the ritual groups in southwest China studied by Helen Rees, or “song festivals” in the northwest. In Uyghur culture, the pervasive role of Islam is masked by Party propaganda on muqam. The world music industry also remoulds “Sufi music” misleadingly to highlight instrumental music.
Conflict, and the 1949 barrier Politics and social change are major themes of my book and this website. It’s always important to break through the 1949 barrier. We must take modern history seriously. The story always continues, from imperial and Republican times to the Maoist and reform eras, adapting to the changing times. People’s life stories and personalities make a revealing human window onto history and social change. Stories like those that I document—amidst campaigns, conflicts, famine, massacres, thefts—are airbrushed under the current Chinese regime.
Unlike small occupational household groups such as Daoists and shawm bands, these associations are public bodies, which the villages cadres have always played a major role in supporting.
I’m always struck by this amazing image of a former monk training disciples in a nearby village in 1959 (see here, under North Xinzhuang), just as the devastating great famine was occurring—the famine is among crucial topics that can hardly be addressed in China.
Shadows in the field I could only offer superficial responses to Feng Jun’s salient query about how I positioned myself in relation to the people and events I was documenting. It’s a major theme of the book (and of a thesis in Chinese). I was most fortunate to have two excellent fieldwork companions from Beijing, who were totally on board with studying social and religious change. It’s most important to stay in the village, and to take part in their ritual life (neither of which is common for Chinese scholars). The villagers were open in replying to my questions, which Chinese scholars hardly asked.
I never thought of making films for the public domain; I filmed strictly for my own research purposes, and only realised later that some footage could be edited into watchable films. Our visits energised the Gaoluo association, while others were declining, but transmission was a constant anxiety of theirs, and a theme of our discussions. We can now see this as a precursor of the Intangible Cultural Heritage system.
The ICH Since my last visit in 2003, a lot has happened in these villages. They’re no longer so poor. Crucial issues, everywhere, are migration, social media, state education, and the whole emptying of the countryside. And there’s no escaping the ICH system, which has influenced many such village groups. Many authors have described how the system commodifies, secularises, and reifies local traditions (see e.g. here). It’s state propaganda; most “research” under its auspices is superficial. While my film, and the book, inadvertently make a contrast with the celebratory approach enshrined by the ICH, I’m perturbed that Chinese viewers don’t seem to articulate this; they can’t read my book in Chinese, and anyway I’m not sure they would care to dwell on my different approach. With recent Chinese fieldwork dominated by the ICH, it is hard to gain a more in-depth picture.
Although the system uses “music” and “culture” as a smokescreen to downplay religious life, it works both ways; for the communities themselves, it helps protect them, legitimise them. With the tenuous survival of these groups under question ever since the 1980s’ reforms, joining the ICH made a tempting expedient for the association leaders. And faith endures, with villagers using the system to their own ends; the Gaoluo association still does funerals, and villagers still offer incense.
The village’s Catholic minority (whose brass band took part in a “demonstration” on 1st moon 15th in 1995, shown in the film) makes an intriguing sub-plot in the story. In this whole area the relationship between “Patriotic” and underground churches has long been opaque, and without a prolonged stay it would be hard to further our understanding of the shifting scene.
As with my work on the Li family Daoists, the combination of book, film, and website is most instructive.
Towards a dynamic approach to material artefacts in diachronic social context
Further to my previous post giving background on material support for amateur ritual associations on the Hebei plain, I now focus on Gaoluo village, whose four ritual associations all preserve a wealth of ritual artefacts. Here our prolonged fieldwork allows us to “break through the 1949 barrier” by incorporating the easily-neglected Maoist era into the wider picture both before the Communist victory and since the 1980s’ liberalisations.
To remind you, both South and North villages have their own ritual association, now commonly known as Music Association (yinyuehui, yinyue referring to the “classical” style of paraliturgical melodic instrumental ensemble); and both villages have their own Guanyin Hall Association (or Eastern Lantern Association, dongdenghui), now known as Southern Music Association (nanyuehui, having adopted the more popular style of “Southern music”). But whereas the misleading term “music association” has since become standard in the region, note that neither the 1930 nor the 1990 lists of South Gaoluo use the term: both texts (like their 1983 gongche score) refer to “Southern Lantern Association” (nandenghui), the 1990 list glossing it as“sacred society” (shenshe). So to stress yet again, this whole topic belongs firmly within the study of folk religion and society, far beyond “musicology”. Do watch my film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo!
These two donors’ lists from 1930 and 1990 make striking exhibits, but the village’s other associations also suggest clues; having written about them separately, here I rework them into a diachronic account.
A common stimulus for creating new donors’ lists is the expenditure of replacing ritual artefacts (ritual manuals, god paintings, instruments, and so on); besides recording the contributions of named villagers, many lists provide detailed public accounts.
The 1930s For our main ritual association in South village, one such list, which we saw adorning the lantern tent for the 1995 New Year’s rituals, was said to date from the late 19th century, but alas it was so faded as to be totally illegible. Instead, most handsome of the ritual artefacts on display was the 1930 donors’ list—apparently the only surviving list from before Liberation that we have found in the region:
Now if we saw this list on the wall of a museum, it would have limited potential. But since the tradition endures, not only can we witness rituals, hearing the wind and percussion music and vocal liturgy before the gods; but further, the descendants of the people featured in the list were able to provide considerable detail, putting the initiative in the context of the Republican era in the region. To summarise my discussion in Plucking the winds and in Ritual images: Gaoluo, during 1930 both associations in South village undertook a refurbishment of their ritual apparatus—apparently prompted both by the brief restoration of peace in the area after many years of fierce fighting between warlords, and by competition with the renewed energy of the village Catholics.
The 1930 list, entitled Wanshan tonggui (“The myriad charities return to the same source”), commemorates the commissioning of a major series of diaogua hangings from Painter Sun of Doujiazhuang village in Zhuozhou county just north. It records 92 heads of households, surely consisting of most of those then living in the southern half of South village which the association served, though some were doubtless too poverty-stricken to be able to afford even a minimal contribution. For all the beauty of the list, many (including all the womenfolk) were unable to read it.
The donations, ranging from 6 yuan to 5 jiao, totalled 109.83 yuan; the cloth cost 24 yuan, the paintings 61.5 yuan, and other expenses amounted to 33.83 yuan, leaving debts of 9.5 yuan. Five “managers” of the association are named at the head of the list: Cai Lin, Cai Ze, Shan Xue, Shan Chang, and Shan Futian (sketches in Plucking the winds, p.54). As their descendants recalled in the 1990s, all were prominent figures in the village, some of whom were also active as ritual performers.
Later in 1930, in preparation for the following New Year’s rituals, the South village Guanyin Hall Association also made a donors’ list for the commissioning of twelve new ritual paintings, listing four “managers”, two “organisers”, and three “incense heads”. The paintings were again made by Master Sun; the 1990s’ members also say he made new diaogua hangings for their association. In the years before the 1937 Japanese invasion, one Wang Laoguo from South Gaoluo painted more diaogua for them.
Further suggesting the ritual revival of the time, the early Dizang precious scroll of the Guanyin Hall Association in North Gaoluo contains a section recopied in 1932 (the precious scrolls are introduced here, and for Hebei, here and here).
Under Maoism In the decades after the 1949 Communist revolution, many village ritual associations gradually became less active or ceased entirely. However, a close look belies the common notion that ritual life was in abeyance right until the 1980s’ reforms. For this crucial and ever more elusive period, material artefacts serve only as an adjunct to the memories of villagers.
With the new regime in its infancy, peace gave rise to hope for local communities long traumatised by warfare. Even as the collective system escalated, Gaoluo’s new village administration managed to embrace its traditional associations. The production teams used to give a little grain or other goods to support whichever association lay within their patch. The political climate didn’t dampen faith in village ritual associations: they continued to perform funerals and observe the New Year’s rituals in their respective lantern tents. Between 1950 and 1964 several groups of young men were recruited to learn both the vocal liturgy and the instrumental music; new gongche scores of the latter were compiled.
However, I doubt if the associations often dared hang out their ritual artefacts, and the atmosphere must have discouraged the making of donors’ lists. Our association didn’t make one between 1930 and 1990, but in 1952 the South village Guanyin Hall Association converted from their chaozi shawm-and-percussion music to the more popular style of “Southern music”. They invited the locally-renowned musician Hu Jinzhong from nearby West Yi’an village to teach them, giving him food and accommodation through the winter, but no fee, as ever. There was some official opposition to them learning the music, so the association sought no public donations; it still owned some land in the early 1950s, so it could buy instruments independently. Supporters merely “took care of a banquet” for the association, and no donors’ list was made.
The early 1960s From 1961 to 1964, in the brief lull between the famine and the Four Cleanups campaign, ritual associations revived strongly throughout the Hebei plain, training youngsters in both the instrumental ensemble and the vocal liturgy. The latter tradition was in general decline on the plain, with the elders of the “civil altar” dying off. In Gaoluo, the vocal liturgy of South and North village Guanyin Hall Associations effectively came to an end with the deaths of Zhang Yi in 1950 and Shan Yongcun around 1956. Only our South village ritual association had a group of keen teenagers who came forward in 1961 to study the vocal liturgy with senior masters. But elsewhere the shengguan instrumental ensemble increasingly came to represent the scriptures before the gods.
One might imagine the early 1960s’ revival prompting our association to compile a new donors’ list, but perhaps the leaders were wary of creating such a public pronouncement. However, in 1962 the South village Guanyin Hall Association used its 1930 list to add a new list of donors.
And in 1964 the Gaoluo village opera troupe, not inhibited by the taint of “superstition”, commemorated its revival in a donors’ list (composed by Shan Fuyi), with the 280 donors representing the great majority of households in North and South villages at the time. The list records the donation of c450 yuan in total.
For both the ritual associations and the opera troupe, the early 1960s were a cultural heyday such as they had not been able to enjoy since the early 1950s, reflecting the social recuperation after the famine afforded by a central withdrawal from extreme leftist policies. Little did they know that political extremism was once again to disrupt their lives still more severely; the optimism of their declarations was soon to look naive and hollow.
Since the 1980s’ reforms In the Hebei villages, as throughout the whole of China, the last two decades of the 20th century were particular in that their associations were reviving after at least fifteen years of stagnation—and even those that had been active until the eve of the Cultural Revolution had practised somewhat furtively. Thus they needed to replace a considerable amount of their ritual equipment.
In Gaoluo after the liberalisations following the collapse of the commune system in the late 1970s, the village “brigade” (dadui) gave 100 yuan a year to all the village’s main associations, which our South village ritual association spent on getting its sheng mouth-organs tuned. In the early 1980s they commissioned a new ritual pantheon of Dizang and the underworld, and compiled a new gongche score, but they didn’t yet create a new donors’ list.
However, the North village Guanyin Hall Association had a donors’ list made as early as 1981, to commemorate their own revival, written in elegant classical Chinese (text copied in Zhang, Yinyuehui, pp.128–9). This association had a reputation for observing the ritual proprieties, and preserved splendid “precious scrolls” from the 18th century, but their fine tradition of reciting them was going into decline even before Liberation. The first historical material on the list consists of four names (“transmitters of the ritual business”) from the 1920s. Unusually, having originally been a temple-based ritual association based on reciting the scriptures, they had diversified by adopting secular genres, acquiring opera in the 1930s, reformed pingju opera in 1951, “Southern music” in the 1960s (learned from their sister association in South village), and lion dancing in 1981.
The 1990s As the economic liberalisations gathered pace and communal consciousness was attenuated, many village associations that had revived found it hard to maintain activity. In Gaoluo the 1990s were distinctive for the renewed energy provided by our fieldwork (Plucking the winds, pp.189–205).
After our first visit over the New Year’s rituals in 1989, our association now resolved to refurbish their “public building”, which they had reclaimed from the village brigade after the collapse of the commune system. This initiative was led by the then village chief Cai Ran, himself a keen member of the “civil altar”. After writing enterprisingly but unsuccessfully to the Music Research Institute in Beijing to request funding for the project, they managed to be self-sufficient in realising the project, with villagers donating money and labour.
So in 1990 the leaders of our association invited Shan Fuyi to make a new donors’ list. His substantial text outlining the association’s history (see Ritual images: Gaoluo) makes clear that my visit was a stimulus for the project; still, it was written with no guarantee that outsiders would return.
The 1990 list names 270 heads of households. Still, villagers were becoming less conscientious about donating (see Women of Gaoluo, under “Rural sexism”).
From the 1930 and 1990 lists alone, we can hardly perceive change. The association still served the ritual needs of the villagers, and was still supported by most households in its catchment area. Without thick description from fieldwork and interviews, we might never know how ritual and social life were changing.
In the early 1990s there were several thefts of ritual artefacts in Gaoluo—but this served as a stimulus for the association to reclaim those that had been taken off by cultural authorities under Maoism.
The lantern tent of the South village ritual association, 1998, with new and newly-copied donors’ lists.
Our attention to the South village ritual association stimulated another competitive ritual flurry among the two villages’ other three ritual associations. For New Year 1990 the North village ritual association also had new ritual paintings made, of their own pantheon and the Ten Kings of the Underworld (for the donors’ list commemorating this initiative, see under Ritual images: Gaoluo). We also saw a more transient paper list of expenses from New Year 1992, pasted at the entrance to their ritual building, and already decrepit and hard to read by the following summer. They had received 690.47 yuan; they had incurred expenses such as buying coal, meat, vegetables, doufu, oil, salt, tea, firecrackers, tuning sheng, buying cloth bags for sheng, copying scores, and mounting ritual manuals and paintings—all conscientiously recorded. At New Year 1998 we saw their paper lists of income and expenses for the past year. Most of the association’s income had come from the hiring of crockery; donations had also been made when the association performed funerals (the rate being around 100 yuan). Some individuals had donated cash (one as much as 750 yuan), and the village committee had given 200 yuan. They had received 3,638.2 yuan (including 939.8 yuan brought forward from the previous year) and spent 2,992.2 yuan.
After the demise of the commune system, the South village Guanyin Hall must have revived along with the other associations by about 1980. Following our 1989 visit and the revamping of the ritual associations of North and South villages, they too had a surge of energy. For New Year 1992 they made a new donors’ list (image here) for the rebuilding of their humble ritual building, with this inscription:
The Eastern Lantern Association of South Gaoluo rebuilt its public building in 1992 AD under the People’s Republic of China, with the aid of the donors listed above. Total expenditure 2,984 yuan 4 jiao; 15 yuan surplus.
The list shows 215 household heads giving sums from 20 yuan to 2 yuan.
Conclusion In all, community support for ritual life had not waned despite successive social upheavals. But new challenges were taking their toll: migration to the towns in search of work, state education, and popular media culture. Since my last visit in 2003, Gaoluo has continued to be transformed—notably by the arrival of the Intangible Cultural Heritage system, which I will address soon.
Static, silent material artefacts are most instructive when we can use them in conjunction with fieldwork and interview, helping us connect them to changing social life, filling in the gaps, learning more about practice and personalities over time. This is where the ethnographer has an advantage over the historian. I wish we had been able to find yet more detail—for instance on the 1950s: how funerals were changing, how calendrical rituals became less frequent, the decline of the vocal liturgy, and so on. We were lucky to be able to consult people who had taken part in the events commemorated in donors’ lists; but as time goes by, fewer villagers remain who can recall the early years of Maoism, let alone the “old society” before 1949.
[1] See the index of Plucking the winds, under “donations and donors’ lists”; Zhang Zhentao, Yinyuehui, pp.116–35, copies and discusses all the Gaoluo donors’ lists. On this site, note also the series of articles under the Gaoluo rubric of the main Menu.
Stone, cloth, paper: economic support for village ritual associations
My new film on Gaoluo prompts me to revisit our fieldwork the ritual associations of the Hebei plain—a task further stimulated by the recent reification of these groups under the Intangible Cultural Heritage system. I now wish to outline economic support for such ritual organisations under the successive political regimes of modern times—”breaking through the 1949 barrier”.
First, in this post I expand on some themes from my survey of ritual associations on the Hebei plain; and in a sequel I focus on Gaoluo, where we found a wealth of ritual artefacts to accompany our prolonged fieldwork and discussions with villagers. Both essays are mere samples of the material we collected through the 1990s—please excuse the considerable overlap with many of my previous writings, both on the ritual associations and on Gaoluo. [1]
Introduction Living traditions of Chinese folk ritual provide a rich source of material artefacts dating back several centuries (cf. China’s hidden century). Still, they are mere snapshots of particular moments: one hopes to be able to augment them by fieldwork on observed ritual practice and the oral accounts of villagers throughout living memory.
In rural China, as everywhere, ritual and cultural life depends on moral and economic support from local communities. Patronage, in cash and in kind, depends on the nature and scale of the enterprise.Occupational family-based groups such as household Daoists and shawm bands (as well as individual intermediaries like spirit mediums) are paid for a particular event such as a funeral, and have successfully adapted to changing patterns of social support in the post-reform era.
In the religious sphere, alongside local temples, the composite term huidaomen (used pejoratively by the Communist state—hui Association, dao “Way”, and men “Gate”) subsumes both ascriptiveamateurvillage-widedevotionalassociations and voluntarysectariangroups. On the Hebei plain, the two broad categories overlapped (see e.g. our notes on Xiongxian and Xushui counties).
Priding themselves on not accepting payment, ascriptive ritual associations have long relied on recouping their expenses through donations from the village communities whose ritual needs they serve. But whereas support for voluntary sectarian (as well as Catholic) groups remains grounded in enduring faith, the ascriptive associations have faced a particular crisis in the new economic climate since the 1980s.
Temples and temple fairs, ritual associations and the “public building” Temples have always been an important focus of community life, and in many regions they remain so, such as in south China (Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, and so on) and the northwest—although much research there has focused on the imperial legacy rather than modern change.
On the Hebei plain, temples were ubiquitous until the 1950s. Village ritual associations learned from Buddhist or Daoist temple clerics, or from other nearby associations that had done so, at various times since the Ming dynasty; they existed mainly to serve the village temples. But in a long process over the 20th century, temples were destroyed or abandoned; rather few have been rebuilt since the 1980s’ liberalisations, and still fewer have any regular staff apart from a temple-keeper. So the main venue for the reduced calendrical rituals of such villages became the “public building” (guanfangzi: Zhang Zhentao,Yinyuehui, pp.181–204), an inconspicuous building only adorned with god paintings and other ritual artefacts, easily stored away, during calendrical rituals on behalf of the community. Besides the long-term decline of active temples in the region, this may suggest insecurity among village communities through political upheavals.
Villages that have restored their former temples are in a minority, but in such cases the refurbished temples seem to provide a greater focus, visited and tended more often, as in Gaozhuang (Xushui county) and two villages in Xiongxian county, Hanzhuang and Kaikou. Still, their annual ritual calendar remains quite sparse (see my survey, under “Ritual duties”).
Even once we recognise the importance of the “public building”, a major part of the duties of these associations is to supply funeral rituals at the homes of deceased villagers.
Donors’ lists Alongside the wealth of material artefacts that we found among the Hebei village ritual associations (ritual paintings, ritual manuals, scores, and so on) are donors’ lists (beiwen碑文), documenting support over the previous year, or for a major initiative. Displayed alongside the god paintings in the ritual building, they proclaim the associations’ support among their community for providing calendrical observances and funerals, symbolising the village’s sacred core. As Zhang Zhentao notes, local terms like beiwen and bushi布施 (“donating”) remind us of the living connection of these groups with the tradition of supporting Buddhist and Daoist temples.
More ephemerally than the stone steles of temples, the donors’ lists of Hebei village ritual associations are commonly inscribed on cloth; but many are even more perishable, written on paper, pasted on the wall of the ritual building over the New Year’s rituals—when new donations (often in cigarettes and tea) are recorded daily. Thus they might never be documented unless some ethnographer happened to be there to take photos at the time.
Throughout China, paper documents are commonly pasted up announcing temple fairs, temple inaugurations, and particular rituals; some of these may record donors and amounts contributed. Even for weddings and funerals, scribes record gifts. The donors’ lists of the Hebei associations are rather different, recording the names of household heads—thereby establishing them as members of the association not just for particular rituals but throughout the year—and amounts contributed. Since these associations were responsible for performing rituals on behalf of the whole village, their leaders sought donations from virtually every household. Besides a few more affluent patrons, most families could only afford a token contribution.
While village ritual associations were inextricably linked to their local temples, there is no direct transition from the stone steles of the latter to the cloth and paper memorials of the former. Most associations must have made donors’ lists ever since their founding, generally in the Qing dynasty or even the Ming, but alas they don’t survive. Even if they did, we couldn’t make a simple comparison.
For those Hebei temples that have been rebuilt since the 1980s’ liberalisations, we found a rare instance of a stone inscription listing donations on the back of the 1993 stele for the inauguration of the Ancestral Hall to Venerable Mother (Laomu citang) in Gaozhuang, Xushui county—led by the village’s ritual association.
