Tag Archives: stammering

Palaver, Kerfuffle, and Faff

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Palaver
Source.

One of the unsettling things about getting old is that I find myself using antiquated expressions that I always disdained, such as

“Well, this is a bit of a palaver…”

With that classic understatement of the English, the ideal context is when serious calamity strikes, such as when quelling a mutiny of the restless natives [As one does—Ed.]. Sure enough (cf. Tickety-boo), its etymology goes back to colonialism. Used in English since the early 18th century,

palaver, “profuse and idle talk; chatter”, comes from Portuguese palavra “word, talk, speech” by way of sailors’ slang. Portuguese was commonly used as a trading language on the West African coast, and palaver came into English first in the sense “a parley or conference, typically between Europeans and the Indigenous people of a region, especially in West Africa”.

One gathers that such discussions were not entirely on equal terms…  The same source goes on:

Portuguese palavra and its Castilian counterpart palabra come from Latin parabola “comparison, explanatory illustration”, and in Late Latin (and especially in Christian Latin), “allegorical story, parable, proverb”.

And it elaborates on a widespread phenomenon:

Metathesis, the transposition of consonants, is common in Spanish and Portuguese: the syncopated form parabla (from parabola) becomes palavra in Portuguese and palabra in Spanish, just as Latin mirāculum “miracle” becomes milagro in Spanish and milagre in Portuguese.

The wiki entry on metathesis gives instances from a wide range of languages including Amharic, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Finnish, Hungarian, Navajo, Turkish—and English.

It’s just as mystifying to suddenly hear oneself using the word kerfuffle,

early 19th century: perhaps from Scots curfuffle (probably from Scottish Gaelic car “twist, bend” + imitative Scots fuffle “to disorder”), or related to Irish cior thual “confusion, disorder”.

Like Ogonek and Til, Palaver and Kerfuffle could be another “feisty yet flawed” pair of detectives.

I can’t see that kerfuffle is related to faff, another word I’ve weirdly adopted—not so much in the sense of “faffing around” as in “this is a bit of a faff”. Again, its etymology is interesting:

late 18th century (originally dialect in the sense “blow in puffs”, describing the wind): imitative. The current sense may have been influenced by dialect faffle “stammer, stutter”, later “flap in the wind”, which came to mean “fuss, dither” at about the same time as faff (late 19th century).

The stammering connection may now establish “faff” even more f-f-firmly in my vocabulary. I surmise that the emergence of such words denotes the transition from an adventurous, carefree youth to the desire for a tranquil life unruffled (unfaffled?) by the sundry ordeals of old age (passwords, call centres, stairs…).

So now we have Palaver, Kerfuffle, and Faff—a firm of solicitors. Colloquially abbreviated to Falafel.

* * *

For the “exploits” of early colonialists, see Vermeer’s hat; do read Sitting Bull’s rebuke to the invaders in n. 1 of The Ghost Dance; and for more dabblings in Portuguese, click here. I am now in the habit of referring to “hideous encounters with domestic necessity” as “marmalade”, after Compton Mackenzie’s beautiful talk about his meeting with Henry James.

Another great Chinese stammerer

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Dong Yu

I’ve just updated my list of Great Chinese stammerers with the Southern Tang dynasty muralist Dong Yu—joining early luminaries such as Deng Ai, Han Feizi, and Sima Xiangru; and for the modern era, Feng Youlan and Gu Jiegang.

Much more under the stammering tag, including Pontius Pilate and the mad jailers, A Byzantine iconoclast, and Porky Pig; a musical Bodhisattva, and a young bard from Gansu; baroque, vaudeville, fieldwork, and blues; Gepopo, and a fine limerick sung as a canon; with my own notes on therapy, such as Modifying disfluency.

A stammering Byzantine Iconoclast

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Left, cell where Methodios was imprisoned; right, Michael the Stammerer.

In classic guide-book lingo,

“No visit to [Istanbul] is complete without a visit to [the Princes’ Islands].”

So we took a pleasant boat trip to the Islands (Adalar, as they’re called with casual familiarity) in the Sea of Marmara just south, long home to Greek and Jewish communities. The jaunt introduced me to the Byzantine (and byzantine) story of Michael II (770–829), who rose through the military ranks to become emperor, continuing the Iconoclastic movement. It was in a dingy dungeon on the island of Burgazada (Antigoni) that he imprisoned St Methodios. As described by Edwin Grosvenor,

In 821 Michael the Stammerer became emperor. Having attained the throne by assassination and violence, he was naturally fitted for the role of bigot and persecutor. With fanatic ingenuity he devised new tortures for the adherents of the icons. Methodios was recognised as their most learned leader. The emperor ordered that he should be struck gently seven hundred times with a whip. The prolongation of the punishment was the refinement of its cruelty. Then, unconscious and apparently lifeless, Methodios was thrown, together with two murderers, into a deep pit at Antigoni. Bread and water were let down daily through an opening above. When one of the murderers died, his decomposing body was left in the pit to render the horrid pit still more revolting. Meanwhile Methodios worked day and night to convert the survivor. Michael died after an eight years’ evil reign, and his son Theophilus succeeded, as iconoclastic but less inhuman.