Whatever the material on which such lists are written, the Hebei associations are mostly village-wide public bodies, perhaps encouraging them to openly display both their expenditure and the names of their patrons. Still, many of these groups have sectarian ancestry, so I wonder if such lists have been documented among sectarian groups elsewhere in China—leads welcome.
Lists of expenses Also often detailed on such lists is the expenditure of the association, justifying the leaders’ probity on behalf of their patrons. Expenses documented include replacing instruments or maintaining them (notably tuning and repairing sheng mouth-organs), commissioning new ritual paintings; buying other equipment (tables, pennants, incense, candles, lanterns, paper, food for banquets); “utility bills” for the ritual building or rehearsal venue (coal for rehearsals, oil for lanterns, electricity); and New Year’s expenses such as firecrackers. For example, again from Gaozhuang is a paper list of expenses from 1995:
Here’s a 1994 list of expenses from Kaikou village (Xiongxian county) for the revival of the temple and its association (Zhang, Yinyuehui, pp.140–43):
Beiwen with written histories Rather as temple steles from imperial times might also document successive renovations, some donors’ lists include brief histories. Some associations even composed separate histories, such as a 1990 banner from Xin’anzhuang, Renqiu county:
Was this prompted by some interest from county cultural workers, I wonder? It clearly constituted some kind of public declaration; but the preludes of some gongche solfeggio scores of the paraliturgical melodic ensemble, whose readership was limited to the performers themselves, also contain brief histories of the association, like those of Longhua from 1963 and 1980 (for both Longhua and Xin’anzhuang, see under Ritual groups around the Baiyangdian lake).
Intriguingly, the instances that we documented were written since the 1949 revolution. Under state socialism, did political anxieties now prompt ritual associations to proclaim or justify their history, portraying the tradition as “culture”, downplaying religion? Re-reading the brief texts that head some donors’ lists, I find them diplomatic, distancing the associations from sectarian connections, claiming a place within the official discourse long before the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This seems to complement the innocuous appearance of the “public building”, the easily-concealed ritual artefacts, and indeed the growing prevalence of the shengguan instrumental ensemble over the vocal liturgy.
Still, such histories can make a useful starting point as we compile more detailed accounts from villagers’ oral recollections.
Some further examples Apart from the Gaoluo associations (to be discussed in a separate post), Zhang Zhentao (Yinyuehui, pp.130–50) details donors’ lists from other village groups we visited on the Hebei plain. These include two 1992 paper lists from North Qiaotou in Yixian county (Zhang, Yinyuehui, pp.136–40; see my discussion here)—a donors’ list introduced by a text in praise of the association’s benevolent virtue:
and their list of expenses:
In Xushui county, on our visit to North Liyuan in 1995 we found donors listed on a blackboard:
Also under my page on Ritual groups of Xushui is material on the rebuilding of village temples in East Zhangfeng (§8) and Xiefangying (§9). Zhang Zhentao further documents lists from Zhaobeikou on the Baiyangdian lake, and Fuxin in Wen’an county.
Many of these groups were of sectarian ancestry—the North Qiaotou association derived from a Hunyuan sect, for instance. As I suggested above, perhaps this made their public proclamation of charitable virtue still more apposite, counteracting state suspicion of “superstition”.
Summary Static, silent material artefacts only provide snapshots in the life of these groups. They are most instructive when we can use them in conjunction with fieldwork, helping us connect them to changing social life, filling in the gaps for the intervening periods, learning more about practice and personalities over time, using the frozen material evidence to prompt recollections from villagers, building up a picture of the longer term. This requires prolonged familiarity—as we gained in Gaoluo, subject of the following post.
And to repeat my point yet again, whereas the topic was discovered by musicologists, it belongs firmly within the study of folk religion and society.
[1] For the Hebei ritual associations, see this survey, and many pages under the Gaoluo and Hebei rubrics of the main Menu. Besides my 2004 book Plucking the winds, as well as “Ritual music under Mao and Deng” and “Revival in crisis”, note in particular Zhang Zhentao’s 2002 book Yinyuehui: Jizhong xiangcun lisuzhongde guchuiyueshe 音乐会: 冀中乡村礼俗中的鼓吹乐社. Like his discussions of the “public building” and gongche scores (pp.181–204, 365–407), his chapter on donors’ lists (pp.115–80) is excellent; following perceptive discussions of particular lists, he analyses the material on pp.150–79, including the role of the local gentry in supporting ritual associations, and comparison with the opaque economics of the mercenary shawm bands.
My new filmon the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo has recently been screened at a grand event (billed as a conference) in the village itself, thanks to the enterprise of Wei Xiaoshi (CDTM) in collaboration with Cai Yurun, who has long served both as leader of the ritual association and the village. A detailed review of the occasion has just appeared on the CDTM WeChat site (click here).
I’m delighted that my old fieldwork companion Xue Yibing could take part—we witnessed the New Year’s rituals in the village together for the first time in 1989, and his careful fieldnotes on Gaoluo and other villages over the next decade were invaluable (see mainly under Hebei in main Menu).
Gaoluo: our first visit to the Lantern Tent, New Year 1989.
One of my sessions with village litterateur Shan Fuyi, displayed on his daughter-in-law’s mobile.
I trust the film was well received, giving younger villagers an opportunity to glimpse their parents and grandparents in the days before the reified commodification inculcated by the Intangible Cultural Heritage began to influence their practices. With sonorous speeches inevitably the order of the day, the constraints of the occasion made me nostalgic for the informality of our fieldwork. The very setting, in a revamped Party Committee office, suggested how material conditions in the village have improved since my visits.
South Gaoluo New Year’s rituals, 2025. Images: Wei Xiaoshi.
Still, the religious context has not been lost: the New Year’s rituals still attract the village faithful, and the association still performs funerals for them. But the authoritative Cai Yurun voiced concerns that ICH support still can’t guarantee the future prospects of the association—in particular the vocal liturgy (which has been in a wider decline on the Hebei plain for many decades). It would take a further period of lengthy immersion in the villagers’ lives to learn their true perceptions (perhaps prompted by the film) on social and ritual change over these last thirty years. My film didn’t seem to prompt comments on how significantly the ethnographic perspective differs from the sanitised media approach typified by the ICH, but Zhang Zhentao has now published an intriguing review on this topic. Inevitably, whereas my book Plucking the winds stresses the constant tribulations of such villages under successive regimes, the prevailing congratulatory mood within China discourages such an approach.
Enbedded in the review of the event, the performance of the percussion suite in the courtyard, while still technically accomplished, inevitably lacks the spirit of the 1995 rendition before the gods. I doubt that this derives merely from the official secular context of the event; the total commitment of masters of yore like Cai An and Shan Rongqing seems to have been diluted.
Above: the association with helpers, 1995 Below: members of the association with connference delegates, 2025.
The Chinese version of the film will soon be available both on my YouTube channel (alongside the English version) and (in China) on the CDTM website. And do browse the posts under Gaoluo in the top Menu!
Click here for recent screenings in Leiden of my films on the Li family Daoists and Gaoluo.
The depth of the art of dhrupad singing never fails to entrance me—from the Dagar lineage through to Uday Bhalwalkar, whom I was blessed to hear this weekend in a recital at the Bhavan Centre in west London.
Through the slow, lengthy exposition of the alap, one hangs on every inflection, all the nuances of timbre, as Udayji expounds the pitch relationships—eventful, constantly creative, with a richly calibrated structure. Without neglecting the changing social context, one is drawn back to Hazrat Inayat Khan‘s 1921 book The mysticism and sound ofmusic. The previous day Udayji led a workshop in which he reminded us of the power of singing as a spiritual discipline.
* * *
Perhaps through some imponderable quirk of algorithm, the only widely-viewed post in my raga series is Bhairav–Bhairavi. All the posts are worth consulting, but if any deserve promoting in particular, for me it has to be the one on Yaman Kalyan.
As I marvel at the variety of solo singing styles around the world, dhrupad has a unique aura. For me, Udayji ranks alongside Billie Holiday and Mark Padmore.
On 21–22 February, to mark the closing of the exhibition A Silk Road oasis: life in ancient Dunhuang, the British Library is to hold a two-day symposium (also livestreamed online)—full programme here.
Besides religion and art, literature and languages, topics among a wide range of fascinating papers include the Buddhist slave trade, medicine, costume, and everyday life. And to follow October’s concert curated by Wei Xiaoshi (cf. the British Museum event), he will elaborate on the multi-faceted musical life of Dunhuang.
With general relevance to the conceptual confusion caused by “world music” marketing strategies, I highly recommend a review by Michael Frishkopf of The Rough Guide to Sufi music (Asian music 43.1, 2012, online here). It’s important background for several of my fumblings on the cultures of West/Central Asia, such as Bektashi/Alevi ritual (here, here) and the Naqshbandi order, and is instructive for traditions further afield—including China, where concepts like “religious music” and “Daoist music” may also confuse.
While praising the CD’s “wonderful collection of stellar performers and powerful performances”, Frishkopf trenchantly criticises its scant twelve pages of liner notes, “replete with misleading stereotypes, Orientalist-inflected, market-driven verbiage (alongside some outright errors)”.
First he addresses “world music”, itself a problematic category—an industry marketing label for musical performances from “elsewhere”, often combining elements (sonic, textual, or contextual) unfamiliar to Western listeners with others conveying reassuring familiarity (notably percussive grooves, or the timbres of Western popular music).
With the noble exception of labels aimed at the non-pecuniary goals of preservation, scholarship, or education, “the typical marketing strategy for this world music includes techniques for selection and description designed to maximise sales, not representational accuracy”.
In search of sales, most world music representations are biased—in both sound and description—to conform to the expectations for the world music idea, underscoring unfamiliarity by stressing features such as exoticism, ecstasy, trance, and spirituality, oſten emphasizing physical aspects (movement, dance, possession), and de-emphasising text in favour of the (supposedly) more transcultural power of musical sound.
On such compilations, the process of abridging original liner notes compounds rather than corrects representational errors. And “connections between different tracks typically cannot be intelligently described because such connections are not present anywhere in the source material; their interpretation requires knowledge of the broader musical scene that has already been omitted in the original re-presentation.” Moreover,
radically different kinds of world music—in this case Sufi music from field recordings, studio recordings, live performances from the world music circuit, fusions with scant existence outside of world music circles—are oſten juxtaposed without comment, simply because they were marketed under the same labels by the chosen source CDs. Some artists are widely known in their home country, others enjoy only local fame, while still others have built careers in world music and aren’t known back home (the essential elsewhere with which they are associated) at all. In the case of music identified as spiritual, some performers are recognised as religious authorities, while others are masters of music alone. Some performances are intended as spiritual utterances, while others have been denatured as a staged art.
Next Frishkopf turns to “Sufi music”, problematising both words (cf. Rectifying names):
First, one must consider the different perspectives on music (both as word and as phenomenon) and related concepts (e.g., sama’, spiritual audition; ghina’, singing) in Islam, and in Western discourse about Islam. In my opinion, the crux of this problem is not that the word music must never be used to describe the sounds of Islam—certainly the semantic scope of this English word is broad enough to encompass that which many cognates (e.g., Arabic musiqa) do not—but simply that this status, and discourse, must at least be discussed, and the etic use of the word music acknowledged. The present CD does not problematise the term at all.
Second, and perhaps more critically, is the slippery concept of Sufi, a word whose ethnocentricism is masked by its status as a legitimate Arabic word describing certain particularly pious Muslims of mystical inclination. Sufism, on the other hand, is an English neologism; the corresponding Arabic term is tasawwuf. In fact, as scholars such as Carl Ernst and William Chittick have recently observed, the current English sense of Sufism (like the terms Salafism and even Islam) has been shaped and promulgated by Orientalists, as a blanket term to designate diverse phenomena—from theosophy to voluntary religious associations (turuq), from ritual ecstasy to simple veneration (madih) of the Prophet Muhammad—throughout Muslim lands, in contrast to an imagined orthodoxy. Yet no single term covers such a vast range of phenomena in the languages of the Muslim majority regions, and indeed until the modern rise of Islamism, Muslim societies did not distinguish two spheres now known as Sufism and Islam; what is now called Sufism permeated rather than counterposed Islamic belief and practice. Sufi thus appears as a crypto-etic term. My point here is not that the term Sufi music should never be used, but rather that such a term (and its constituent parts) should be problematised, however briefly, considering its etic status and Orientalist genealogy, and (consequently) the ways it tends to mask difference.
He lists some examples on the CD. Whereas in most Muslim practice (Sufi or otherwise) language is foregrounded, in such packages instrumental music is stressed more than poetry.
In the cover statement “Islamic mystics harness the power of music”—sometimes true, though certainly not always—the sensory is transformed into the sensational, a technique for selling CDs. On page 3 of the notes booklet appears the phrase “hypnotic and trance-inducing”—an exemplary instance of world music marketing.
Following scholars of religion, Frischkopf queries the notes’ use of terms like “sects” and “orthodoxy”. And commenting on “the religious orthodox have tried to keep music out … but the Sufis have harnessed the power of music … and turned it to the service of God”,
this statement misleads in several directions at once. First, if music is taken in its broadest sense, even most Sufi writers tended to object to music in general and would approve of particular forms of chanting and—occasionally—instrumental performance only in carefully prescribed and regulated contexts. Second, if music is taken to include religious chanting, even the orthodox have always accepted certain kinds of music such as the cantillation of the Qur’an (tilawa), the call to prayer (adhan), and the recitation of religious poetry (inshad), provided that its themes remain within the bounds of religion, that the musical practices focus on text rather than emotion, and that men and women do not mingle.
Moving on to the second paragraph of the notes (!),
one finds further representations of Sufism through rituals and festivals that are described as exotic, dramatic, extreme, and ecstatic; a bodily spirituality reaching heights of bliss while radiating agony and death, evoking both Eros and Thanatos; ironic transfigurations of similar discourses today deployed—harshly—by so-called Muslim fundamentalists, the Salafiyya, for whom such features constitute adequate proof that Sufi ritual is a wholly illegitimate bid‘a (heresy; literally, innovation), having nothing to do with true Islam. Orientalist fantasies and fundamentalist critiques, both drawing on Sufi stereotypes, are thus unwittingly paired.
Frishkopf sums up:
All the artists and recordings presented here are aesthetically outstanding, though the relation of performers and performances to Sufism is quite variable. Most tracks appear to be concert or studio performances (oſten in international world music contexts) rather than field recordings, a limitation which could easily be excused if it were at least acknowledged. The selection is limited in range (so many regions and traditions have been omitted, while others are overrepresented), and biased toward instrumental music (though sung poetry nearly always prevails in Sufi contexts). Finally, the notes, which appear to rely entirely on texts drawn from source CDs (thus repeating and compounding their errors), suffer from serious inadequacies. Worse than unscholarly or error-prone, they are badly afflicted by overgeneralizations, unproblematized categories, essentialisations, and world music stereotyping, echoing Orientalist discourses, presenting misinformation, and failing to suggest important connections. Finally, understanding is severely curtailed by the absence of poetic translations. It is a rough guide to Sufi music, indeed.
His conclusion is almost comically tactful:
As a result, this album can only be recommended for teaching music, ethnomusicology, or Islamic cultures under two conditions: (1) if it is supplemented by additional readings and critical classroom discussions; or (2) if it is presented as an instance of the world music phenomenon, to be interrogated as such. For the listener, however, these tracks present a rich aesthetic experience, one that can easily be extended by recourse to the generally available source CDs, and beyond. For this service, and for highlighting the work of these remarkable musicians, the editors and publishers of The Rough Guide to Sufi music deserve commendation.
Frishkopf doesn’t interrogate a second edition (on 2 CDs) curated by William Dalrymple (cf. his film Sufi soul—see under From the holy mountain).
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.
At this time of year I like to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic by organising some of my more notable posts from the past year under particular themes. As ever, many belong under multiple tags, so below I make some whimsical choices.
Keeping company with my film on the Li family Daoists, most important is my *new film* on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo (Chinese review here). It also prompted me to devise a new Menu, and even a YouTube channel (with playlists reflecting my diverse tastes as well as my own films). For now I still resign myself to Twitter, but I’m posting on BlueSky too, so let’s all migrate there!
Homages to the genius of three friends who greatly inspired me:
You can find any posts I’ve neglected in the monthly Archive as you scroll waaay down in the sidebar. All this suggests that it would be a sensible New Year’s resolution for me to burden you with fewer of these ramblings—but first I plan a major series inspired by the Gaoluo film…
A substantial Chinese review of my new film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo has appeared on the WeChat public account of the CDTM 中国音网, headed by the enterprising Wei Xiaoshi—
Following CDTM’s earlier review of my book on Gaoluo and its audio CD, access to the film within China should clarify my emphasis on the ritual function of such groups on the Hebei plain, over a decade before the Gaoluo ritual association came to fame as their image was remoulded by the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Naturally, I hope the villagers themselves will be gratified to see vignettes of life in Gaoluo thirty years ago—many of them will hardly remember that era, and youngsters should be intrigued to see their grandfathers taking part in these rituals. As to scholars, it would also be good if the film finds an audience not only among musicologists but also in the fields of religion and folklore.
You can now watch the Chinese-subtitled version on my YouTube channel and here, and (in China) on CDTM (follow this link).
The amazing Hua family shawm band 滑家鼓乐班 playing the suite Da Yanluo 大雁落 for a funeral, Zhuanlou village, Yanggao county, north Shanxi, August 1992 (here).
From the DVD Doing Things with my book Ritual and music of China: shawm bands in Shanxi (2007).
The Hua band’s repertoire (“Ming dynasty bebop”) is heard on the ear-scouring CD Walking Shrill (Pan Records, 2004). Note also this detailed comparison of shawm bands with the qin zither, and this piece in particular! For more on shawm bands in China, see Walking Shrill, and for shawm bands around the world, here.
Regent Hall, tucked away right by Oxford Circus, is said to be a promising venue for world music. Indeed, last Friday, straight after Pouyan Biglar’s fine performance at the British Museum Silk Roads event, I hurried off there to hear more art music of Iran, with Hossein Alizadeh and the Hamavayan Ensemble (samples on YouTube e.g. here and here).
The current octet is led by Alizadeh on tar, with Houshmand Ebadi (ney), Hossein’s son Saba Alizadeh (kamancheh), Parisa Pooladian (robab), Ali Boustan (setar), and Behnam Samani (percussion). After the concert at SOAS last month I was glad of another chance to hear the vocals of Mehdi Emami, dovetailing with female singer Zahre Gholipour.
Master musicians have long been subtly adapting the radifs and dastgahs of traditional Persian muqam. Hossein Alizadeh (b.1950) is a prominent star in this lineage, reaching out to wider audiences over several decades. Modern tastes for a rather larger ensemble leads to more polished arrangements; Call Me Old-Fashioned, but I prefer the intimacy of a smaller group.
Still, the musicians’ demeanour on stage is entirely without ostentation, and their programme for the current tour mostly eschews the more popular repertoire heard on some of their CDs. Such is Alizadeh’s reputation that the largely Iranian audience listened with reverence through all the long free-tempo sections—far from easy listening, and surely remote from their daily tastes in rock or rap, whether in Tehran or London. Not all migrant communities elsewhere in the world show such devotion to their own traditional music, but Iranians in exile doubtless feel a need for emblems of Persian culture. In a week when two harrowing new BBC documentaries on Iran became available, it is hard for outsiders like me to connect the cachet of this refined tradition with changing currents in modern society and the ongoing unrest.
Last Friday, following the British Library Dunhuang concert, in the latest stage on the Silk Road caravanserai the British Museum hosted a series of musical events, wisely curated by Rachel Harris in association with SOAS as part of the public programme supporting the BM Silk Roads exhibition until 23rd February.
Besides the current exhibition, I’m always amazed by the inexhaustible riches of the galleries. Three of them made the setting for the musicians, the ambience of the surrounding artefacts lending a more palatable, less formal atmosphere than the concert stage—albeit still remote from social life along the medieval Silk Roads. So while the tension between medieval and modern soundscapes can never be resolved, I found the whole experience more satisfying than the BL concert. On a gratuitous historical note, I muse idly that chairs are a feature of later eras…
The performances comprised
South Asian and Afghan pieces on sarod and rubab (close cousins) with William Rees Hofmann, setting forth from enchanting alap
Iranian classical dastgah with the outstanding Pouyan Biglar, in the Albukhary Gallery of the Islamic World. Here he is at SOAS earlier this year:
Funeral procession (detail), Afrasiab (modern Samarkand) murals South wall. Wiki.
Inspired by the 7th-century murals from the Sogdian Hall of the Ambassadors, the event opened in the Hotung Gallery, with its numinous arhat, featuring recreations of melodies from the medieval culture of Sogdiana, heard at the capital of the Tang court in Chang’an. Directing the SOAS silk-and-bamboo ensemble, Hwee-San Tan gave a cogent introduction to Laurence Picken‘s great project to recreate the Tang scores exported to Japan, where they were soon retarded and overladen with the bewilderingly gorgeous patina of sound heard in gagaku. This, the event’s only attempt at “recreating” the medieval soundscape, made a fitting venture—though having long defected from early Chinese music sources to groups serving living folk communities, I now feel bemused by the complex issues involved in trying to perform such repertoire. In the absence of recruiting Chinese folk musicians from venerable folk traditions such as Xi’an guyue, academic reconstructions tend to resort to the unsatisfactory compromise of silk-and bamboo ensemble style around south Jiangsu—among the most junior of Han-Chinese folk traditions. Inheriting Picken’s transnotations as we do (this was the only intrusion of music stands!), the result could only sound twee by comparison with the other living folk traditions on display. *
Context is everything: we may have become used to attending Afghan, Uyghur, and Persian musics in concert, but one can at least imagine them in a more personal social setting—whereas academic recreations, however worthy, seem doomed to the staid atmosphere of the concert hall, remote from that of medieval Sogdian wine bars.
Regarding the performers, as Rachel Harris observed, it’s a privilege to work in a city where such people share their gifts with us.
* Sogdians held influential positions at the Tang court. Their music and dance—and wine bars—were all the rage there, influencing elite society further afield in north China (note the research of Chinese scholars such as Ren Erbei; on a lighter note from the great Tang scholar Denis Twitchett, see here). Topics to ponder include the degree of sinification of Central Asian ensembles at the Tang court, and how they differed from those of the oasis towns further northwest (clues here).
Musicians on camel, Tang dynasty. National Museum of China, Beijing.
Perhaps the most ambitious attempts at reconstructing the Tang repertoire result from the research of Zhao Weiping 赵维平 in Shanghai (here and here, among several related items featured on David Badagnani’s YouTube channel—the drastic retardation of the pieces in gagaku is quaintly illustrated here and here). I still feel the way forward is to approach early notations in the light of the varied ways in which folk musicians of diverse regional traditions decorate their skeletal gongche scores. Even for a relatively recent tradition like the “suite-plucking” of Qing-dynasty Beijing, this recording of the great Pu Xuezhai is far more convincing than later conservatoire recreations.
If it’s hard to find suitable Chinese musicians to recreate the Central Asian component of the Tang repertoire, perhaps a more radical project might involve shashmaqom musicians, in similar vein to early-music specialists like Jordi Savall.
Still, I approve David Urrows‘ comment on recreations of music from a later era:
In my experiences in China studies, when it comes to music repertoire in the missions from the late 16th century onwards, most of what people write—and then perform—is 10% based on documentation, and 90% based on fantasy, resulting in a kind of musical chinoiserie of a New Age type. I don’t want to promote, much less add to this pile of pseudo-scholarly dreaming, pleasant as it is to listen to…
I wonder how the new Menu is going down… Under “Roundups” there you’ll also see Playlists. I’ve never even noticed that I have a YouTube channel, but now—with the stimulus of publishing my new film on Gaoluo there—I’ve begun the long process of creating new content.
In due course I’ll upload my other documentaries on Chinese ritual cultures. Meanwhile I’m gradually adding playlists to reflect some main topics of this site, so far including
This exercise might seem a tad nerdy, but I naively imagine the selection in the playlists may lead the listener [singular—Ed.] to the numerous posts in which I expand on them—hmm, I spend all my time going on about how silent immobile text isn’t enough, and I now find myself pointing out that film isn’t enough—No Pleasing Some People…
In my post on New British jazz I mentioned Yazz Ahmed (site; wiki), so I was glad to hear her quintet at the London Jazz Festival this Saturday.
“High priestess of psychedelic Arabic jazz” is an alluring tagline, but doesn’t do justice to such a serious composer. Grand Junction in Paddington, a former church, made a striking venue, suitable for the reflective mood of her work, its architecture compensating for the intimacy of many jazz venues.
With her British-Bahraini background, Yazz Ahmed reflects in interview on exploring her Arabic heritage, but not limited to an ethnic bubble, she creates her own voice. Focusing on collaboration, she plays an unassuming role on trumpet and flugelhorn, modulating timbres with the aid of a Kaoss pad, highlighting ensemble textures—besides drums and bass guitar, the quintet is enriched by vibes and bass clarinet, joined in the second half by vocalist Randolph Matthews.
Her studio album Polyhymnia (2019) is a six-movement suite devoted to “six women of exceptional qualities, role models with whom she felt a strong bond”: Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai, Ruby Bridges, Haaifa Al-Mansour, Barbara Thompson, and the Suffragettes (playlist):
And a foretaste of her forthcoming album A paradise in the hold:
In This Day and Age™, while it would be churlish to write off new creativity in Western Art Music, I find far more relevant all the activity going on beneath the broad umbrella of “jazz”—further enhanced in live performance by the major factor of atmosphere. I’ve explored the theme of “serious music” at length here.
For a wide range of classic and world jazz, see this extensive roundup. And you can work through the plethora of posts under the world music category in the sidebar, including not just China and India but flamenco, Turkish music, and much more…
Despite my lamentable lack of background in Turkish cultures, I have dabbled in Alevi ritual—on which scholarship is clearly thriving (for Istanbul, see here and here; for Anatolia, here). Last week I learned from a talk at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul, when Faruk Çalışkan (Istanbul Technical University) introduced his research, based on his recent PhD thesis.
His work focuses on the music of Alevi âşık minstrels with their bağlama plucked lute, who have a long history of performing songs separately from their role in accompanying the vocal hymns of the dede ritual leader at cem ceremonies, coming to wider fame through the recording industry (see e.g. articles by Thomas Korovinis and Ulaş Özdemir in Landscapes of music in Istanbul, and studies of bards such as Aşık Veysel and Neşet Ertaş).
Referring to concepts such as Actor-Network Theory, Çalışkan’s work is amply theorised. And as an experienced bağlama player, he gains much from participant observation, navigating between the roles of listener, performer, and scholar:
As a listener, he observes how differently âşıks are imagined; as a performer, he experiences how âşıks imagine themselves, their positions, roles, and legacies; and as a scholar, he observes the wide network of mainstream artists and folk music performers, including bağlama players and instrument makers.
While the music of the âşıks has been popularised since the days of cassettes, Çalışkan examines commercial and non-commercial recordings across various genres that circulated on digital platforms since the 2000s. The video market, with TikTok and Instagram, must also be substantial, as well as online forums.
This dynamic process involves a broad spectrum of actors—singers, bağlama players, collectors, archivists, and the music industry itself. By tracing these re-enactments and the roles of various human and non-human actors, his thesis reconsiders the circulation of âşık music in a kaleidoscopic manner and highlights its multidimensional presence and influence.
In his work he pays attention to the legacies of âşık Nesimi Çimen (1931–93, who died in the Sivas massacre) and âşık Mahzuni Şerif (1939–2002).
Âşık Mahzuni (left) and âşık Nesimi.
Their recordings can be found online—for âşık Mahzuni, e.g. this:
And âşık Nesimi:
I am reminded of my caveats in Unpacking “Daoist music”; rather than a separate topic to be outsourced to musicologists, soundscape should always be part of our studies of ritual and culture. But whereas “Daoist music” is a misleading concept imposed by outsiders, a distortion of the underlying ritual fabric of the whole Han-Chinese population, the Alevis are an embattled minority actively creating their own images. The song lyrics are clearly crucial. For China, perhaps a more apposite parallel might be daoqing 道情 narrative-singing, with its Daoist origins later absorbed into popular expressive culture, no longer limited to ritual.
Outsiders like me need to keep trying to grasp basic issues. While the bağlama is far from exclusive to the Alevis, they attribute a particular significance to it, setting forth from its ritual function. Similarly, the whole âşık phenomenon extends to non-Alevis (Kurdish, Turkish, and beyond)—besides subsuming a range of behaviour beyond “music”. * I also wonder about similar marketing ploys like “Sufi music” or “dervish music”.
Çalışkan continues to unpack definitions of “Alevi music”, a theme pondered by scholars such as Ulaş Özdemir and Ayhan Erol. As he suggests, for older generations the terms “Alevi” or “music” were largely redundant. But the recording industry has enhanced the identity and visibility of the Alevis—influential instances that Çalışkan cited include the 1980s’ Muhabbet albums and the work of Arif Sağ, the Kalan series Aleviler’e (see e.g. this playlist), and Kızılbaş albums with their theme of resistance. Still, Çalışkan reminded us of the evolving tradition of Alevi communities around Anatolia, and their whole social and cultural identity. So while “music” and its commodification are clearly important, we should bear in mind the over-arching topic. Yet another world into which I shouldn’t presume to venture…
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.
[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?!”.
Despite all its flaws, the vast Anthologyof folk music of the Chinese peoples remains an essential starting point to survey the ritual life and soundscapes of regional folk cultures. For the province of Henan, I’ve written posts on bards and spirit mediums; now, while bearing in mind the volumes on folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance, I’ve been skimming the Anthology volumes on instrumental music, where much of the material on ceremonial and ritual life appears (cf. my surveys for Fujian, Liaoning, and Tianjin, as well as Two local cultural workers):
Though the great bulk of the volumes consists of musical transcriptions (never very helpful in the absence of available recordings), and the quality of the textual essays is even less satisfactory than in many of the other volumes, clues may be found in the terminology for regional genres and names of bands and musicians.
While the early history of musical cultures in Henan is reflected in a wealth of iconography and excavations (for which, see further Zhongguo yinyue wenwu daxi, Henan juan中国音乐文物大系, 河南卷, 1996), the main material is based on fieldwork on living traditions. Major themes in the modern transmission of local cultures, always suppressed in PRC historiography, are poverty and the memory of trauma (cf. Memory, music, society, and Sparks). But the Anthology rarely offers glimpses of this submerged history; in the narrative-singing volumes for Hunan province I found some passages bearing on the famine around 1960 (here, and here), but Henan suffered even more grievously, and looms large in studies of the national catastrophe. *
Shawm bands By now we are used to finding the Anthology‘s most substantial coverage devoted to “drumming and blowing” (guchui), referring to shawm bands serving life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies. After the general survey (pp.9–11), the introduction to these bands (pp.29–35) preceding the many transcriptions is brief and formulaic.
Bands are commonly known as xiangqiban响器班, and the shawm as dadi⼤笛, often supported by the related wind instruments xidi锡笛 and menzi闷⼦. Many bands have added the sheng mouth-organ since the 1930s.
The introduction confirms the lowly outcast status of the musicians in the “old society”. Locals distinguish those who only play shawm (qingshui清水) and those who also work as barbers (hunshui混水). In Zhoukou municipality alone, 300 bands were documented at the time of compilation.
In sections near the end of vol.2, following introductions to the Song family shawm band of Kaifeng (a kind of folk academy for the state troupes) and the shawm band of Shibukou in Lankao county (pp.1422–23), brief biographies (pp.1425–35) contain further clues. Many of these musicians came to the attention of collectors through being absorbed into the state troupes, but any of their lives would make an illuminating in-depth social study—incorporating the history of Maoism, the famine, and the 1980s’ reforms.
Guanzi player, Tianshan village, Longmen, Luoyang Xun ocarina player, Puyang Shang Yuanqing on shawm, Neixiang Shengguan players, Xinzheng.
Chuida in Neixiang county, and Bayin louzi of Zhoukou Sixian luogu, Shangcheng county Shipan, Yima municipality.
Also subsumed under the rubric of “drumming and blowing” are groups in central and northwestern Henan led by guanzi oboe or dizi flute: the shipan⼗盘 of the Luoyang–Sanmenxia region (named after its ten-gong yunluo, and akin to ritual shengguan ensembles just north); the amateur bayin hui⼋⾳会around Jiaozuo (with a more diverse instrumentation)and bayin louzi⼋⾳楼⼦ of Zhoukou municipality (named for their processional sedan), once patronised by Shanxi merchants.
Clues to the Shanxi origins of the Bayin louzi in Zhoukou.
String ensembles By comparison with wind bands, string ensembles (“xiansuo”) are rather under-represented in modern Chinese folk cultures (see e.g. Amateur musicking in urban Shaanbei; Musicking at the Qing court 1: suite plucking). In Henan the main genre isbantou pieces 板头曲 (pp.724–894), along with their zheng zither repertoire, largely collected around Zhengzhou (cf. The zheng zither in Shandong)—the instrumental component of the dadiao vocal tradition, based on 68-beat variants of the folk melody Baban.
Cao Dongfu.
Despite biographies of the celebrated zheng masters Wang Shengwu (1904–68), Ren Qingzhi (b.1924), Cao Dongfu (1898–1970) and his daughter Cao Guifen (b.1938), one gains little impression of the recent maintenance of this tradition.
Blowing and beating Without acquaintance of “blowing and beating” (chuida) pieces around the Funiushan and Dabieshan mountains, I’m unclear how they differ in style from the shawm bands discussed above. In Shangcheng county on the northern slopes of Dabieshan, mixed ensembles with strings and percussion (sixian luogu) are found. The famine around 1960 was particularly devastating in the Xinyang region; bands there, derived from shadow puppetry, are said to have “developed” greatly in the 1950s.
Festive percussion ensembles are introduced in a rather good article (pp.1061–66), including tongqi she铜器社 societies (cf. Xi’an) originally serving temple fairs (with 87 groups active in Xuchang municipality alone at the time of compilation), and the funerary jiagu架鼓 of Taiqian county, northeast Henan.
More solo pieces are identified than for most other provinces (pp.1197–1334), although most perhaps belong under ensemble and vocal categories: for dizi flute, regional types of bowed fiddles (zhuihu, zhuiqin, sihu, “soft-bow” jinghu), the rare bowed zitheryazheng, zheng plucked zither (related to the bantou tradition), and sanxian plucked lute.
“Religious music” Noting that the very concept of “religious music” is misleading, I often wish that local music collectors would engage with folk ritual practice—and scholars of religion with its soundscape. For regions such as Fujian, on whose local Daoist “altars” scholars have published detailed monographs, little can be learned from the sections on “religious music” in the Anthology; but for regions where serious scholarship is deficient, these sections at least promise some preliminary leads. Despite the long-term social impoverishment of communities in Henan, folk ritual practice there appears to maintain its vigour, yet the minimal Anthology fieldwork yielded disappointing results, and the topic still doesn’t seem to have attracted scholarly attention.
Transcriptions of Buddhist pieces, mostly instrumental, come from Yuanyang, Qixian, Minquan, Zhengyang, and Wuzhi counties, with only two vocal items (from Xinxiang municipality). This section strangely neglects the prominent Xiangguo si temple in Kaifeng, whose “music” was commodified even before the Intangible Cultural Heritage era, although the temple’s Republican-era gongche solfeggio score is reproduced in an Appendix (pp.1441–85). Daoist pieces are transcribed from Yanling, Xunxian, Pingyu, and Huaibin counties; the introduction (p.1378) also mentions a household Daoist group in Gegang district of Qixian county.
[Household?] Buddhist ritual specialists, Xinxiang municipality Buddhist monks, Lingshan si temple, Luoshan county Household Daoist presides over funeral, Tongbai county.
Hints of ritual life come in the guise of two brief biographies of wind players who were recognised at regional and provincial festivals in the 1950s:
Zhang Fusheng 张福生 (Daoist name Yongjing 永净, b.1918) came from a hereditary family of Daoists; he fled the 1942 famine along with his father and seven Daoist priests to make his home at the Guangfu si temple in Yanling county (p.1428).
Sun Hongde 孙洪德 (Buddhist name Longjiang 隆江, b.1927) came from a poor village in Minquan county; when he was young his mother gave him to the village’s Baiyun si temple, and later he moved with his master Canghai to the Tianxing si temple in Jiangang district of Shangqiu municipality (p.1430).
So far I have found few clues online to augment this paltry material, though a brief 2004 article on “Daoist music” in south Henan (where the officiants are commonly known as daoxian 道仙) is based on fieldwork with six “altars” (tan 坛) there. Further leads welcome!
* * *
A/V recordings of such folk traditions are hard to find online; some brief clips appear on douyin, e.g. “folk ritual from Xinyang” here. Perhaps still more than with local traditions of instrumental music further north and northwest, most of these genres are inseparable from folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera—as a reminder of the importance of vocal music, here’s a clip of “wailing for the soul” (kuling) for the third anniversary of the death:
In the Shaanbei revolutionary base area in the 1930s, cultural cadres struggled to valorise folk performing traditions that were so inextricable from the “feudal superstition” which the CCP was seeking to overthrow (see here). The long process of sanitising such traditions has now reached its nadir in the dumbing-down of the ICH. So, however unsatisfactory, the Anthology remains an essential starting point for fieldwork on local traditions of expressive culture in China, allowing us to adjust our perspective from the “national music” of the conservatoire style, through facile epithets (coined in the 1950s) standing for the music of a large region (Hebei chuige, Jiangnan sizhu, and so on), right down to grassroots fieldwork—town by town, village by village.
While the Henan volumes contain useful material on late imperial and Republican history, what we now need are detailed ethnographies for the whole period since the 1949 “Liberation”, as the social fabric of local communities served by such traditions struggled to survive political and economic assaults.
* For Henan, see e.g. Ralph Thaxton, Catastrophe and contention in rural China (2008), and Peter Seybolt, Throwing the emperor from his horse (1996). For more sources on the famine, see under Cultural revolutions.
It’s only quite recently that I’ve started dipping my toes, or ears, into the vast ocean of maqam (see e.g. Iran: chamber music, Art music of Iran 3, and Shashmaqom). As part of the admirable Maqām Beyond Nation project, organised by SOAS and the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, the Nasim-e Tarab ensemble of master musicians from Iran performed earlier this week at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS—last stop on a tour that also included concerts in Bologna, Venice, Bristol, Waunifor, and York.
Nasim-e Tarab (“The Breeze of Musical Enchantment”) is named after a Safavid musical treatise, compiled in Persian during the 16th century. The quintet is led by Saeid Kordmafi (santur), with Mehdi Emami (vocals), Siamak Jahangiri (ney), Hamid Ghanbari (percussion), and Saeid Nayebmohammadi (oud), all with illustrious pedigrees in Iran.
They performed a macro-suite consisting of four majles “sessions”, with metric cycles (of 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13 beats) punctuating lengthy, ecstatic free-tempo sections. Mehdi Emami (listen e.g. here, and here)—a pupil of Mohammad Reza Shadjarian and Mohammad-Reza Lotfi, no less—sang with dignity and passion, adorned by a halo of santur (cf. Zithers of Iran and Turkey) and ney flute.
The material was composed and arranged [terms I’d be curious to unpack—cf. improvisation] by Saeid Kordmafi, based on his long-term research on and practical involvement in creative practices and their historical interdependencies in the Middle/Near East and Central Asia, endeavouring to address classical Iranian music from a transnational and historically informed approach. As the blurb goes on to explain,
The ensemble is part of a dynamic aesthetic movement in contemporary Middle Eastern classical music which challenges the rigid (and heavily political) boundaries between national traditions, in favour of a cross-cultural approach to the musics of the region. This approach acknowledges how musical practices and musicians moved, varied, and influenced each other in the Middle and Near East as well as Central Asia for centuries.
Nasim-e Tarab comes from the heart of a troubled and war-ridden region with a simple yet powerful message that we have far more in common to celebrate than differences to fight over.
Here’s a brief preview:
While such music is still doubtless performed for festivities and gatherings of aficionados (see under my original post) alongside the more formal presentations of the academy, outsiders like me will happily settle for a suitably intimate concert venue. I relished the musicians’ rapport—part of the impact of this genre derives from the performers’ unaffected stage presence, eschewing the kitsch ethnic costumes that bedevil much “world music”. By contrast with China, I’m always impressed how the conservatoire system that has evolved throughout this region manages to nurture an integral, creative relationship with tradition.
Image: courtesy @soasconcerts and @mikeskelton.
Even if the bewildering modal nest of radif, dastgah, and gusheh remains opaque to me, the whole maqām tradition is entrancing, in all its transformations.
Shawm-and-percussion bands occupy a lowly but vital position in folk cultures around the world. Throughout rural China they are the major performers for life-cycle and calendrical rituals, as is clear from the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples. *
For folk expressive cultures, our evidence for change before the early 20th century is limited to the inspection of historical documents and iconography; for the whole modern period since the Republican era, our sources are hugely enriched by fieldwork. Continuity with the imperial heritage tended to be obscured by the political interventions of the Maoist era, but was revealed again by the massive revival of local traditions in the early reform period of the 1980s—documented in the Anthology and coinciding with my own fieldwork.
In two books (with DVDs) I introduced shawm bands of north Shanxi (2007) and Shaanbei (2009)—see under Other publications. In my survey Walking Shrill I outlined their lowly milieu: however indispensible,
shawm bands were always at the bottom of the social pile. Virtual outcasts, they were often illiterate, bachelors, opium smokers, begging in the slack season, associated with theft and violence.