Methodios was eventually released under Theophilus, but was publicly scourged and imprisoned again before becoming the emperor’s inseparable companion.

Antigoni

The island of Antigoni (Burgazada).

Anyway, although it’s good to know that Michael’s im-p-pediment didn’t im-p-pede his career, he transpires not to be a great role model—it just goes to show that not all stammerers are reticent and benign… But at least I can now add him to my list of famous stammerers from Moses to Marilyn Monroe, and from Deng Ai to Gu Jiegang.

My Turkish vocabulary has hitherto been limited largely to the word inziva “recluse”, some obsolete Ottoman musical instruments, and terms for segments of the Bektashi–Alevi cem ritual, none of which get me very far when I’m trying to ask for a tube of toothpaste. But it has increased with the pleasingly onomatopoeic kekelemek, “stammer”—opening with a fiendish double plosive. For some more staggeringly inappropriate vocabulary, see Language learning: a roundup, notably That is the snake that bit my foot. Cf. Pontius Pilate, and the mad jailers.

Mata Hari

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Mata Hari 1905

Mata Hari performing, 1905.

Eurovision has become a significant theme in ethnomusicology. Further to my post on Barbara Pravi, Ukraine’s successes in the 2004 and 2016 Eurovision contests are among the subjects of Maria Sonevytsky’s Wild music.

Azerbaijan’s 2021 entry Mata Hari by Efendi is striking:

The refrain Ma-ma-ma-Mata Hari makes another entry for my list of stammering songs. Were there an Azeri Stammering Association, they could have p-p-picketed p-p-performances.

The song may not be entirely illuminating as historical documentation, but hey—portrayals of her story have never been limited by facts. This clip from Greta Garbo’s 1931 movie is enriched with Amy Winehouse‘s You know I’m no good:

“Exotic, glamorous spy… notorious temptress…”—among several posts exploring the trope of the femme fatale, see here (cf. Words and women).

And while I don’t expect Efendi’s song to reflect the wonders of Azeri folk magham (for which see here), we world music fans are always on the lookout for popular songs that mine (and cheapen…) the folk heritage—a more promising theme the further east one ventures (e.g. Ivo Papazov). But in Mata Hari the shawm plays a sadly minor role, so here’s an Azeri zurna solo:

Roll-call

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Schoolmaster

Rowan Atkinson’s classic Roll-call sketch has been modestly tucked away under Philomena Cunk‘s wonderful list of words possibly (not) invented by Shakespeare, but it deserves its own coverage.

As Richard Sparks explains in a BTL comment on YouTube, he wrote the sketch in 1978 for Rowan’s first London revue, Rowan Atkinson and friends; after John Cleese saw it, he invited Rowan to do it for The secret policeman’s ball [in 1979]. Charmingly, it transpired that “the Powers That Be wanted to cut Rowan from the film because he was a complete unknown, and the show was over-long and packed with big-name stars”.

So here’s the sketch’s first outing at The secret policeman’s ball:

Like Alan Bennett’s Sermon, it evokes the peculiarities of the English upper classes at a particular time. Whereas the world of the Sermon was still familiar to AB’s audience, the audience for Roll-call might have had less personal experience of the bygone public-school values that Rowan Atkinson evokes, but the air of supercilious menace is a widely-enough shared characteristic of the English.

We all have our favourite names; alongside Elsworth-Beast Major, Orifice, Plectrum, and Zob, I’d like to put in a word for Kosygin.

Rowan Atkinson is yet another stammerer manqué; his overarticulation of plosives is partly a deliberate block-modification technique. I’d erased from my memory the painful ordeal of having to answer roll-call at school.

More classics under The English, home and abroad.

Get a proper speech impediment, FFS

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BoJo

Brandishing Bendy Banana, Bumbling Boris,
Bombastic Bonking Buffoon, Blusters Brazenly

I have the greatest admiration for people who learn to manage their speech impediment to speak in public. Not among them is Bumbling Boris (for his full title, see Stewart Lee—since “Boris” and “BoJo” seem too generous in their familiarity, Lee’s solution “Turds” seems suitable; “Spaffer” also has a certain ring to it).

Along with the tousled hair and shambling walk, his disjointed speech—seeking to convey a spontaneous happy-go-lucky image, making it up as he goes along—seems a public-school affectation. Mystifyingly, in some quarters this is apparently considered attractive, like Hugh Grant’s “Posh Twat” persona, or Jacob Tree-Frog eternally trapped in the ridiculous fancy-dress outfit that he once wore for a laugh at a school party.

Or is his stumbling a recognition that if he does somehow manage to string more than two words together consecutively, the result will inevitably consist of fatuous offensive clichés, or is it a cunning attempt to dissociate himself from them?

Er er er, bumble wumble, ow-ow-our [smirks] European friends [the AfD], the-the-the…, um, ipso facto [smugly], I-I-I, letterbox, i-i-s a… er, world-beating [Ha], um, roadmap, blah, [ruffles hair “endearingly”], Winston, er er… (what was his name again?) pifflepafflewifflewaffle steady ship… um, um um, cavalry…

Here’s a real one:

Boris BS

Such are the dazzling Eton–Oxford debating skills with which mere plebs and women can’t compete.

In his distinctive shtick, I don’t think I’ve heard him stammer on initial consonants, only repeating whole monosyllables (the), often vowel sounds (I) (see also under stammering tag).

Say what you like about Donald Trump (“and I mean that sincerely“), at least his odious and incomprehensible gibberish had a certain, um (sic), fluency:

Well he said, you’ll be the greatest president in the history of, but you know what, I’ll take that also, but that you could be. But he said, will be the greatest president but I would also accept the other. In other words, if you do your job, but I accept that. Then I watched him interviewed and it was like he never even was here. It’s incredible. I watched him interviewed a week later and it’s like he was never in my office. And you can even say that.

Or perhaps the difference is that Tweety blundered on relentlessly [enjoy that past tense], whereas Spaffer peppers his own drivel with cute hesitancy. So much for oratory (and for fluent impromptu exposition in Indian raga, click here).

Created at a time when the idea of either of them being allowed anywhere near power seemed utterly ludicrous, Paul Whitehouse’s character of Rowley Birkin QC combined the posh Spaffer mannerisms and the relentless Tweety gibberish (playlist):

Here’s Matt Lucas:

Recently a Spaffer–Birkin hybrid has emerged:

I might have a greater tolerance of such eccentricity for a politician not wallowing in a cesspit of opportunism, xenophobia, and duplicity. For a less-than-ringing endorsement from a former colleague (“a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgment”), click here.

“What I can tell you is this“: on behalf of the, um, stammering “community”, I would like to dissociate myself from this kind of flummery—FFS, either get a proper speech impediment or just learn to engage mouth with “brain”. Ideally, go away.

More under my roundup of posts on Tory iniquity.

It’s not that we didn’t know. I like this vignette from Outnumbered, when The Suspect was still Mayor of London:

And don’t miss The Life and lies of Boris Johnson (under Drawing a line).

Phonophobia and s-s-s-syncopation

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Porky

Further to my discussion of Covid and plosives (a recent addition to my stammering tag), a couple more articles catch my attention.

writes in a lyrical style reminscent of French philosophy, with examples of historical discussion from Galen and Francis Bacon to Freud. Some readers may be more amenable than I am to this kind of thing:

The voice is the vehicle and the arena of this agon between dissipation and replenishment. Our celebrations of the voice are too monotonously pitched in the register of fullness, richness, clarity and penetrativeness, the privilege is too regularly accorded to the energetic out-loud and the “haute voix”. The autumnal, deciduous voice, which is heard in illness, fatigue, ague and age, is not epically shredded by passion, but rather silted with lilting circumstance.

I would love to hear a group of stammerers, or indeed anyone, trying to get their tongues around “paradoxical polyphiloprogenitiveness”.

Call me superficial (You’re superficial—Ed.), but With All Due Respect to Ancient and Modern Sages, I’m intrigued by some of the asides. Connor notes Marc Shell’s observation that when animals were given human speech in animated film, they often, like Donald Duck, or Porky Pig, suffered from speech impediments. I see that Porky shared his stutter with the voice actor who originally played him; but because he couldn’t control his stutter, recording sessions took hours and production costs became too high (cf. my own attempts at voiceover). Here’s a helpful roundup:

which features the “That’s all folks!” sign-off:

There’s even a ten-hour version (WTF). But scholars don’t seem to agree that the word “Hottentot” is an onomatopoeic mockery of stuttering that early Dutch colonists in South Africa thought they heard in the speech of the local people.  I’m keen to read Robert Arthur’s 1964 story The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot (cf. the truth-speaking parrot of Tibetan opera).