For the period before and after the 1949 Liberation, some players were visually impaired, as shown in the rich material of the Anthology; while I still came across senior blind musicians during my own fieldwork in north Shanxi and Shaanbei through the 1990s, fewer remained active (similarly, sighted bards were encroaching on the livelihood of blind performers). But most sighted players still had a somewhat unsavoury reputation, partial to alcohol and amphetamines.
Coinciding with the revival, the Anthology fieldwork came at the most opportune time to document local traditions. But today’s society is already very different from that of the 1990s, with pervasive changes escalating . So I’m curious to learn how widely the outcast status of shawm bands still applies. We certainly can’t draw conclusions about the broad picture on the basis of the ideology of the urban troupes and conservatoires—the mere tip of a vast iceberg. Much of my work documents underlying rural customs that resist or circumvent such values—as they did even during the Maoist era. A different mode of state intrusion (or shall we say “presence”—e.g. Guo Yuhua ed., Yishi yu shehui bianqian) may now apply, but it’s never the whole story.
Chang Wenzhou’s big band at village funeral, Mizhi 2001.
I was not entirely oblivious to recent change. I described how shawm bands were turning to pop music, incorporating the “big band”, adding trumpet, sax, and drum-kit, in north Shanxi (2007, pp.30–38) and Shaanbei (2009, pp.149–53); and for the latter region I gave a vignette on the image presented by an urban troupe (pp.210–12, recast here). I have noted how the new wave of pop culture since the 1980s promised to be more successful in erasing tradition than political campaigns during the decades of Maoism.
* * *
Detailed ethnographic updates are scarce. At SOAS, Feng Jun has just completed a fine PhD thesis on paiziluo shawm bands in southeast Hubei—an instrumentation which, perhaps exceptionally, dispenses with drum in favour of gongs.
Left, paiziluo after dinner at funeral. Right, two paiziluo bands performing simultaneously in the ancestral temple. Images courtesy of Feng Jun.
Feng Jun discusses the role of these bands in funerals and ancestral ceremonies, which still require a largely traditional repertoire—whose modal variations she analyses in detail. But she also highlights weddings, which have long featured more innovative popular pieces (cf. my Shaanbei book, pp.188–9, and DVD §D2). Performers now “selectively appropriate diverse musical spectacles, particularly through the national Spring Festival Gala, and project their own re-imagining of these spectacles in the ceremonial spaces of village rituals.”
Left, brass band performing for village wedding. Right, dancing to the song Rela nüren (“Hot and spicy women”).
The increasing participation of women is another trend that I haven’t kept up with. I noted how shawm-playing men might encourage their daughters to take part in the family band, at least before marriage, since the 1980s; but in Hubei, with men often absent as migrant labourers in distant towns, married women now not only take part in paiziluo groups but form their own brass bands—another radical innovation. Feng Jun goes on to unpack the practical impact of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), now an unavoidable topic—where a plethora of detached academic analysis detailing its negative effects never manages to convey just how damaging it is.
In Hubei Feng Jun found no such prejudice against shawm-band musicians as has been documented in north China—which she explains by the greater lineage cohesion of southern society. This makes me wonder if their exclusion from mainstream society is less widespread than my material suggests. So we might consider two caveats referring to space and time: differing long-term regional customs, and recent social change. For the former, we might go back to other provincial volumes of the Anthology for more clues. As always, there will be regional variations, depending partly on the poverty and insularity of a locale. For the mid-20th century, I suspect my impression still holds good for the north and northwest, and for the Shandong–Henan region; perhaps less so as one goes further south.
And even in more backward areas, as the country has become more affluent and villages further depopulated by migration to the cities, peasants seek upward mobility through education while the influence of national trends expands greatly through social media. For some shawm families, other more reliable and salubrious livelihoods beckon; but those younger generations who still take up the trade of their elders tend to spruce up their former lowly image.
Musical change is perhaps more evident in public events (including temple fairs), that can be exploited by cultural authorities, than in domestic rituals such as funerals or the activities of spirit mediums. Household Daoists are also invited for funerals in southeast Hubei—their rituals doubtless also changing, if less obviously than those of the shawm bands.
All this is probably a question of emphasis: pop music was already part of the rural scene by the time the Anthology was being compiled, but was mentioned there only in passing. Innovations that I still considered minor only twenty years ago would now be a significant part of our description.
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In Walking Shrill I outlined the minor presence of the suona in the conservatoire (cf. jazz, which has also gained admission to the academy since the Golden Age). Indeed, while the term suona is used in historical sources, it now belongs to the conservatoire, folk musicians preferring a variety of local terms; where they do adopt the word, it is itself a badge of modernity.
Though the shawm lacks the suave image of erhu, zheng, or pipa, it has long had a foot in the conservatoire door. Under Maoism since the 1950s, state-funded Arts Work Troupes featured suona solos by celebrated “folk artists” such as Ren Tongxiang (heard e.g. on the archive CD Xianguan chuanqi). After the 1949 Liberation, some shawm players from hereditary traditions became conservatoire teachers, training younger generations from similar backgrounds—like Liu Ying, who found his way from rural Anhui to join the Shanghai Conservatoire soon after the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976. And far more than other instrumentalists in the conservatoire, Liu Ying’s pupils tended to come from a poor rural background, the Shandong–Henan region (see here, and here) remaining the heartland for such recruitment.
Even if rural musicians won’t necessarily make a lot more money in this new environment than they would back home (cf. Ivo Papazov—see here, under “Bulgaria, Macedonia”), they will naturally leap at any prospect of upward mobility. The troupes and conservatoires make a promising route to urban registration, an escape from a tough life (cf. The life of the household Daoist); still, they will never be able to absorb more than a minor intake.
As to the shawm band musicians who remain in the poor countryside serving life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies, their lives and livelihoods are changing. But thanks to the internet, the polished style of the conservatoire virtuosi is one strand among a range of new images to emulate.
Chinese scholars write academic theses on regional shawm-band traditions—although they are surely at a disadvantage under a system that still discourages the participant observation that is routine in Western ethnomusicology. So I suppose the idea of a PhD in suona studies, combining performance and writing, shouldn’t seem so comical to me. “China’s first suona Ph.D. is ready for her solo” is perhaps only a clickbait headline for the likes of me (cf. this more detailed article in Chinese).
A young Liu Wenwen performs with her parents. Source.
At the Shanghai Conservatoire, Liu Ying’s pupil Liu Wenwen (b.1990—no relation!) recently gained China’s first PhD in suona, for which she had to perform three solo recitals and write an original dissertation. Her father Liu Baobin is descended from a shawm lineage from southwest Shandong, and is said (here) to be a pupil of Ren Tongxiang; her mother Liu Hongmei comes from a long line of shawm players in Xuzhou in northwest Jiangsu. Unlike in the northwest, in the Shandong–Henan region the custom of absorbing female players into family bands appears to date back several decades. Practising from childhood under her parents’ guidance, Liu Wenwen began making journeys to Shanghai for lessons with Liu Ying, and by the age of 15 she enrolled at the conservatoire to study formally with him.
As household Daoist Li Qing found in north Shanxi when he escaped the worst of the famine by taking a job in the regional Arts Work Troupe, the conservatoire style consists largely of quaint “little pieces”, often using kaxi techniques to mimic bird-song. This repertoire never approaches the complex grandeur of traditional shawm suites (note Dissolving boundaries); and even when “little pieces” are a significant component of rural practice, they are performed (and creatively varied) within the context and rules of lengthy life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies.
In the troupes and conservatoires we also find change through different eras—not least in the spin put on the rural background. Under Maoism the suona soloists of the Arts Work Troupes fostered the image of peasants nobly toiling for the common cause, whereas publicity for today’s suave virtuosi deflects the political spin for a more glamorous image, with aspirational hype about “ascending to the hall of great elegance” (deng daya zhi tang) on the concert stage, trumpeting the success of modernisation. In both images the actual conditions of the countryside are irrelevant.
Left, village band performing for funeral, Shaanbei 1999. Right, Liu Wenwen accompanied by Tan Dun. Source.
In the case of Liu Wenwen, gender again plays a role in innovation. On the international stage, her playing has made another bandwagon for composer Tan Dun. The differing contexts entail adaptations in costume; the headscarf of the male peasant, emblem of the revolution, is now only paraded for kitsch staged performances and the ICH. **
It’s worryingly easy for the conservatoire tip of the iceberg—and the ICH—to obscure both local traditions and the pervasive changes taking place in the countryside, revealed in fieldwork like that of Feng Jun.
** I wrestled with this issue in presenting the Hua family shawm band on stage; after teething issues in Washington DC in 2002, I was able to opt for suits without ties, a cool look that doesn’t conflict too much with their casual local attire. The band may have been gratified by their brief residency at SOAS in 2005, but, free of pressure to glamorize their image or simplify their repertoire, it was very different to the long-term cultural shift embodied by players like Liu Ying and Liu Wenwen.
BTW, when visited by academics, peasants may initially appear impressed; once they discover that we’re totally hopeless at any useful, practical task, their respect may turn to consternation as our credentials prompt envy at our mystifying ability to cadge an “iron food-bowl”. This is an element in the Li family’s magnificent Joke, which follows the final credits of our film!
As you may have noticed, I feel drawn to blind musicians, in China and around the world—notably shawm players and bards. And my jottings on the wonderful Kuzguncuk mahalle of Istanbul have grown into a series (listed here, with more here). Ali Çoban makes a genial presence on the main street, perching unassumingly with his little barrow of knick-knacks. His Facebook page has a good short video; with Augusta we sometimes have a gentle chat over tea, learning a little about his story.
Ali was born blind in 1971, the oldest of five children from a village in Amasya in the Central Black Sea region. “An older friend bought me a bağlama [plucked lute] when I was young, realising my love and aptitude for music. I played well, learning songs by heart just by listening”. But he lacked the support to take it further.
When the family migrated from the village to Istanbul they moved into a run-down place in Esenyurt. Ali couldn’t leave the house for ten years—he felt like a prisoner. After his mother died in 1996, things became difficult between him and his father, but their relationship improved once he learned to be more independent by getting around with a stick. “Today I think his rejection was a good thing as it taught me to fend for myself and have some sort of a life. I’m in a much better position now than I would have been had my father taken care of me then.”
Ali met a blind woman called İnci at a summer camp in Balikesir. Herself a civil servant, she accepted when he told her that he wouldn’t be able to offer her an adequate standard of living. But after marrying in 2009 they lived together in her flat in Kuzguncuk.
Ali is not a practising Alevi, though he occasionally attended cem ceremonies at Karacaahmet. Still, the tenets of Alevism run deep, and eventually religious differences surfaced in his marriage with İnci. She came from a Sunni Muslim family, whereas for the Alevis the human dimension is always uppermost. While Ali stresses the duty to regard others charitably, perhaps he perceives a certain conflict between the noble ideal of Islamic prayer and the sometimes flawed ethical and political behaviour of mainstream society. He hasn’t directly experienced the discrimination that Alevis suffer, but by contrast with Turkey, he is impressed by the German Ministry of Education’s tolerance for Alevi teachings.
I ask how he feels about the call to prayer. “As Alevis we are not against the ezan—it’s just that some muezzin don’t perform it so well! Their level of training is important. Sometimes it’s really beautiful—not that I understand it because it’s in Arabic…” He likes our wise local imam Aydin Hoca and knows that he is well disposed towards him too even though he doesn’t attend the mosque.
Ali’s father eventually returned to the village, dying in 2019. The next year Ali and İnci separated. “It was a difficult period, but I’m thankful to be able to get about, and to be here.” He remains friends with İnci and they help each other when needed.
He tells us, “Never having seen colours, I can’t imagine or understand what they’re like. Everything comes via sound—even my dreams are like sound recordings.” As to his listening tastes, he admires the great bards of yesteryear such as Aşık Veysel and Neşet Ertaş (some tracks here), as well as Aşık Mahsuni Şerif (compilation). He loves the songs of Sezen Aksu and her protégées like Sertab Erener. He mentions the MFÖ band. Of course he knows of the blind accordionist Muammer Ketencoğlu and his radio programmes exploring Balkan music. Ali also enjoys foreign music, like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and the Beatles. In the video clip he tells how he was stimulated by the song Pes etme (“…never give up”).
Besides Ali’s meagre income from selling trinkets on the street, he receives a pittance from his father’s pension; he’s not in the best of health, and his siblings, all in different places, rarely visit. Still, he never offers a hard-luck story; indeed, he feels fortunate. However modest his apartment, “I love living in Kuzguncuk and wouldn’t want to leave.” He feels part of the mahalle community, and appreciates all the help provided by shopkeepers and others, feeding him or giving him a reduction. Sometimes locals even help him out with the rent.
Ali is a kindly soul. “I am so glad to be here, to be alive, and independent.” As he says in the film clip, “I seek spirituality, understanding, tolerance, and love”.
Lest anyone despair that my Chinese theme has recently been submerged beneath football and tennis…
Having studied the qin zither obsessively for my first few years after coming to China in 1986, I then defected—feeling not exactly unworthy but just too immersed in the utterly different world of folk ritual life in the poor countryside (see Taking it on the qin). So my posts on this elite solo tradition (see qin tag) are partly an attempt to atone for jumping ship. The qin being a genuine ivory tower, we might try and see the wood for the trees (make up your own metaphors—though “Swirls before pine” is unbeatable!).
John Thompson has never wavered in his devotion to the qin. The documentary
Music beyond sound: an American’s world of guqin (Lau Shing-hon, 2019) (watch here; introduction here, with links)
makes a useful introduction to his lifelong work. Interspersed with lengthy sequences in which he plays his reconstructions of Ming pieces at scenic spots in Hong Kong and Hangzhou (in the mode of the literati of Yore), he reflects on his early life, his later path, and the state of the qin (biography here). Subtitles are in both English and Chinese. It’s something of an illustrated lecture, with testimonials.
From a background in Western Art Music (WAM), John was drawn to early music, as well as popular music and jazz. After graduating in 1967 he was confronted with the draft, serving in Military Intelligence in Vietnam (cf. Bosch) for eighteen months and making trips around East Asia. Already educating himself on Chinese culture, he returned to the USA to attend graduate school in Asian Studies, studying Chinese language and discovering “world music” through ethnomusicology, learning the Japanese shamisen. In those early days before the vast revival of traditional Chinese culture around 1980, he was understandably underwhelmed by the bland diet of conservatoire dizi and erhu solos. Instead, through reading the seminal work of Robert van Gulik, The lore of the Chinese lute, he became fascinated with the highly literate, prescribed microcosm of the qin. *
For this his best option was Taiwan, where from 1974 to 1976 he studied with Sun Yu-ch’in (1915–90); he then studied with Sun’s accomplished pupil Tong Kin-woon and the veteran Tsar Deh-yun (1905–2007) ** in Hong Kong, where he made his home. While learning from the qin renaissance in mainland China before and after the Cultural Revolution, he has forged his own path performing and researching early tablatures; setting forth from reconstructing the 64 pieces in the 1425 Shenqi mipu (6-CD compendium with 72-page booklet, 2000), he avidly sought out other early tablatures (CD Music beyondsound, 1998).
This may seem like a niche within a niche, and it’s an even more solitary pursuit, but the search for early pieces vastly expands the small repertoire handed down from master to pupil. All this work gave rise to his remarkable website.
In the PRC since the 1960s the traditional silk strings of the qin were largely replaced by metal, though they persisted in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and there are some advocates on the mainland. In keeping with his taste for historical recreation, John is a fervent advocate of silk strings (see this typically exhaustive essay).
In Hong Kong he also served as Programme Adviser for the Festival of Asian Arts from 1980 to 1998. In 2001 he married Suzanne Smith and they moved to New Jersey. Alongside his ongoing research he continues to engage with the qin scene in mainland China, where his work is respected. In 2010 he was among fourteen masters invited to take part in a festival at the Zhejiang Museum to play qin zithers from the Tang dynasty (!!!) (click here; for a 2019 festival, here). Like other wise qin players, confronted by the performance ethos of the conservatoire and the Intangible Cultural Heritage, he valiantly proclaims the literati aesthetic of self-cultivation.
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While silkqin.com contains a vast range of material, John remains devoted to recreating Ming tablatures (still, I find it refreshing to hear him explaining that in such an oral tradition, there was no need for tablature!). The site contains ample material on the changing modern practice of the qin, but the social context before, during, and since Maoism (suggested in my series on the qin zither under Maoism) is not his main theme. Clearly the quietism the film evokes (cf. the spiritual quest of Bill Porter) is remote from the “red and fiery” atmosphere of the folk festivities that I frequent, but the social bond of PRC qin gatherings is also largely absent.
In the Chinese media the dominance of elite imperial culture is stark; online there is a wealth of information on the qin, whereas material for far more common traditions (such as the rituals of spirit mediums) is elusive. While John’s comments on the differences between early WAM and “Chinese music” are thoughtful, the vast variety of the latter cannot be represented by the qin; his dedicated study of one aspect of an elite tradition hardly allows room to absorb the wider context.
Bruno Nettl has wise words on “you [foreigners] will never understand our music” (The study of ethnomusicology: thirty-three discussions, ch.11). Conversely, I’m tired of the old clichés “Why should a foreigner study Chinese culture?” and “The monk from outside knows how to recite the scriptures“. Within China there are plenty of “monks to recite the scriptures”; no-one there would ever suggest that the qin is only understood by foreigners. John is indeed exceptional in his long-term in-depth study, but further afield this kind of thing is common—as is clear from the careers of other foreign scholar-performers such as Ric Emmert for Japanese noh drama, Veronica Doubleday for Afghan singing, or Nicolas Magriel for the sarangi in India. ***
In the sinosphere, whereas scholars rarely engage in participant observation for folk music, for the qin performing and scholarship tend to go hand in hand. So alongside the majority of qin players who have been content to transmit the repertoire that they learned from their teachers are some distinguished masters who unearth and recreate early historical sources—such as Zha Fuxi, Yao Bingyan, Tong Kin-woon, Bell Yung, Dai XIaolian, and Lin Chen. John’s work as performer and scholar is a particularly intense instance of this historical focus, a niche in the wider movement of Historically Informed Performance (HIP: see e.g. Richard Taruskin, John Butt).
Qin fraternities are now thriving in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and around the world. Senior figures on the Hong Kong scene include Tsar Teh-yun, Tong Kin-woon, Lau Chor-wah, and Bell Yung. Note also the work of Georges Goormaghtigh. The qin has long been a popular choice for foreign students to study in the PRC.
My usual point: given its tiny coterie of players, the qin is vastly over-represented in studies of Chinese music! But however niche, the qin is an essential aspect of literati culture through the imperial era, along with poetry, painting and calligraphy; and John Thompson’s work is an essential resource.
** See Bell Yung, The Last of China’s literati (2008), and the 2-CD set The art of qin music (ROI 2000 / AIMP 2014).
*** Note the contrasts between these four cultures, and approaches to them: Emmert working within the “isolated preservation” (Nettl) of noh, Doubleday as participant observer of an Afghan folk tradition soon to be decimated by warfare and fundamentalism, Magriel immersed in the changing social context of sarangi, and Thompson focusing on his own historical recreations of qin music.
On a roll after my Euro 24 folk playlistsfor the 24 teams and then for the quarter-finals, here’s another niche selection of funky tracks for the semi-finals! Having covered some bagpipe traditions, I might have gone on to highlight shawms (suitably loud, and widespread), but this playlist (partly derived from previous posts, with some new material) is based on singing and fiddling.
Whatever your feelings about football, just in case you suppose this exercise is a frivolous diversion from weightier matters, it makes an instructive and inspiring reminder of the diversity of European cultures!
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For Spain, for all its wealth of regional styles (e.g. Songs of Valencia and Festive soundscapes of the Rioja), one can never have enough flamenco (and the documentary series Rito y geografïa del cante is not to be missed!)—here are a few classics from my series.
If it’s folk traditions you’re after (Yeah right—Ed.), then how about
the world of fiddlers around the Dauphiné in the southeastern Hautes-Alpes, accomoanying the rigodon dance—here’s the CD France “Rigodon sauvage”—Alpes du Sud: Dauphiné (Ocora, 1995): *
* * *
England: more singing with fiddles (from this post on the doyens of the English folk scene)—
here’s Eliza Carthy and the Ratcatchers, with John Boden and John Spiers of Bellowhead:
Saka is a player you just love to see have these moments, to smile, to remind you […] that this is still at bottom a matter of play, joy, fun, and invention.
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Now don’t get me wrong, I love the Dutch; I should really make an effort with their folk cultures, although recordings (mainly from Friesland) such as Jaap Kunst‘s 1956 LP seem less than enthralling (playlist here, or this clip from a 1963 disc, with images). I’m all for doorstep anthropology, but one can imagine Kunst finding Indonesia a more stimulating fieldsite, and I can see why Antoinet Schimmelpennick set off for China. Still, personal taste isn’t really the brief of the ethnographer.
All the same, in my self-appointed capacity as referee I’m going to overrule the Netherlands’ second-half goals and pretend Turkey won—because they have been the stars of the tournament, and it feels like they’ve been playing at home. So first,
an early Gastarbeiter song, again protesting racism:
Another reason for me to bend the rules is because Turkey has some amazing music. Whereas modern France is multicultural, my other choice for Turkey reflects a multicultural past:
The tracks from 1939, on the eve of war, were recorded by Roger Dévigne (1885–1965):
The 26th—telegram from the Vice-Chancellor: “Come back immediately”. Mr Jouan Nicola arrived at the same time as the telegram: “I’m here to help you dismantle your recording equipment” he told me. From outside came the continuous rumble of coaches leaving packed with soldiers called up. Off to the station. Long queues of soldiers called up from the mountains, each with his cardboard suitcase…
The more fanatical football supporter may wish to delve into the fine site violoneux.fr.
Detail of map showing distribution of fiddle traditions in France!
For a less voluminous introduction to regional styles, click here—citing an 1821 decree:
It is forbidden to all fiddlers or other instruments forming any gathering around [feasts], they could become responsible for the evil that would result and need to be arrested by order of the Mayor.
Such sources reflect on the long decline of the traditional context of social dance.
Not so much an impromptu pre-match party as a rigodon at Saint-Pierre-de-Méarotz, Isère, July 1908. Source (cf. the excellent title Le rigodon n’est pas un fromage!).
Making headlines since 2017, their 2018 single School revolution (lyrics) was remixed on EP in 2022. From VoB’s YouTube channel, their 2023 album Retas (Guardian interview) includes tracks like What’s the Holy (Nobel) today?, God, allow me (please) to play music, and [NOT] PUBLIC PROPERTY. Here’s the playlist:
Warming up for Glastonbury (where they are understandably concerned about the weather and the food…), VoB played in London at Downstairs at the Dome—but it was sold out, so I wasn’t distracted from Euro 24—indeed, I would have felt like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake, in Raymond Chandler‘s fine simile.
This makes quite a change from Éva Gauthier‘s genteel promotion of gamelan. Note also my roundups on punk (including Croatia, Spain, Iran, Beijing, and the GDR), gender, and West/Central Asia—Like I’d Know…
Like Beijing nearby, the municipality of Tianjin encompasses a large region, much of it still rural. On ritual and its soundscapes there, my previous articles include
which as ever contain substantial material on ritual traditions. To remind you of my introduction to a similar recent survey for Fujian province in southeast China,
Ritual pervades all genres of folk expressive culture: in the Anthology, it is a major theme of the volumes for folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance. In the instrumental music volumes, even genres that lack explicit liturgical content are also invariably performed for ceremonial occasions—but a further reason to consult them is that the specific rubric of “religious music” has been consigned there. I’ve described the flaws of the Anthology project in my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.
Apart from the Anthology‘s valuable Monographs for opera and narrative-singing and brief textual introductions to genres, its volumes consist mainly of transcriptions, of limited value without available recordings. Conceptually its classifications are rudimentary, but it opens up a world of local cultures.
It’s important to grasp the geography of the large regions covered by such surveys (cf. Layers of fieldwork). At the time of compilation the greater Tianjin municipality comprised four suburban areas (east, west, south, north), five counties (Wuqing, Jinghai, Ninghe, Baodi, * Jixian), and three districts (Tanggu, Hangu, Dagang), all of which had distinctive local traditions.
Useful as always are sketches of some leading groups (pp.1327–39) and brief biographies (pp.1340–56), containing promising leads to further ritual associations and sects.
Volume 1 is entirely devoted to “drumming and blowing” (guchui yue 鼓吹乐). Here the rubric of “Songs-for-winds associations” (chuigehui吹歌会) is misleading (see under Ritual groups of Xushui), compounded by the sub-categories of leading instrument (guanzi, suona, sheng, dizi). While many musicians are versatile on wind instruments, this masks the important distinction between occupational shawm bands and devotional ritual associations led by guanzi. However, there is some valuable historical information bearing on the “classical” style of amateur ritual groups (often known as “music associations” yinyuehui) serving ritual, such as the Tongshanhui 同善会 of Huanghuadian in Wuqing county (p.1336; brief mention here, under “Further leads”). Such groups were to become my main focus (see Menu, under Hebei and Gaoluo).
Nao and bo cymbals of the Tianxing dharma-drumming association, inscribed Xuande reign, 5th year (1429). Besides museums, folk performing groups preserve important evidence for the material culture of imperial China (see China’s hidden century).
Shawm bands always occupy a substantial part of the Anthology coverage. Here the summary introduces traditions for all the municipality’s regions, notably in the north around Baodi and Jixian (pp.36–8, 41–2; groups pp.1338–9, biographies p.1343–4, 1355).
The “great music” of Tianjin.
Still under the heading of “drumming and blowing”, a separate rubric introduces the imposing “great music” (dayue大乐, though here I seem to recall it should be pronounced daiyue) of the Tianjin region. These shawm bands, derived from the Qing court (cf. longchui and Pingtan paizhi in Fujian), were transmitted among the folk through the Republican era until the 1950s, mainly in urban districts but also in the suburbs; but later they became largely obsolete, so the Anthology fieldwork was largely a “salvage” project.
The impressive introduction (pp.599–610) refers to documents from the late Qing, including material on the “imperial assembly” (huanghui皇会), supplementing that of the dharma-drumming associations), and details the use of the genre at weddings and funerals. Besides recordings made for the Anthology in the 1980s, the appetising transcriptions (pp.611–78) utilise early discs that I’m keen to hear—Pathé (Baidai) from 1908 and the 1920s, Shengli 胜利 from the 1930s. Cultural cadres recorded senior artists in the 1950s and even “in the mid-70s”. By the 1980s, surviving musicians were recorded for the Anthology, and took part in the Boxer movie Shenbian神鞭 (Holy whip, 1986).
Shifan band, 1930s.
Volume 2 opens with an introduction to the mixed ensemble shifan十番 (text pp.679–701, transcriptions pp.702–875; further material on the late Qing societies Siru she 四如社 and Jiya she 集雅社 on pp.1327–8). Related to the better-known genres of south China, notablyJiangnan, shifan bands are also found in a few northern regions including Hebei (see my Folkmusic of China, pp.206–8). In Tianjin, where shifan was part of the thriving Kunqu scene before Liberation, the major figure in documenting the tradition was Liu Chuqing 刘楚青 (1909–99) (pp.1341–2), who used his youthful immersion in the culture to compile a major volume in 1987.
Notable among percussion ensembles (pp.876–1138) arethe dharma-drumming associations (fagu hui法鼓会), which my mentors at the Music Research Institute (MRI) in Beijing were excited to discover in 1986 and 1987 while attending major folk music festivals in Tianjin. These groups commonly subsumed a shengguan melodic ensemble—from the 1986 festival, listen to the MRI’s audio recording of the Pudong “music and dharma-drumming association” in Nanhe township, Xiqing district 西青南河镇普东音乐法鼓会. These events led us to the fieldwork of local scholars—notably Guo Zhongping 郭忠萍, author of the valuable overview in the Anthology (pp.876–97; transcriptions pp.898–1009; see also groups pp.1328–34 and biographies pp.1347, 1349), based on her more detailed early publication Fagu yishuchutan (1991).
This section also introduces the percussion of “entertainment associations” (huahui花会): “flying cymbals” (feicha飞镲), stilt-walking (gaoqiao高跷), dragon lanterns (longdeng龙灯), and flower drum (huagu花鼓).
“Religious music” As always, despite my criticism of the term, this is a substantial category in the Anthology, subsuming some major traditions of Buddhist and Daoist ritual.
Jinmen baojia tu shuo (1846).
For major insiders’ accounts by temple clerics Zhang Xiuhua and Li Ciyou before and after the 1949 “Liberation”, see n.1 here, leading to Appendix 1 of my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China and the research of Vincent Goossaert.
Daoist band, Tianjin. Tell us more…
For “Buddhist music” (pp.1141–52) and “Daoist music” (pp.1274–9) the introductions can only serve as a starting point for more sophisticated fieldwork—like the transcriptions (pp.1153–1273 and 1280–1326 respectively). There are slim pickings here—although the section on Daoist temple music provides a remarkable vignette from 1972 (!) on a Pingju opera musician’s visit to Zhang Xiupei 张修培, elderly (former?) abbot of the Niangniang gong temple, to notate his singing for the purposes of “new creation”. This section also introduces Li Zhiyuan 李智远 (1894–1987) of the Lüzu tang and Tianhou gong temples; though laicized after “Liberation”, from 1985 he was able to support the renovation of the Lüzu tang. More promising are the rural areas, where there are always household Daoist bands to explore. The transcriptions end with three items of vocal liturgy from the Western suburbs (pp.1313–26): the popular “Twenty-four Pious Ones” (Ershisi xiao 二十四孝), the “Song of the Skeleton” (cf. the Li family band in north Shanxi), and Yangzhi jingshui 杨枝净水.
The accounts of many folk groups offer glimpses of the sectarian connection. In Yangliuqing township (known for its nianhua papercuts), the Incense Pagoda Old Association (Xiangta laohui 香塔老会, above) of 14th Street (which we visited all too briefly in 1989) had scriptures including Hunyuan Hongyang baodeng混元弘陽寶燈 and Linfan jing临凡經. Tracing their transmission back eleven generations to the Wanli era (1572–1620) of the Ming dynasty, they have remained active exceot for the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution. In the western suburbs the Tianxing dharma-drumming association (pp.1331–2) belonged to the Tiandimen sect, and groups in Dagang district (p.33) also derive from Tiandimen and Taishangmen sects.
For all its flaws, the Anthology remains a valuable resource; but as ever, the groups introduced there call for fieldwork from scholars of folk religion as well as musicologists.
* Rural Baodi is known to Beijing musicologists and other intellectuals for its “7th May Cadre Schools” (Wuqi ganxiao 五七干校), wretched sites of exile during the Cultural Revolution—for scholars of the Music Research Institute at Tuanbowa (Jinghai), scroll down here.
Carla Grissmann, Dinner of herbs: village life in Turkey in the1960s.
Her year-long stay in a rural hamlet east of Ankara in the late 1960s was curtailed when she was expelled from the village by tedious visa regulations, so she wrote up the story in frustration soon after returning to New York, but it was only published in 2001.
It’s another outsiders’ view of rural poverty that includes classics such as Christ stopped at Eboli, Let us now praise famous men, and so on (see under Taranta, poverty, and orientalism). Always partial to village studies since my time in Gaoluo, I might not have high hopes for the book as ethnography, since she arrived untrained, learning Turkish as she went along—and yet I concur with Maureen Freely and Paul Bowles that it’s most impressive. Anatolian villagers may not easily relate to a single and childless foreigner:
Through all the months I was at Uzak Köy there was hardly a flicker of curiosity about who I myself was, where I had come from, what I had done before or was thinking of doing next. That I had lived in many places, had worked for a magazine, a newspaper, had taught school meant nothing, except perhaps they could vaguely picture a mud schoolhouse similar to their somewhere in the world. What impressed them was that I was an only child, that I had never known my grandparents, that my mother and father lived separately in different countries and that I had no husband and no children. […] In their experience of life my own life was empty.
But while Grissmann’s natural ability to engage with the villagers recalls Bruce Jackson’s thoughts on rapport, her sojourn was not “doing fieldwork”, but living among people.
“People were in and out of each other’s houses from dawn until bedtime.”
She immerses herself in her companions’ challenging routine of cooking, cleaning, childbirth and childcare. “There was always music”—songs with saz, lullabies, the village story-teller, a wedding band, all part of social life, and the conviviality of sharing cigarettes. She obliges an old woman who wants her to record a song, weeping as she sang how one of her sons had killed the other “after that quarrel over nothing”.
On topics such as healthcare and education (and indeed, village latrines, or the dependency of the bride in her new home) I’m reminded of the basic concerns of people in rural China.
Although in the village, being able to read and write was of no great usefulness, it was nevertheless acknowledged that some form of non-religious education, at least for the boys, was of value. It gave them an advantage during their military service, and would always be a safeguard against being cheated by the outside world.
Grissmann sees the wider picture:
Turkey had come so far. Much of the population after the First World War had been lost through battle, disease, and starvation. No proper roads existed, only one railway from Istanbul with a few dead-end branches into Anatolia. Malaria and typhoid still broke out. There were no industries, no technicians or skilled workmen, in a country 90% illiterate, with no established government. The heaviest liability, however, of Ataturk’s derelict legacy from the Ottoman Empire was the great mass of benighted peasants, rooted in lethargy, living in remote poverty-stricken villages untouched by the outside world. Ataturk was determined to loosen the hold of Islam on the people, which he believed was the major obstacle to modernization, and to awaken a sense of Turkish national pride. He fought fiercely for the emancipation of women, denouncing the veil, giving them the right to vote and to divorce.
Still, living in the village, such initiatives seemed remote. Confronted by apathy and prejudice, the village schoolteacher had a daunting task:
On every side the teacher faces the wall of tradition, of the older generation. The masses of Turks obediently took off the fez, yet in their vast rural areas they are still bound to their mosque, fetishism, holy men, and superstitions. Women still cover their face. The men believe that women should indeed be veiled, that girls should not go to school, that sports and the radio are the intrigue of the devil. Illness is cured by words from the Koran, written out and folded into a little cloth bag and pinned on a shoulder, or by having the Imam blow on the diseased or ailing parts. The old men sit in rows fingering their beads and say that what their village needs is a new mosque, not a new road. An new mosque, not a new school.
When she offers money from friends in the USA to install basic amenities,
They only partially understood; they could not really visualize the source of this wealth in any tangible, significant way. It was providential, immense, incredible, and yet it remained simple. There was no embarrassment of gratitude.
As to Grissmann’s access to the outside world:
Sometimes a group of children, mute with importance, brought a letter at the crack of dawn, right up to my bed. Most of. these letters had been opened in a friendly way, which I didn’t mind at all. In one fashion or another, everything seemed to arrive, although I never divined any discernable postal system at work or the hand of an actual postman anywhere in the background.
She ponders the process of learning to communicate:
When you are learning a new language I think you inevitably use a great deal of pantomime and mimicry, and develop small speech idiosyncracies, much of which is inevitably expressed through the comic. Beyond the clownish aspect of this can lie true humour, and if you can genuinely share this most subtle and personal sensibility, I think you have won half the battle of human communication. Although the people in the village were extremely reserved in their speech and their manners, and did not seem to express themselves with gesture or emotion, they were an enthusiastic audience and instantly caught the slightest flicker of whimsy and the allusive point of any story. We built up between us a special way of teasing that never ceased to move me, even after endless repetition. Their teasing of me and each other was a warm human thing and seemed to me to be a part of wisdom, an open, guileless generosity of heart.
Dinner of herbs is a work of great empathy.
Carla Grissmann (1928–2011) led a colourful life. Turkey proved to be a stepping-stone from Morocco to her long-term base in Afghanistan. The 2016 Eland edition contains a vivid afterword by her lover John Hopkins.
* * *
This led me on a preliminary foray in search of further ethnographies of Anatolian life. Grissman mentions Mahmut Makal‘s trenchant A village in Anatolia (1954), as well as Yaşar Kemal’s 1955 novel Memed, my hawk. On Makal and later village websites, see this thesis, as well as wiki on the short-lived Village Institutes.
Following Brian Beeley (Rural Turkey: a bibliographic introduction, 1969, and his “Migration and modernisation in rural Turkey”, in Richard Lawless, ed., The Middle Eastern village: changing economic and social relations, 1987), note the work of Paul Stirling (here, with full text of Turkish village, and papers; he also edited the 1993 volume Culture and economy: changes in Turkish villages). This article introduces some other international anthropologists in the field in the late 1960s; here Chris Hann reviews works by Carol Delaney, Julie Marcus, June Starr, and (for urban arabesk) Martin Stokes. I trust there’s much more out there from Turkish ethnographers. My search continues for documentary films on rural Anatolia (cf. Everyday life in a Syrian village).
Erlangen made a suitable and nostalgic venue for the film, having been the scene of the last concert on the delightful 2013 German tour of the Li family Daoists—my post on which I’ve just augmented. I even stayed in the same hotel, bringing back many fond memories of them.
Partly because I can now take a further step back, and partly because I’ve just been editing my new documentary about Gaoluo, I’m all the more aware how demanding the Li Manshan film is—longer, I think, than the new one will be. But I remain amazed at all the technical and personal detail it contains, and all the work that went into it.
In the discussion following the screening, the bright audience made stimulating comments. Among them was Fabrizio Pregadio, * scholar of early Daoist internal alchemy, whose own work as editor of The encylopedia of Taoism and an invaluable reference guide to the Daoist canon doesn’t render him unmoved by the modern practice of peasant Daoists in the poor countryside of north China!
Click here for more thoughts arising from screenings of my film, here for reflections on the Erlangen showing, and here for a roundup of posts on the Li family Daoists.
Left: outside the hotel, where the Li family Daoists relaxed in 2013 Right: Bell Street, after my Chinese name…
* I often wonder if his surname predestined him to become a scholar of religion!
The book comes with an audio CD—but its taken me all this time (Like, Hello?) to realise that from my video footage I could create a beautiful film devoted entirely to the 1995 New Year’s rituals around 1st moon 15th—my first extended stay in the village.
So I’m admiring the creative editing skills of the splendid Andrea Cavazzuti 老安, himself a fine film-maker. Long resident in Beijing (see this interview; for his photos from the early 80s, click here), and an old friend of the Li family Daoists in Shanxi, he’s currently spending time in Milan, so I’ve just spent a few intensive days with him there crafting a rough cut, while relishing the joys of Italy after a long absence.
It’s been inspiring to revisit the 1995 footage, nostalgic to recall the kindness and good humour of the villagers, and fascinating to collaborate in editing.
Alongside the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of the village’s four ritual associations exchanging New Year’s greetings as they parade to their respective “lantern tents” adorned with exquisite god images, are the shengguan wind ensemble, the “civil altar” (wentan 文壇) singing hymns (as well as the Houtu precious scroll)—and in particular the moving, exhilarating percussion suite, led by the great Cai An. It’s also moving to see senior masters like He Yi, Li Shutong, and Yan Wenyu, who maintained the village’s ritual life through the tribulations of Maoism. But ritual activities in Gaoluo already belong to another era…
UPDATE: you can now watch the film here, making a worthy companion to my portrait film on the Li family Daoists!
As Nicolas explains, he created the site “rather idiosyncratically” in 1997 during the internet’s early days. It became an archival treasure chest in 2014, containing (in his words):
A mammoth archive documenting over a hundred sarangi players whom I worked with when doing my PhD research in India in the 1990s. This includes biographical and anecdotal information, but most importantly, videos and audio. As of March 25, 2015 there were 300 videos of 52 sarangi players on the site as well as some rare audio of great sarangiyas of the 20th century.
Information about the sarangi, its history and social significance, its construction, maintenance and repair, and its technique.
Information about my own musical journey as well as about my research on South Asian music. My articles and PowerPoint presentations and links to my other publications will appear in due course.
Information about my teaching of sarangi, vocal music and other instruments in London and online. The video archive includes videos of my own lessons with several masters of the instrument and videos of me teaching my own students in London.
As he explains, the site “has remained unique on the internet. There is no site that comprehensively surveys the diversity of players of sitar, sarod, tabla or any other Indian instrument in this kind of detail.” In particular, no other site documents the home life of Indian musicians as in the videos:
People in India sometimes know the public face of sarangi—on the concert stage or how it is represented in Bollywood films. They know nothing about the life of sarangi players, about the gruelling practice sessions, about the intimate relationship sarangi players have with their instruments—repairing and maintaining them themselves. Because I am a sarangi player myself and have enormous sympathy with the plight of sarangi players, both musically and socially, when I was doing my fieldwork in the 1990s, I had unprecedented access to their homes. This video archive comes a long way towards illuminating the real world of sarangi players and sarangi life.
He goes on:
This website also pays tribute to the world of tawayafs, the courtesans whom sarangi players traditionally accompanied, the singing and dancing women who in the words of my dear ustad Abdul Latif Khan “kept this music alive for the last four hundred years”. These women have been excised from the history of Indian classical music as part of the crusade to make the music respectable and suitable for middle class consumption—a crusade which began to take shape in the latter half of the 19th century in tandem with aspirations for Indian independence and statehood.
We are promised further videos of mujhras, courtesan performances in Banaras, Mirzapur, and Calcutta.
Impressively, Nicolas has now created a new supplementary section, “Sarangi Players in 2024“,
which introduces, auspiciously, 108 new videos of young contemporary sarangi players, including some breathtaking pop/fusion sarangi and also some lamentable garbar. Partially because of financial necessity and partially out of a genuine enthusiasm for a more popular music idiom, a few players have moved in really surprising directions, and we see some wild videos—with high production values—in terms of both sound and image. The sarangi is alive and well in 2024, but it has had to adapt—most sarangi players can no longer make a living by accompanying classical vocalists.
The famine, and glimpses of the early 1960s’ cultural revival in response to desperation (for more on the national famine, and Ukraine, see here, and under the famine tag)
Enduring social issues: the films of Jiang Nengjie—with a note on mining elsewhere (now with a link to Hu Jie’s bleak film set in the mountains of Qinghai).
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.
* * *
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.
Last week on the eve of Nowruz, just back from Istanbul, I was happy toattend a concert of shashmaqom in the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, featuring two fine musicians from the Academy of Maqam in Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Sirojiddin Juraev on long-necked lutes and Khurshed Ibrohimzoda on vocals and tanbur plucked lute.
As I seek a rudimentary education on this suite repertoire of refined Sufi poetry accompanied by instrumental ensemble, in my explorations below (typically) I merely “gaze at flowers from horseback” 走马观花.
Shashmaqom originated from the numinous cultural metropolis of Bukhara, with related traditions evolving in centres such as Tashkent and Ferghana. For the greater region, Theodore Levin has adopted the term Transoxania, favoured by his fieldwork colleague Otanazar Matyabukov (“OM”)—stressing its “underlying geographic and social coherence rather than its more recent ethnic and political divisiveness”.
From The hundred thousand fools of God.
Basic sources on shashmaqom include an essay by Alexander Djumaev, the Musics of Central Asia site; Will Sumits’ chapter 15 in Michael Church, The other classical musics (cf. Musics lost andfound, chapter 17); “Central Asian Republics” in The Rough Guide to world music: Europe, Asia, and Pacific; and sections in the New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians and TheGarland Encyclopedia of world music.
Rather than attempting to define “classical” (cf. What is serious music?!, Joining the elite musical club, and in the introduction to my series on the Beatles) or to regard shashmaqom as a “living fossil” of courtly art music from a bygone society, it surely makes sense to understand such a tradition as part of the widespread, shifting maqam family of repertoires crossing national and class boundaries, albeit subject to canonisation (“maqām-isation”) even before the interventions of modern state regimes (see Rachel Harris, The making of a musical canon in Chinese Central Asia, pp.9–10, 97–9, 107–8).
Under the Soviet era, while shashmaqom was the object of official posturings about its “national”, “elite”, or “popular” status, it “found itself at the centre of a nationalistic tug-of-war” (in Sumits’ phrase), with competing Tajik and Uzbek versions.
So it’s high time for me to revisit Theodore Levin‘s “pioneering cultural odyssey” The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (1996, with CD). Despite its brilliant title, I suppose I was somewhat resistant to the book at first: reading it just at a time when I was deep in Chinese traditions of village ritual that were (then) remarkably unmediated by conservatoire-style remoulding, I found it unfortunate that so many of Levin’s interlocutors were representatives of state ensembles. Whereas Veronica Doubleday and John Baily, living in Herat on the eve of the Soviet invasion, had been able to immerse themselves in the grassroots world of social musicking, Tashkent was different; when Levin arrived there in 1977 his institutional base was doubtless inevitable. On that initial stay he can have had little access to the social milieu that OM later described to him (pp.33–4):
The entire unofficial cultural network and economic system that supported the central events in Uzbek social life—the toy (wedding), âsh (literally, “food”—an early morning quasi-religious gathering of men given separately by the fathers of both bride and groom before every Uzbek marriage), and ziyâfat, gap, gurung, or majlis, as intimate evening gatherings of friends for conversation, food, and music are variously called—had existed all along in the shadow of the official cultural life played out in concert halls and theatres, at public ceremonies and on radio and television.
Source: The other classical musics.
The tradition of gap is related to the Uyghur mäshräp, now the object of a new wave of repression in Xinjiang.
But if Levin too was perhaps frustrated that his initial clues to this elusive world were largely based on second-hand accounts rather than direct observation, he writes most insightfully about his encounters, with revealing stories of senior musicians’ lives. On his later visits to Tashkent with OM from 1990, he was able to attend gap and âsh ceremonies, meeting latter-day abdâl Sufi dervish “fools of God” (cf. Uyghur ashiq).
Back in 1977 Levin regarded the shashmaqom as stagnating—”a musical system propped up from above by the policies of Uzbekistan’s culture apparat” (“Frozen music”, pp.47–51):
Though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something had seemed not right about the performances of Shash maqâm I heard when I first came to Tashkent. Put simply, they lacked life. As taught at the Tashkent Conservatory, the Shash maqâm could have been compared to a dying person being kept clinically alive on a respirator. The respirator was controlled by the Ministry of Culture. It was the Ministry that had approved of the resuscitation of the moribund Shash maqâm in the late 1950s and had stage-managed its ideological repositioning as a leading exemplar of Uzbekistan’s “national” music (this after a near-death experience in the early 1950s in which the Ministry had decreed that the Shash maqâm had been too close to the feudal culture of the emirs, too distant from “the people”, too infused with undercurrents of Sufism, and thus had to be suppressed).
Still, as I learned of the troubled maintenance of folk ritual activity in China through the Maoist decades (see e.g. Gaoluo), I doubted if the turgid state ensembles could really have monopolised the musical market before 1990. Indeed, Levin continues with a vivid section on Turgun Alimatov (1922–2008), whom he met between 1990 and 1994. As Alimatov recalled, after his radio ensemble was disbanded in 1952,
I played at weddings with two brothers named Bâbâ Khan and Akmal Khan Sofixânov. Their father, Sofi Khan, was a famous hafiz [classical singer]. In those years, there were several musical dynasties which had a high calling […]. In contrast to other singers, the Sofixânovs performed exclusively songs with a religious content. They were religious people themselves, even during the time when religion was strictly forbidden. People who rejected religion simply didn’t associate with them, and for their part, the Sofixânovs stayed away from atheists. They were invited to the houses of believers.
Alimatov told Levin how he used to take part in many Sufi zikr-samâ rituals at which the Sofixânovs would perform (cf. Turkey). And he contrasted such devout behaviour with that of a lowly class of musician known as attarchi—with whom he also used to associate (cf. the underworld of old Lhasa). On this CD (Ocora, 1995), recorded by Levin, Alimatov moves from long-necked bowed lute sato to the plucked tanbur:
The ghijak spike fiddle is common to Transoxania and Xinjiang. But whereas in Xinjiang the soulful satar had long been at the heart of the Uyghur muqam, in Transoxania the sato had long been dormant when Alimatov revived it in the 1950s, followed by his pupil Abduvali Abdurashidov in Dushanbe (see below). And here is Alimatov on tanbur in 2001, recorded by Jean During, leading scholar of Central Asian maqam:
Levin continues with a revealing account of Arif Xatamov, another “unrepentant traditionalist who bemoaned the spiritual superficiality of contemporary music”—here’s a 2013 CD from Alchemy (as playlist):
And in the following chapter on Bukhara (note Levin’s CD Bukhara: musical crossroads of Asia [Smithsonian Folkways, 1991] and Shashmaqam: the tradition of Bukhara [New Samarkand Records, 1999]), while learning of the depth of Sufi and Jewish traditions he pursues shashmaqom in greater depth, finding more “frozen music”:
The worker’s state whose goal had been to eliminate class barriers in art had vilified the Shash maqâm as an elite art and tried to expunge it from cultural life. When that had failed, it had then tried to transform the Shash maqâminto a popular art. But Soviet cultural stategists had gotten everything reversed. In Bukhara, the Shash maqâm and other “heavy” music had been a popular art. And when they had tried to turn this music into a “national” folk art, they had inadvertently created an elite art: elite, that is, because it had all but lost its audience. No-one wanted to listen to a music whose soul had been usurped by the state.
The ponderous ideology of the state troupes still persisted in the early years after independence from Soviet rule. But since then, as the concert market has liberalised, shashmaqom has found a niche in the “Heritage” and “world music” industries, affording a home for some fine, creative musicians.
The hundred thousand fools of Godcontinues with chapters on musical life in the south of Uzbekistan, Khorezm, the Upper Zarafshan and Yagnâb, and Shahristan, where Levin encounters a range of musical activity in social contexts—Sufi rituals, weddings, epic singers, healers. The book is another accessible classic of ethnomusicology, valuable both as an account of the nuanced views of musicians striving to emerge from the Soviet-style cultural yoke, and in paving the way for detailed ethnographies of traditional musicking in Transoxania.
* * *
Anyway, if I find a radical gulf (or might I say gap) between folk and conservatoire in Han-Chinese musicking, it seems I should be rather more broad-minded on the journey further west. In 1950s’ China, when “old artists” were recruited to the new state song-and-dance ensembles and arts-work troupes, they often found themselves busy accompanying a bland, politicized repertoire quite divorced from their former folk practice, which they now abandoned. [1] Conversely, prestigious musicians in the Uyghur homeland and in Central Asia, rather separately from their duties in the state ensembles, often seem to have quietly maintained more traditional styles and contexts.
While I’m keen to learn more about shashmaqom-related grassroots social life(however attenuated by modernization), this kind of music is always easier to find online in commodified versions on stage—including this short UNESCO presentation. Here’s a film from the Aga Khan Music Programme, which has played a major role in enhancing the global profile of Central Asian musics, and in sponsoring centres such as the Academy of Maqam:
Invisible face of the beloved: classical music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Music of Central Asia, vol. 2 (2006):
Vol. 7, In the shrine of the heart: popular classics from Bukhara and beyond (2010), introduces other regional traditions worth pursuing.
Abduvali Abdurashidov, the main guide in Invisible face of the beloved, leads this fine Tajik chamber ensemble on sato at a 2010 Paris concert, with singer Ozoda Ashurova, [2] Pasha Hanjani on ney—and a young Sirojiddin Juraev, whose visit to SOAS inspired this little survey:
Abdurashidov appears on the CD Tadjikistan: chants et musiques classiques (Ocora, 2013):
I’m enthralled by the CD Shashmaqom: Dugoh maqomi (Inédit, 2002), again recorded by Jean During:
For more, see again here, under Audio and video recordings, §8.
Again (cf. Taiwan), I note that one consequence of a superficial survey like mine is an undue attention to the “star” performers, rather than the unsung participants who are at the heart of grassroots musicking (cf. China).
The hundred thousand fools of Godconcludes in Queens, New York, where a notable Bukharan Jewish tradition of shashmuqom has taken root. The Ensemble Shashmaqam there is comprised of emigrés from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (heard on Levin’s 1991 Smithsonian Folkways CD Central Asia in Forest Hills); in this concert they celebrate the artistry of three leading women performers who have performed with the ensemble over the years. In 2014 Evan Rapport supplemented Levin’s account in Greeted with smiles: Bukharian Jewish music and musicians in New York.
So much for homework. Since China opened my eyes and ears to musicking as a vital part of social gatherings (life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies, and so on; cf. Society and soundscape), I’ve had conflicting feelings about “concerts”—events that we so easily take for granted. Of course I grew up with Western Art Music in concert (see e.g. here), and I’ve been complicit in presenting Chinese ritual traditions on stage (e.g. here, and on tour with the Li family Daoists—contrast my film); just that I’m sometimes struck by how such reification can skew our impression of the vitality of expressive culture in local society.
As Djumaev observes, while the new academies seek to adapt the traditional master-apprentice (ustod-shogird) system, a range of strategies for transmission has emerged in response to changing times. Still, however sensitively accomplished musicians may devise classroom teaching, I still find it an alien, stultifying environment for such a culture (cf. Training Daoists in Shanghai).
At SOAS last week, the concert and the preceding workshop were engagingly introduced by Saeid Kordmafi, new lecturer in the Music Department. In duet Sirojiddin Juraev (YouTube playlist) and Khurshed Ibrohimzodahave a wonderful understanding, their musicking at once natural and intense, never showy. Ibrohimzoda’s vocal items (some incorporating a vertiginously high tessitura—apparently his personal taste rather than a feature of the tradition) alternated with instrumental solos on plucked lutes and an intimate meditation on bowed sato. For all my concerns about the academy, their spiritual focus would surely have impressed venerable senior masters like Turgun Alimatov and Arif Xatamov. The dancer Madina Sabirova adorned two items, the singing in the lively finale revealing a more popular folk style.
Across the muqam world, as Levin (pp.55–6) notes, “rigidly structured, closed repertoires like the Shash maqâm had given way to autonomous pieces performed in a relatively personalised style”. The innovations of Turgun Alimatov remind him of Jean During’s remarks on modern change in Persian art music, characterising the shift as a “transformation from classical formalism to Romanticism”,
in which music is cleansed of its status as a sacred object in order to become recentred in the interiority of the individual. […] The values of inspiration, creativity, originality, and personality of style and improvisation have become exalted to the detriment of conformity to standards, fidelity to repertoire, and fixed composition.
While I might suspect that this downplays the creative individuality of the master musicians of Yore, it looks like an inexhaustible topic for debate.
In its latest reinvention of tradition for the concert platform, shashmaqom is most beguiling—I just wonder whether it might be creating a new kind of “frozen music”. As always, I’d like to learn about its prospects for a viable social life beyond the concert hall.
[1] See e.g. A Daoist serves a state troupe. Though the opera and narrative-singing troupes were also the objects of intense remoulding (see e.g. my post on Gansu, and sequel), their musicians were often better able to preserve a more traditional style. Re my aversion to the conservatoire, I’m reminded of the Chinese text on the SOAS T-shirt, magnificently misread by one of my Daoist mentors as “anti-academy”…
[2] For the modern admission of female singers into maqam ensembles, see again Djumaev. For the Ferghana tradition, a female star of maqom is Munojot Yoʻlchiyeva (b.1960), also introduced by Levin (pp.77–80). In Europe, CDs have been issued by Ocora (1994, 1998) and World Network (1997). Here she is in concert:
In vocal traditions of Chinese expressive culture (as I keep harping, or drumming, on), the neat pigeon-holes of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera disguise a continuum from solo singing though to fully-staged genres with larger forces, all oscillating between a range of points along the ceremonial–entertainment continuum—see my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337, e.g. §4.4.
Within the Anthology, one often needs to consult all three rubrics: folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera—and indeed dance. Along with my focus on ritual traditions and instrumental ensembles, narrative-singing (aka “story-telling”) is often relevant to my studies. So I’ve recently added a tag in the sidebar for shuoshu说书 (aka shuochang说唱, or in official parlance quyi曲艺)—I’ll try and keep updating this roundup.
Another issue of taxonomy in the Anthology: whereas “religious music” is largely consigned to the instrumental music volumes, some ritual groups accompanying their vocal liturgy only with percussion are found within the narrative-singing volumes, such as the household Daoists of Changwu in Shaanxi. Also classified somewhat uncomfortably under “narrative-singing” is the substantial theme of
“precious scrolls” (baojuan)—surveyed here, with links to Hebei, Gansu, and south Jiangsu.
Of course, rather than being constrained by narrow categories, we need to place the variety of expressive cultures in social context. Studies of “narrative-singing” often highlight the refined urban entertainment of urban stages and teahouses, with a largely sinological, literary approach to late imperial history—itself a worthy topic—tending to reify performances that are in fact animated by a strong element of improvisation. And as with folk-singing, opera, and indeed instrumental music, this may distract us somewhat from the ethnography of changing modern society. In rural China, ritual contexts are strong; much story-telling takes place in the context of temple fairs and domestic blessings. The rural perspective is significant across all genres, but I find it particularly salient in coverage of narrative-singing. It may also remind us of the importance of poverty. Itinerant blind performers are prominent.
Salutary instances include these two posts on Shanxi:
Here I introduce Liu Hongqing’s harrowing exposé of the lives of poor peasant families in the Taihangshan mountains, based on a blindmens’ “propaganda troupe”.
Other regions featured on this site, in more or less depth, include
Based on a 2019 presentation made for Tibetan artists and bureaucrats in Dharamsala for the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) there, the article deserves a wide readership: many of Isabelle’s findings are applicable to genres both among the Han Chinese and elsewhere around the world, making a valuable addition to the extensive literature on “Heritage” (for a roundup of posts on this site, click here—with my own first rant on the topic here).
She discusses in detail the evolving debate around the system worldwide, as well as the Tibetan notion of “culture”. As she explains, the ICH terminology has been ubiquitously used in the cultural policies of the PRC since 2006—towards Han Chinese communities, but most critically among the so-called “ethnic minorities” (including the Tibetan regions of TAR, Amdo, and Kham), and it has given rise to “a massive output of lavishly funded state programmes, festivals, museums, academic conferences, books, DVDs and commercial by-products for tourism”—a veritable “heritage fever”.
The article sums up the genealogy, aims, language, and logic of UNESCO’s categorisations of culture, contextualising the UNESCO heritage nominations in a comparative worldwide survey. It then explores the political, linguistic and cultural reasons explaining the relative blind spot for the ICH among Tibetan communities, before moving to the specific challenges faced by ICH-nominated traditions and artists in Tibet. Unpacking the notions of “heritage” versus “cultural heritage”, Isabelle notes:
The very idea of “heritage” in the West came up as a sort of nostalgic look at the past, when it was already “too late”, that is, when the cultures supporting these objects were in a great part defunct. Moreover, this nostalgia is imbued with a nationalistic flavour, in the sense that these traditions on the verge of being lost are deemed essential in the shaping of a national bond and belonging. It may be the case that Tibetans feel that their traditions are lively enough that they do not need an objectifying label such as “heritage”. But the very idea of the creation of (what would later be called) the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in 1959 draws exactly from that same double logic of nostalgia and nationalism.
While ICH policies are “aimed at preserving songs, dances, dramas and cultural practices—not unlike what TIPA has been attempting to do for six decades”,
this politicised “catalogue” view of culture is also remote from how anthropologists understand culture: as ever adaptive and organically articulated in the multiple layers of the lives of people.
Thus “the recurrent effect of ICH proclamations is that they, in effect, isolate the practice from its context, and lead to its further endangerment”.
Yet
The phrase ICH remains obscure for nearly all Tibetans in exile—actually, as we will see, for most Tibetans in Tibet as well […] The idiom remains obstinately abstract for the great majority of Tibetans, even for those who are involved in ICH… and sometimes even for the local Chinese administrators in charge of the programmes. *
Isabelle goes on:
Cultural reluctance to the concept of ICH can be seen in two ways. On one hand, despite strong assaults on Tibetan culture that some authors have termed “cultural genocide” or “assimilation”, aspects of Tibetan of culture are still felt by Tibetans as being very strong and alive. Tibetans do not easily identify with a nostalgic contemplation of “culture” in terms of the ways in which it is embedded in ICH and UNESCO objectified conceptions. For most Tibetans, culture is not (yet) something distant, staged, or at least it is not only that. On the other hand, another cultural reluctance may concern the very notion of “culture”. ICH presupposes a democratic, or rather a “people’s view” of culture, where “culture” is that everyday life content which is shared by most people. This differs from an elevated and exclusive conception of “culture” (rig gnas) by Tibetans, that carries connotations of virtuous knowledge transmitted by role models. The idea of honouring “simple” singers, dancers or ache lhamo performers as cultural heroes of the community seems odd to most conservative Tibetans. Prestigious seats at official functions are meant for “cultural heroes” that inspire devotion and respect, such as lamas, politicians, and more recently (in exile) resistance fighters who bravely confronted the enemy. In a deeply religious and perhaps exclusive diasporic society, where the very survival of the community rests upon keeping the culture homogenised and extolling role models, the idea to give money, titles, and public acknowledgement to “simple” TIPA artists (if we consider Tibetan exiles) seems at best out of place, if not outright unacceptable. Finally, the third possible reluctance I see of Tibetans with the ICH concept is political. For those who are informed, they know that UNESCO is a cenacle of recognised independent States, and that Tibetans, not having this legitimacy, do not stand much of a chance to be heard, so why bother?
So I might consider this “blind spot” of the Tibetans not so much “unfortunate” as wise, suggesting a reluctance to play the Chinese game or pander to commodification.
Calling ICH “yet another tool to milk the government”, observers have voiced that ICH boils down to a competition between bureaucrats for their personal benefit, rather than a meaningful way to safeguard traditions for the benefit of the local people.
Still, along with other scholars of ICH, Isabelle recognises that “astute stakeholders” are sometimes able to use the ICH for “manoeuvring and promoting Tibetan culture”—a ploy also adopted among the Han Chinese and communities further afield.
Most rural performers, who are generally not educated (in formal schools), do not understand the underpinnings of the concept of “intangible cultural heritages but retain a rather positive attitude towards ICH, which they construe as bringing them material benefits (money, costumes, equipment, occasions to perform, status and value in the eyes of the State, etc.). They also recognize that ICH garners more visibility of Tibetan traditions that are disappearing fast from rapidly modernising rural areas, after decades of marginalisation and hardships. The ICH program has indeed allowed the revitalisation of derelict traditions in remote parts of the countryside and has brought more awareness about “tradition” among the youth.
On one hand “ICH does enhance visibility, give opportunities to perform (for example at State-run festivals) and sustain, to some degree, the continuous practice of art traditions”. However,
troupes are often limited to performing a short vignette of their style (20 minutes or less). When preparing their troupes for such snippets, troupe directors confess a frustration at not being able to pass down a full tradition to the next generation. A majority of these rarefied translocal art traditions require an immersion into a whole system of knowledge and cultural references to be understood and appreciated, but only a series of “postcard-like” excerpts are allowed to be “displayed” for public consumption and entertainment (and approval).
As she notes, “ICH programmes came about in a situation where performing arts traditions had already been heavily reworked through State-run programmes during the previous six decades.”
Local community traditions versus reified state propaganda: left: Ngagmo female ritual group, Rebkong (Amdo); right: TAR song-and-dance ensemble. Source.
Within the borders of China, for traditions nominated for the ICH, three were promoted simultaneously in 2009: the Gesar epic, Tibetan opera (ache lhamo), and what UNESCO dubs “Regong arts” (a thangka painting tradition in Rebgong, Qinghai). The article goes on to list the later profusion of ICH inscriptions at national, regional, and county levels.
It’s always important to unpack state agendas in promoting culture; I admire much scholarship on ICH, but while the programme has cast an ever larger shadow over local traditions, it seems sad that such authors have to invest so much energy in bureaucratic theory and practice which they might otherwise be able to spend on studying the changing communities themselves.
In her fine Conclusion, Isabelle sums up:
On the global stage, ICH is an exercise in public relations. International identity politics are now done through “spectacle”, and the representation of one’s nation through simplistic reified images. The crucial aspect of UNESCO’s conception of culture is that these cultural expressions are a “property”, an entity that is owned and managed by a State presenting itself as the legitimate custodian of that heritage.
At the level of the PRC, ICH is a crucial notion in understanding the current predicament of Tibetan culture. While definitely allowing for more visibility of folk traditions in the public and media spaces, generating more income, and offering some possibilities to safeguard and sustain cultural traditions, its actual implementation is typically fraught with complications. ICH programmes have reinforced both ancient and new hierarchies of knowledge, power and money and fostered an ever-pervasive State interventionism into the management of folk culture. The staggering budget poured into traditional culture brings about radical transformations in the name of preservation, and economic marginalisation in the name of empowering local communities. But many artists and observers in the performing arts try to stake their claim to these choreographed cultural forms and, at the same time, manoeuvre within the system to try and salvage their traditions in between the dotted lines defined by their duties. I will leave the last word to one of these Tibetan cultural custodians, who perceptively remarked:
The government wears the clothes of “culture” to do politics. We Tibetans wear the clothes of “politics” (obedience, loyalty) to do culture.
* Echoing Musapir‘s findings for Uyghur traditions—on which, note also the work of Rachel Harris, exposing the Chinese state’s sinister agenda in co-opting culture as part of its war on the Uyghur heritage—recently, this article.
Through the Maoist decades after the 1949 Communist takeover, while the society of mainland China was constantly beset by a succession of iconoclastic traumas, the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan was considered a bastion for the maintenance of traditional Chinese culture.
What I suspect hasn’t always been clarified is that Taiwan cannot embody that culture as a whole: naturally, its heritage largely reflects the traditions of the particular regions from which they were descended on the southeastern mainland—and it was that, until the 1980s, which was the only peep-hole through which we could view the enormity of Chinese culture. *
But then, as “reform and opening” swept the PRC, ritual and other folk performance activity—that outsiders could only assume to have been extinguished there after the Communist takeover of 1949—began reviving on a vast scale, along with an array of central and regional scholars keen to resume fieldwork and research. And at the forefront of discoveries was the region of south Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan (see e.g. C.K. Wang, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean, John Lagerwey). As fieldwork expanded to other parts of the southeast (see Daoist ritual in south China), it soon became clear that there was a vast repository of local traditions of ritual and expressive culture to document all over China (see The resilience of tradition)—if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective. The research of Taiwanese scholars was now able to inspire fieldwork on the mainland.
Still, the main genres of Taiwan have rather little bearing on the kind of ritual traditions that were coming to light in the north Chinese countryside, or even in east-central China; indeed, they only represent a small selection from the diverse range of genres around Fujian, as becomes clear by consulting the volumes of the monumental Anthology (for now, see here, with a further post to follow).
I also think of the transformation of Tibetan studies. After 1950, exile communities (led by TIPA in Dharamsala—see e.g. Zlos-gar, 1986) had been considered as the sole heirs to the culture of Tibet; but by the 1990s scholars began shifting towards the mature ethnographic assessment of its vicissitudes under the Chinese yoke (under Recent posts on Tibet, see e.g. Labrang 1). In her wise article “Easier in exile?, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy ponders the different challenges of doing fieldwork among Tibetans in Lhasa and Dharamsala (see The enchanting world of Tibetan opera).
* * *
Taiwan Besides the small minority of aboriginal groups (c2%), the main populations of Taiwan are Hoklo (Holo, c70%), Hokkien speakers originating from the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou regions of south Fujian; and Hakka (c15%), descended from the mainland regions of east Guangdong and west Fujian (click here and here for the expressive cultures of both groups). Refugees from elsewhere in China fleeing to Taiwan in the 1940s also brought some staged vocal genres with them.
With Taiwanese society subject to far fewer traumatic social upheavals than on the mainland, cultural forms were certainly better maintained there. But as in any modern society, there are no “living fossils”: besides the island’s complex colonial legacy, performers and patrons have to negotiate the incursions of modernity and popular media (see Society and soundscape, notably the work of Bruno Nettl).
Since the clampdown in the PRC under Xi Jinping, perspectives regarding the mainland and Taiwan are modifying (see The Queen Mother of the West); having myself been busy studying the maintenance of local ritual cultures in the PRC, it’s high time for me to re-assess my approach. So as sometimes happens on this blog (e.g. Precious scrolls, and even A jazz medley), this basic overview of music–ritual traditions is as much for my benefit as yours…
Surveys In English, starting points include articles in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, TheGarland encyclopedia of world music (Wang Ying-fenpp.423–9, Hsu Tsang-houei pp.523–9), Wang Ying-fen in The Rough Guide to world music, Europe, Asia & Pacific (3rd edition, 2009), and even wiki.
At the forefront of studies of traditional music in Taiwan was Hsu Tsang-houei許常惠 (1929–2001), who gravitated from WAM-style composition to fieldwork on folk traditions. ** Among his surveys are Taiwan yinyue shi chugao台灣音樂史初稿 (1991, I think) and (with Cheng Shui-cheng) Musique de Taiwan (1992). See also Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬, Taiwan chuantong yinyue gailun台灣傳統音樂概論 (2005, 2007), in two volumes on vocal and instrumental music.
Genres Among the most popular topics are nanguan and Daoist ritual—both, since the 1980s, informed by fieldwork on either side of the strait. Amateur nanguan 南管 music societies, performing exquisite chamber ballads for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, have long been deeply embedded in community life (see this post). Nanguan is the subject of much research, both in Fujian and Taiwan. Wang Ying-fen has published extensively on the Taiwan scene in both Chinese and English—I particularly admire her articles on the risks inherent in state promotion of nanguan (such as this), worthy contributions to studies of the thorny issue of heritage.
Temple fairs, with vibrant processions, remain a major part of life in Taiwan. Regional traditions of Daoist ritual (for the north, click here) are the focus of generations of Taiwanese and foreign scholars. For the former, alongside many distinguished scholars, Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬 has paid notable attention to ritual soundscape (e.g. Daojiao yishi yu yinyue道教儀式與音樂, 1994). Another major theme in ritual studies is the worship of the female deity Mazu, widespread both in Taiwan and around the southeastern coast of the mainland.
The composite genre of beiguan 北管 (good wiki page here, with links) is again performed mainly for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, largely by occupational groups; while closely related to vocal drama, it’s best known for its loud outdoor shawm-and-percussion bands. Here’s a short documentary about the master Qiu Huorong 邱火榮 (b.1937):
Most flexible of popular operatic forms is gua-a-hi (gezai xi歌仔戲). And more popular in Taiwan than shadow puppets and marionettes, glove-puppetry (budai xi 布袋戲) has adapted to changing times; the former tradition was transmitted by masters such as Li Tianlu 李天祿 (1910–98), whose early life is evoked in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 film The puppetmaster.
Narrative-singing is best known through Chen Da陳達 (1905–81) on the Hengchun peninsula. He was “discovered” in 1967 by Hsu Tsang-houei and Shih Wei-liang 史惟亮 as part of their fieldwork for the Folk-song Collection movement, forerunner of several state-sponsored organs in Taiwan. Here’s Shih Wei-liang’s recording from 1971:
In the north of the island, the blind female singer Yang Xiuqing楊秀卿 (b.1934) is also renowned.
(As in the PRC, please excuse me if I fall into the old Songlines trap of giving undue attention to “star performers”—whereas in-depth ethnography soon uncovers the myriad unsung bearers of tradition, such as Vincent Goossaert’s “ordinary Daoists”, or rank-and-file members of festive groups.)
Like beiguan, the Hakka bayin 八音 ensemble is dominated by shawms and percussion. Here’s the CD Taiwan: mountain songs and bayin instrumental music (Inedit, 2006; as playlist):
As in mainland China, the vocal polyphony of minority peoples (notably Amis, Bunun, Tsou, Paiwan, Rukai—around 2% of Taiwan’s population) has attracted much attention, with many recordings issued of aboriginal singing, such as Polyphonies vocales des Aborigènes de Taiwan (Inedit, 1989):
and Taiwan: music of the Aboriginal tribes (Jecklin, 1991) (playlist):
As in mainland China, while such traditions struggle to remain relevant in a modernising society, national cultural bodies have adopted particular genres as symbols of identity. Expressive culture has made a major component in the rapprochement between the PRC and overseas Chinese communities. Wind Records in Taipei issued a succession of CDs of mainland genres in conjunction with the Music Research Institute in Beijing, notably an important series of archive recordings (folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and instrumental music, as well as minority polyphony), and of the qin zither. The journal Minsu quyi, with its detailed studies (mostly in Chinese) on ritual, theatre, and folklore, also expanded its scope from Taiwan to the mainland.
* * *
Growing political tensions encourage us to pay renewed attention to Taiwan, and to support beleaguered democracy. While it’s fruitful to study the genres introduced above on both sides of the strait, the island remains a conducive environment for both performance and research. Now I’m keen to see someone with fieldwork experience in both societies, such as C.K. Wang, Wang Ying-fen, Ken Dean, or Adam Yuet Chau, expounding the different trajectories of the diverse traditions there, and the challenges that they face.
* Now, none of these comparisons quite work, but… While it’d be far too parochial to imagine the Isle of Wight as a refuge from a radical government in mainland UK, perhaps we might visualise Cuba becoming a liberal sanctuary from a Gilead-style fundamentalist north America (see The handmaid’s tale)—or even Sicily as the sole isolated outpost for tradition while mainland Europe languishes in the grip of authoritarian regimes.
In chapter 10 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China I made a similarly rash comparison, seeking to incorporate north China into our overview of Daoist ritual (cf. this post, again):
It is rather as if our knowledge of Christianity in the whole of Europe were based almost entirely on Sicily and Puglia, with the odd footnote on the Vatican and Westminster Abbey. We may like what we find in those places, perhaps considering it more exalted, mystical, and ancient—but that is another issue.
Without at all playing into the greasy hands of PRC propaganda, one might consider Taiwan (culturally, not politically, since it is clearly an independent nation! Cf. China has always been part of…) as just one among over thirty provinces of China, all of whose forms of expressive culture are dominated by long-established local folk traditions while also featuring some “national” genres and styles from other regions.
** If Yang Yinliu wasn’t the Chinese Bartók, then Hsu Tsang-houei wasn’t the Taiwanese Yang Yinliu (whereas Bill Evanswas the Bill Evans of jazz).
The going was tough for the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the years following the regime of William Glock. A rigorous, ear-scouring diet of avant-garde music was leavened only occasionally by returns to the core symphonic repertoire, as well as dutiful lip service to the “cowpat” school of early-20th-century English composers—although I recall being impressed by Arnold Bax’s Tintagel.
The first cycle of Five songs from the Chinese poets (score) set English texts by Bantock’s friend the euphoniously-named Launcelot Cranmer Byng, after Tang poems by Zhang Zhihe, Du Fu, Li Bai, Tong Hanqing, and Sikong Tu. All but one appear in A lute of jade (1909)—one of the first collections of Chinese poetry that I bought (probably from Watkins) while still at school. The cycle was arranged for string quartet in 1933 as In a Chinese mirror. According to this post, some of the lyrics of Songs of China were written by Bantock’s wife Helen.
From the second set (score), here’s John McCormack singing a version of a text by the Tang poet Cen Shen in 1927:
* * *
Bantock also composed Chinese-inspired works on a larger canvas. Besides Choral suite from the Chinese (1914, again to texts by Cranmer Byng), I note the orchestral Four Chinese landscapes (1936)—the latter mostly directed by Walter Collins in 1946:
To the modern ear, such sketches are no more enticing than the works of Chinese composers trained in the WAM idiom such as Xian Xinghai, Nie Er and He Luting (a focus for much ideological wrangling in China over the following decades). But “it is what it is“: Bantock and others were part of a lasting European fascination with the Mystic East (see e.g. More East–West gurus), as yet largely uninformed by later fieldwork in the folk cultures of a vast region.
For later Eastern-inspired works, see e.g. Messiaen, and the ambivalent reaction of Toru Takemitsu to Japanese tradition. For the great Bruno Nettl‘s taxonomy of responses to the growing hegemony of Western musics in developing societies, click here. For Tang poetry, see under A Tang mélange.
I’ve written about the nine meditations of Messiaen’s monumental organ work La nativité du Seigneur(1935), but only last week did I hear it live, played by Roger Sayer (replacing Samuel Ali) at St John’s Smith Square, * making the building resound (like the mouth-organs of the Li family Daoists in Heidelberg…). Organ recitals may not lend themselves to rapport (that of Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus on piano being more conducive), but after a break from Messiaen, it’s always astounding to enter his unique sound-world again.
To encourage you to bask in this amazing piece, here’s the glorious finale, Dieu parmi nous:
And don’t miss the remarkable film of Messiaen himself at the organ of Saint-Trinité (under French organ improvisation!). My Messiaen series begins with a post on the mind-blowing Turangalîla, where you can find links to more of his most cosmic masterpieces. Along with Bach, Mahler, and Ravel, Messiaen remains my deepest engagement with Western Art Music…
* St John’s Smith Square has happy memories for me, both of memorable concerts (Bach Passions…) and recording sessions (Mozart piano concertos…). In My Day the posh restaurant in the crypt made a comical contrast with the ludicrously cramped backstage facilities, never designed to accommodate an orchestra and choir—an issue I doubt if the recent revamp can have solved.
Dating from 1728, the church was gutted by fire after a bombing raid in 1941. It was eventually restored as a concert hall in 1969. Deconsecrated, it’s not quite a church, but has more atmosphere than a concert hall (see Buildings and music).
Uh-oh, I’ve been cajoled into giving local partygoers another burst on the erhu fiddle—* I’m more used to people asking me not to play it… This gives me another pretext to roll out my old excuses, such as “It was in tune when I bought it”, and “I just sort of… picked it up” (cf. my early days with Ray Man).
Along with Abing’s inescapable Erquan yingyue (immortalised in Yang Yinliu‘s 1950 recording), the plangent Jianghe shui (literally “River waters”, but often rendered, suitably, as “Song of suffering”) has been a mainstay of the erhu concert repertoire since the 1960s (see here, and David Badagnani’s notes).
The concert piece derives from a melody of traditional shengguan ritual wind ensembles in south Liaoning—sadly, I can’t find a rendition, so we’ll just have to imagine it from other recordings, such as the guttural shawms on #6 of my Audio Gallery in the sidebar (notes here). Soon after the 1949 “Liberation” it was adapted to the conservatoire style (for which see here, and here) as a solo for the double guanzi oboe (shuangguan)—here’s Gu Xinshan with the Lüda Song and Dance Troupe of Dalian in 1956:
Hu Zhihou on (single) guanzi, with a sparsely-inflected rendition:
Indeed, the melody has re-entered the folk repertoire in Liaoning, as we can hear on #12 of the Ocora CD Chine: musiques de la première lune.
But Jianghe shui soon came to be known mainly as an erhu solo, accompanied by yangqin dulcimer, following Huang Haihuai’s 1962 arrangement—click here for his recording from 1963.
Min Huifen, 1963.
It became a signature piece of the great Min Huifen—here she is in 2007:
Even conservatoire solos were largely a male preserve until the 1980s (see e.g. the archive CD-set Xianguan chuanqihere), when women players began to dominate; see e.g. Song Fei’s lecture-demonstration on her own highly emotive interpretation.
In between the flexibility of the traditional wind ensemble style and the rigidly-prescribed conservatoire version, all I might add is that while playing Jianghe shui on erhu it’s always worth bearing in mind the plaintive timbre of the double reed. And I learn much from the sheer physical dynamism of the great players, their kinetic grace with both hands and arms. Of course I can’t even begin to emulate the sheer technical perfection of conservatoire virtuosos, but I can just about get away with it before an audience that has never heard real Chinese musicians who can actually play it. And as a change from my usual diet of rural funerals and temple fairs, it’s an interesting challenge to think myself into the heart-on-sleeve romanticism of the conservatoire style.
In traditional societies, most public performers are male; women’s musicking—largely considered under “domestic” contexts—can be quite hard to discover (for some readings, see Flamenco 2, under “Gender”; for China, see e.g. here).
In rural Anatolia, some Kurdish dengbêj bards are female. And in Çaltı village in the southwestern municipality of Denizli, Sultan Bacı (Sultan Torun) comes from a nomadic family, overcoming prejudice in her youth to accompany her songs on bağlama plucked lute. Typically (again, for Turkey and much of the world) she sings of hardship. Recent videos of her singing for village gatherings, or as she herds the goats, have made her something of a media celebrity (e.g. here, and here), the mise-en-scène feeding into urban images of picturesque rural life.
From her YouTube channel, videos like these have become popular online:
Even as outsiders, such plaintive songs remind us of the depth of folk culture. As we begin to absorb ourselves in the musical style, we might also seek to learn more about the diverse genres in the soundscape of the region. It’s worth pondering the public/domestic continuum further; while women sing in a range of informal contexts, perhaps Sultan Bacı’s accompanying herself on bağlama is considered more of a public statement? However alluring such soundbites may be, ethnographies of changing societies are always to be desired.
In China after the 1949 “Liberation”, all kinds of religious activities persisted, with difficulty, at local level under Maoism—even during the Cultural Revolution—until they could be observed more openly since the 1980s’ reforms, as shown in numerous posts on this blog. Among the diverse cast of practitioners in local communities are spirit mediums, who constitute an important resource consulted by those seeking to resolve various physical, psychological, and practical afflictions (see this roundup of posts).
From Manshin: ten thousand spirits (see below).
In Korea (where they are mostly women), there’s a range of terms, among which mudang and manshin are commonly heard; in English they are widely, if controversially, known as “shamans” (see the useful discussion in wiki). While their practices in the south are well documented, they have clearly also maintained clandestine activity under the severely impoverished conditions of the DPRK in North Korea—a regime often likened to an ongoing Cultural Revolution. [1]
So I write these notes mainly out of curiosity; for whereas scholars who were previously limited to fieldwork in Taiwan have been able since the 1980s to turn their attention to religious life under state socialism in mainland China (see e.g. The resilience of tradition, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean), no such thaw has occurred in the DPRK, so clues to their activities there, gleaned mainly from defectors, remain highly elusive.
Two jangseung tutelary deities outside a Korean village, 1903. Source.
After the Korean war, the ecstatic shamanic tradition of the Hwanghae region (now the southwest of the DPRK) was introduced by many shamans taking refuge in the south. It seems important to distinguish the large-scale kut rituals performed by the mudang and the less public divination sessions of jeomjaengi fortune-tellers. An NPR article from 2021 provides some clues to the recent situation:
In South Korea, shamanistic rituals are visually flashy and involve a lot of sound, whereas in the North, from what I’ve heard, they are very small-scale and quieter. […] Practitioners can be jailed, sent to reeducation and labour camps, or executed for taking part in what’s considered an illegal superstition.
As in China, where religious activity increased in response to periods of extreme deprivation (such as in Hunan), an article on North Korea from 2015 suggests that consulting shamans (or at least the jeomjaengi fortune-tellers) has surged in popularity since the 1990s’ famine. As one defector commented:
North Koreans widely believe in shamanism. Before marriage they check their marital compatibility, when moving houses they check the site of their future home, and before they leave for business people used to ask me whether the journey would be comfortable or not.
Despite severe deterrents, the law may be overlooked at local level (again as in China, e.g. Officials without culture, and One eye open, one eye closed; for Chinese cadres maintaining their local ritual traditions, see e.g. here)—not least because local cadres are themselves among the shamans’ main clients (cf. this article from 2022). In a 2018 report on religious freedom in North Korea, the US State Department reported
an apparent continued increase in shamanistic practices, including in Pyongyang. […] Authorities continued to react by taking measures against the practice of shamanism. […] Defector reports cited an increase in Party members consulting fortune-tellers in order to gauge the best time to defect.
A South Korean scholar consulted for the 2021 article commented:
Because North Korean shamans who hold rituals risk being discovered and arrested, some shamans there simply do fortune-telling, which can still be effective in explaining the reasons for clients’ problems.
The article goes on:
Lee Ye-joo told fortunes in North Korea before defecting to the South in 2006 at age 33. She now lives in Chungnam province, south of Seoul. When she was 12, Lee began studying a book of divination called the Four Pillars of Destiny, based on the Chinese calendar system. She began telling fortunes eight years later. “All people who came to me were officials”, she recalls. Because ordinary North Koreans “don’t even have enough to eat, the only people who seek out fortune-tellers are those with money, like big-name officials. They usually ask when they might lose their job or who their children should marry.” Lee built up her clientele surreptitiously, by word of mouth. She had to be careful not to get caught, she says—but then again, so did her clients. “They were all linked to other officials who introduced me to them”, she says. “So if one of them got me into trouble, I could tell on all the others.” Telling fortunes didn’t pay well, so she turned to trading. She says she bought and smuggled goods out of a special trade zone to sell, often making a perilous trek through the mountains to evade authorities.
In the late 1950s, the state began to conduct campaigns against “superstitions”—a term that often included more institutionalized forms of religion as well. Since women made up the majority of fortune-tellers’ customers, the Women’s Union carried out most of these actions. […]
There are even reports about shamanistic rituals occasionally being performed in the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s—but a limited number of participants carried out such rites quietly, without music or singing, to avoid discovery. […]
The situation began to change in the early 1990s. Economic crisis and famine seriously damaged the once hyper-efficient surveillance system, and poorly-paid enforcers lost much of their erstwhile zeal. Simultaneously, the new world of trade, starvation, opportunities, and dangers made all kinds of superstitions far more popular. Amid capitalist uncertainties, it was too tempting to believe that a skilful shaman would persuade spirits to guide the newly established venture to prosperity. […]
Though sacrificial offerings, called jaesa, remained banned for a few decades, the state partially permitted some graveside rites from 1972. […]
As to geomancy and physiognomy, palm reading and dream interpretation,
North Korean refugees report that during the “Arduous March” famine it became common to consult with kunghap specialists about a would-be spouse.
Just as in China, assaults on custom are often made in the name of anti-extravagance campaigns:
In April 2007, Choseon Yeoseong (Korean Woman) magazine criticised large celebrations for the “four family events” of coming of age, weddings, funerals, and ancestral worship. “This extravagance leads to the waste of grain which was harvested with such great labour, and creates conditions for drunkenness.”
* * *
In South Korea, besides having to adapt to commercial pressures and competition from Christianity (the latter also a significant underground presence in the DPRK), shamans have also experienced periods of state repression. A celebrated figure since the 1980s, when the mudang first came to wider attention and were documented by scholars and the media, is Kim Keum-hwa (1931–2019). [2] The vicissitudes of her life are brilliantly depicted in the splendid Manshin: ten thousand spirits (Park Chan-kyong, 2013), both documentary and biopic, a must-watch (here) even without English subtitles—which are at least provided in this trailer: [3]
Born in Hwanghae province—now part of North Korea, and then under Japanese occupation—Kim was subject to disturbing sinbyeong visions in her youth (such psychic crises commonly indicate that one is “chosen” to become a medium, in China and elsewhere); by the time she was 17, her parents could no longer resist, and her grandmother (who was also a mudang) initiated her with the naerim-gut ritual.
After the outbreak of the Korean War, [4]Kim Keum-hwa’s “superstitious” practices came under attack from troops of both sides. For this turbulent period, the film (from 23.44) has some intriguing detail, which Simon Mills has kindly summarised:
During the war, Kim recalls seeing someone’s head explode and their guts fly up into the branches of a tree—she still feels disturbed when she thinks of it. One day a man wearing a communist-style cap and trousers said “You! Come out here!” As she came out, he said “So you’re a mudang, eh? Bring out all your things and we’ll burn them!” So she has nothing remaining from that period. At the time it was a case of do or die.
[Recreation] A woman asks Kim: “Could you help us? I hear that you’re a new mudang! Please do a kut just this once for us, to save my son-in-law Mr Park!” Kim replied: “I sense that his fortune is good. Let’s figure out a suitable date for the kut.”
(Still, as she recalls: “When the Communists retreated, the home guard treated us even worse—thinking that mudang were corrupting people’s minds and spying for the communists [presumably because they held discussions with many people and travelled around to see clients—SM]. In that period, we never thought we’d be able to hold rituals, but even people in the army would come to me for help.”)
So Kim makes the risky decision to head out to heal Mr Park—a spy from the South. During the ritual, she declares “He’ll get better” but in her head she’s hearing “He’s going to die”—and as she sings, her unconscious thoughts come out. A man points a gun at Kim and says “an unskilful novice just kills people; you should die right now!”, but both the woman who invited her and the afflicted man intervene. Kim comments: “That kind of thing happened all the time—people saying that it was all superstition and illusion… When they accused me, I just said: “My only sin was being born as a mudang…”
“As it turned out Mr Park returned to full health, but as the war situation became worse I escaped, fleeing from island to island in the West before arriving in Incheon.” She almost died in a sea storm, clinging onto some cymbals for protection, and hearing others speak of the River Jordan, wondering what they meant…
Ritual specialist attacked in anti-superstition campaign, South Korea 1972. Still from Manshin: ten thousand spirits.
Kim Keum-hwa eventually managed to relocate to Seoul, going on to master major rituals from great shamans. She started promoting the artistic features of shamanic rituals to the public, going on to win an award at the National Folk Art Competition in 1974.
But even in South Korea the mudang‘s trade was vulnerable. Coinciding with the Cultural Revolution in China, as part of the Saemaul campaign the authoritarian president Park Chung-hee unleashed a Movement to Overthrow Superstition. As mudang Kim recalled (here):
Anything that hinted at superstition was frowned upon. I was persecuted day and night. I detested that I couldn’t be a normal housewife, raising a family that loves me. I loathed my fate for that. As I encountered one obstacle after another and saw how happy other people were, I was envious. Then I told myself off for coveting things that weren’t mine. My path was clearly in front of me, and I made up my mind to live it the best I could. After 40, I stopped envying the lives of others.
By the 1980s shamanism began to enjoy a vogue, and Kim Keum-hwa received the title of Living National Treasure in recognition of her work in preserving rituals, notably the baeyeonshin-gut fishing-boat blessing.
The film also shows a ritual for unification that Kim performed in 1998 near the demilitarized zone, during which she became possessed by the spirit of DPRK leader Kim Il-sung, behaving exactly as he did, to everyone’s amazement.
Still in South Korea, several other renowned mudang have perpetuated the northern Hwanghae style (see e.g. this 1988 article, and here on Yi Hae-gyŏng). Here’s a short film on the younger shaman Seo Gyunguk:
Back in the DPRK [unreleased Beatles track?], under the state ideology of juche “self-reliance”, the intense fervour for the Supreme Leader that is demanded at public demonstrations has led scholars to suggest influences from traditional Korean religions, such as the ecstasy of shamanic ritual. I would need to read up more on this before being convinced, since such politically-induced veneration appears across diverse cultures.
If grass-roots religious practices in China like those of spirit mediums have become a sub-theme of research alongside the formal institutions of Daoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, it remains impossible to conduct such ethnographic fieldwork in North Korea. Still, it’s clearly not a religious void, even if tantalising clues from defectors suggest that “shamans” there mainly practise surreptitious divination, rather than the grand public rituals of the south. If only we could somehow gain access to internal reports from local Public Security and Cultural bureaus on the continuing need to suppress “superstitious practices” among the people, such as we have for Maoist China (see e.g. under Hunan).
With thanks to Simon Mills.
[1] For the opaque society of the DPRK, note Barbara Demick’s fine book Nothing to envy: ordinary lives in North Korea (2010); and the Inspector O crime novels of James Church are both imaginative and well-informed. For divided Germany after the war, see links here, under the GDR.
[4] For the story of the goddess Houtu rescuing a Chinese brigade during the Korean war, see The Houshan Daoists, under “Houshan before and after Liberation”—another article that shows the tenacity of religious faith under Maoism. Cf. the deified young soldier shown on the pantheon of a Shanxi medium (here, under “Dongye township”).
Barbara Hannigan’s concerts with the LSO are always stimulating (for more, see under Conducting: a roundup).
Their programme at the Barbican last week (notes here) was intense right from the start, with Berio’s hieratic Contrapunctus XIX, an arrangement of the final unfinished work in Bach’s Art of fugue, completed with an enigmatic B-A-C-H chord. Then came Berg’s violin concerto (1935), mourning the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler—with another homage to Bach. Having been entranced by the piece through my teens, I was glad to hear it again, played by Veronika Eberle. Though this was the only piece requiring larger forces, the way she blended with the orchestral sonorities reflected the whole intimacy of the concert, reminiscent of chamber music.
Image: Mark Allen, via @londonsymphony.
After what is known as an “interval”, * Haydn’s Trauersinfonie, more Sturm und Drang than sombre, was delightful. Symphony orchestras venturing back into Early Music can sound ponderous and drab, but scaled down, in the hands of a tasteful director, they’re perfectly capable of bringing such works to life. Not an obvious choice, the symphony is full of the light and shade highlighted in the rest of the programme, and juxtaposing it with new works, Hannigan and the LSO reminded us of Haydn’s creative originality. The oboes and horns shone, the strings with some fine pianissimos between bursts of manic, angular noodling (1st and 2nd violins seated antiphonall, YAY!); and the Adagio (in E major!) was radiant (I couldn’t help imagining Haydn beating Henry Mancini to it with a minor-key variation on the Pink Panther theme).
And so to a most original finale: Lonely child (1980) (see e.g. here and here) by the Canadian Claude Vivier (1948–83) (wiki, and here)—yet another composer whose sound-world was enriched by gamelan (cf. Debussy, Eichheim, McPhee). Without knowing of his traumatic, short life, his text may seem more dreamlike and reassuring, with its “great beams of colour”, stars, magicians, sumptuous palaces, and mauve monks. But Vivier’s music is “forever grasping at a place of security and eternity that is just beyond reach”, in the words of Jo Kirkbride’s programme notes. Hearing it live, I felt a certain remote Arctic chill—suggesting a link with Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you, already a modern classic thanks to Hannigan.
Lonely child was first sung by Marie-Danielle Parent, for whom Vivier wrote it. Whereas Hannigan often combines singing and conducting, here she accompanied the evocatively singing of Aphrodite Patoulidou—here they are in 2019:
* At this point my keyboard was hijacked again by a Martian ethnographer, whose note I append here:
Interval: an interruption in the proceedings that appears to be widely accepted by the participants, when they take leave of the ritual building to partake further in the ingestion of mind-altering substances.
Isole che Parlano Festival, Sardinia, September 2022.
At the Turkish weekend of the London Jazz festival in November I relished Ozan Baysal’s rock gig on double-necked bağlama, but I missed his previous appearance at SOAS with the more traditional Anatolian Groove ensemble (both bands introduced here). So I was happy to hear him there last week in duet with Melisa Yıldırım on kamencha/kamene fiddle (website; YouTube; interview, and Songlines #166; note also her latest album with tabla-player Swarupa Ananth, Hues of imagination).
They stood to play—Melisa’s kamane equipped with one of the lengthiest spikes ever to adorn a spike fiddle. Along with extended taksim improvisations, zeybek dances, and an Azeri song, they explored Havada Turna Sesi Gelir, by the âşıkHisarlı Ahmet (1908–84)—who sings it here:
For more on the âşık tradition, see e.g. Thomas Korovinis’s chapter here, linking to a 1952 biopic on Âşık Veysel, and Anatolian bards rock.
As a lively finale they played Nikriz Longa by Tamburi Cemil Bey (1873–1916)—again, here’s his own recording:
Still, while it’s interesting to return to early recordings, the concert never felt remotely like a homage to a hallowed past—Ozan and Melisa make a fine combo, exploring new timbres as they create a distinctive style. I like it when gifted musicianship makes me oblivious to unwieldy clichés like old or new, Eastern or Western…
On 12th March, also at SOAS, a benefit concert for the earthquake in Turkey and Syria:
Much of my education on the fate of Uyghur expressive culture under the Chinese regime derives from Rachel Harris (in my series, see e.g. Uyghur culture in crisis, and Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam). Her recent report with Aziz Isa Elkun for the Uyghur Human Rights Project,
The authors note the “heavy securitization, mass incarcerations, and attacks on local languages and other aspects of cultural identity” since 2014, with detainees in the camp system “subjected to systematic torture and rape, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor. Outside the detention facilities Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples are subject to a pervasive system of mass surveillance, controls on movement, forced sterilization, and family separation”. […] Regional authorities have destroyed large swathes of built heritage, including mosques, shrines and graveyards; destroyed Uyghur language books and restricted the use of Uyghur and other indigenous Turkic languages; and imprisoned hundreds, possibly thousands, of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz intellectuals and cultural leaders”.
As acknowledged in the 2021 International Criminal Court framework on cultural heritage, acts of dispossession and destruction of cultural heritage are often inseparable from—or the precursor to—acts of genocide.
Yet despite international condemnation,
UNESCO continues to acknowledge China as a protector of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz heritage in the Uyghur region through the inclusion of several items on its lists.
With “heritage” widely exploited as a tool of governance, the Chinese regime regards the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) system as
a resource to develop the tourism industry, and a propaganda tool used to present heavily stage-managed images of normality in the region. […] In the same way that mosques and shrines are closed to local communities but open for tourist business, community gatherings are transformed into glamorous stage shows purveying messages of interethnic harmony within the framework of Chinese nationhood, while local communities are terrorized and torn apart.
The report criticises UNESCO’s continuing recognition of several genres.
The Uyghur muqam The Chinese authorities supported muqam from the 1950s, and by the late 1990s there were several institutions in Ürümchi dedicated to its study, performance, and promotion. But
since 2017, several well-known professional muqam performers employed in government-supported troupes have been arbitrarily detained, along with unknown numbers of Sufi followers who performed muqam in religious contexts. The regional authorities have closed institutions previously tasked with researching the tradition, and introduced radical changes to the teaching and performance of the muqam in order to align with Xi Jinping’s policy of promoting a “pluralistic-unified” Chinese nation.
One informant stated that around 30–40% of the employees of the Xinjiang Arts Centre were sent to the camps, including celebrated performers such as Shireli Eltekin, Abduqadir Yarel, Aytulla Ela, and Sanubar Tursun. By 2022 the Xinjiang Muqam Research Office was among 160 organizations devoted to researching traditional Uyghur culture that were closed, with those remaining being used as a propaganda tool for government policy. UNESCO-inscribed heritage was now “deliberately manipulated and staged as part of a wide-ranging disinformation campaign to deny crimes against humanity in the Uyghur region”.
Rahile Dawut.
The performance of muqam played a role in the religious context of Sufi gatherings, which had previously survived but were now attacked, as was informal secular music-making. Whereas performers have often been released on condition that they sing songs in public praising Xi Jinping, scholars have been sentenced to longer imprisonment or “disappeared”—notably Rahile Dawut, a fine ethnographer whose work had previously gained official support.
UNESCO has supported rival programmes in both China and Kyrgystan for the Kyrgyz vocal epic manas. But in Xinjiang, again, performers and researchers have been coerced and detained, and the genre has been exploited by the Chinese regime.
The meshrep A most incisive section of the report concerns the meshrep, “an umbrella term for Uyghur community gatherings that typically include food, music, joking, and storytelling, and an informal community court”. *
Meshrep: left, singing the Dolan muqam; right, village dancing. Images courtesy of Rahile Dawut. Source.
Both before and after the nomination, grassroots community meshrep gatherings have been designated by the Chinese authorities as criminal activities, meshrep leaders and participants have been arbitrarily detained, and Uyghur communities which formerly nurtured meshrep have been uprooted. In their place, staged meshrep shows have been used as tourist entertainment and for cultural diplomacy.
As one interviewee explained,
We don’t regard meshrep as just for playing music, singing and dancing, community entertainment. It is an unofficial form of self-government, a core social structure for the Uyghur community. Meshrep helps the community to take care of its social issues. It’s an essential social gathering to preserve Uyghurs’ cultural and social existence and development.
The authors comment,
These are core values in UNESCO’s heritage framework and they are also the direct reason why the Chinese authorities have consistently and sometimes violently suppressed the grassroots practice of meshrep over the past thirty years.
They remind us of the suppression of a grassroots meshrep movement in the northern city of Gulja in the 1990s, part of the backdrop to a massacre in 1997. Still, in 2010 UNESCO ratified China’s nomination of meshrep for the ICH—which led to draconian restrictions, denying local communities the right to organise their own gatherings. And in 2014 meshrep was co-opted for “anti-religious extremism” campaigns in Aqsu prefecture (see Rachel Harris, “A weekly mäshräp to tackle religious extremism: music-making in Uyghur communities and Intangible Cultural Heritage in China”). Meshrep participants are among innumerable performers and scholars who have been detained since 2017 .
The “natural heritage” is also exploited and implicated in human rights violations. The Chinese nomination of the Tianshan (Tengritagh) mountain range as “an area of outstanding natural beauty and ecological diversity” was ratified by UNESCO in 2014. Forced relocations and suppression of protests had already begun by 2005, leading to “forcible displacement of indigenous Kazakh communities and the sale of their ancestral lands to Chinese tourist companies for commercial development”. The Uyghur karez irrigation system met a similar fate, formerly “an integral part of an ecosystem, providing water for domestic use, farm irrigation, native plants and wildlife habitats”—yet another aspect of Uyghur culture that has fallen foul of Chinese development projects. At the same time, history was being rewritten, just as with the intangible heritage.
The report’s Conclusion is devastating:
Heritage management is not an innocent celebration of culture, but a selective process that leads to hierarchies and exclusion. […] When the management of heritage is used in tandem with the hard modes of governance currently in play in the Uyghur region—ones that states and international bodies have designated a form of genocide—then the heritage system is complicit in those acts of genocide. […] China’s approach to heritage in the Uyghur region takes the heritage out of the hands of its rightful owners, by expelling communities from their ancestral lands and polluting the environment, by destroying built heritage and de-sacralizing religious traditions, and by criminalizing grassroots cultural practices, while using their staged representations to promote new political narratives. Culture bearers are dispossessed and imprisoned while their history is rewritten, and the economic benefits of heritage accrue in the hands of the ethnic majority and flow back to eastern China.
The authors list points requiring urgent intervention by the international community—including a request for the removal of muqam, meshrep, and manas from the UNESCO lists, “given the serious and substantiated evidence set out in this report that the elements no longer satisfy the criteria for inscription on those lists”.
Despite numerous instances of co-option and suppression since 1949, it’s disturbing to think that Uyghur culture somehow coexisted with Party rule for many decades before the clampdown escalated. And while Xinjiang makes a particularly shocking instance, I have always felt uncomfortable with the ICH system as applied to Han Chinese communities, promoting reified, staged performances rather than providing genuine support for cultural activity among local communities.
For an another astute article on the topic, click here.
Mukaddas Mijit’s The Thirty Boys (Ottuz Oghul, 2022) is a fine film on Uyghur meshrep gatherings in Kazakhstan, “occupying an uneasy space, one eye towards the growing ethnic nationalism of their host country, one eye towards China’s ongoing policies of securitisation, incarceration and cultural erasure in their homeland”:
More from the Kazakhstan Uyghurs on the YouTube channel of the Uyghur meshrep project. See also Rachel Harris and Ablet Kamalov, “Nation, religion and social heat: heritaging Uyghur mäshräp in Kazakhstan”, Central Asian Survey40:1 (2020).
We can also find footage from the Xinjiang homeland (before 2014, naturally)—here’s a brief excerpt from a 2010 meshrep in Yarkand:
And though heavily staged, this reconstruction contains the core elements of the traditional meshrep:
This 2010 introduction (under the bizarre Chinese transliteration maxirap) shows how UNESCO was under the thrall of the official promotional style then current in Xinjiang (again, note Rachel Harris, “A weekly mäshräp to tackle religious extremism. pp.36–43):
Funeral procession (detail), Afrasiab (modern Samarkand) murals South wall. 
Early morning procession to the soul hall, North Xinzhuang 1995. Photo: Du Yaxiong.
Henan municipalities. 
Chang Wenzhou’s big band at village funeral, Mizhi 2001.
A young Liu Wenwen performs with her parents. 
As to France, even I might hesitate to try out 
Not so much an impromptu pre-match party as
Nao and bo cymbals of the Tianxing dharma-drumming association,
Shifan band, 1930s.
Jinmen baojia tu shuo (1846).
“People were in and out of each other’s houses from dawn until bedtime.”
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 
From The hundred thousand fools of God.
The first cycle of Five songs from the Chinese poets (
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Stephen Jones: a blog 