* * *

Less fantastical is this study, supplementing my More stammering songs:

Stammering’s material culture of the past lends itself to historical analysis and therefore allows us to gauge how medical and social attitudes toward the impediment have changed.

She notes:

The impediment not only provided (pseudo) medical actors with a lucrative market for various curative objects and practices, but also propelled the (sheet-) music business. Stammerers themselves appear in this story of materialisation and market as both agents and objects. The cheap self-cures, medical manuals, sheet music and (later) recordings that were produced not only for, but also by, them, show how easily the impediment was aligned with the modern consumer’s identity and how the persona of the stammerer was, ultimately, lodged in the Western collective memory in very material ways.

Writing of the “collusion between consumerism and stammering” in the late 19th century, she observes:

The cures targeted a middle-class audience that would presumably care most about speech impediments (they were in a profession requiring fluent speech), but—more importantly—would also have the means to afford a cure. Self-help manuals seem to have targeted a similar audience: they were relatively cheaply produced, but a book on stammering would necessarily have been a “luxury” item, requiring its owner to be literate. This image of the consumer of self-help manuals dovetailed conveniently with the image of what most scientists considered to be the typical stammerer: a white middle-class man, the victim of the modern “strenuous” life, but also autonomous and capable of curing himself.

It was often claimed that stammerers were typically found in the professional classes and characterized by an extraordinary intelligence. Hoegaerts cites an 1896 paper:

“Children of weak intellect rarely stutter because their thoughts are slow, and their speech always keeps pace with their thoughts.”

And she observes:

That the stammerer was “civilised” was shown by the fluent speech of “savages”. Travelers were called upon to show that no one had ever encountered speech impediments in the uncivilised world. “All travellers, who have long resided among uncultivated nations, maintain that they never met with any savages labouring under an impediment of speech”. This was because, according to scientists like Hunt, its inhabitants were not subjected to the stress and strain of civilisation: their fluent speech was owed to “their freedom from mental anxieties and nervous debility, the usual concomitants of refinement and civilization.” Likewise, the lower classes did not appear to seek the help of therapists and were considered to be relatively free of the impediment. […]

Women, on the other hand, were not so much thought of as uncivilised, but rather as more suited to civilisation and its rhythms of speech than men. Individual cases of female stammerers occasionally surfaced, but they were thought to represent a very small percentage of stammerers. According to Richard Faulkner, women expended less energy on speaking. “We have compared subsequently the energy developed in conversing by the voice of a man and that of a woman, and have found that women are fatigued, in talking, four times less than a man”. Others had already suggested that women were naturally good at speech. What made women’s speech so fluent, these theories surmised, was that most of it was idle chatter anyway.

So

Whereas “savages” could not speak of anything beyond the concrete and women did not move beyond the trivial, the (male, middle-class) stammerer’s laborious speech betrayed his intelligence.

Hoegaerts goes on,

That a woman could appear at her most attractive and intelligent by not talking at all would easily have been accepted by therapists and gentlemen-scientists of the period.

Women came to acquire the authority in the field of speech therapy—although I note that many of the most famous therapists have been men, while women comprise a majority of the work force—Typical!

The sound of stammering
Stammering became a popular theme for Tin Pan Alley songs, further popularised by sheet music. Yet

The popular representation of stammerers in songs, at the turn of the century and up until the 20s, seems very far removed from this image of the privileged, highly intelligent modern individual.

Composers treated stammering as a poetic and commercial opportunity, rather than as an impediment. It is no coincidence that almost all stammering songs were romantic and/or humorous in their content. The impediment was, in that sense, not the subject of the song, but merely a rhythmic device, the means to emotionally engage the audience, or the set-up for a joke. Sometimes, it was all three.

Of course, the rhythmic syncopation of stammering is an extrapolation by composers: the real sound is unpredictably non-metrical, aleatoric.

Following The stuttering coon (1898),

The connection of stammering to race allowed for rhythmic license. More specifically, the halting sound of stammering allowed composers to ride on the lucrative wave of ragtime music. Most explicit in the “use” of the sound of stammering was the 1913 song Stammering Sam, in which a young black boy’s stammer is presented as the “origin” of ragtime:

Then Stammering Sam sang,
and the company sang “babababa! Babababe!”
Singing his stuttering song with glee
and that was the very first ragtime melody.

Like the stammering girls, these stammering “coons” defied scientific knowledge: their ethnicity as well as their social class should have protected them from speech impediments. Yet there they are, imaginary creatures proudly claiming syncopated speech in order to entertain.

Of course, in many ways the “stammering coons” are images of manifold oppression: their almost clownish representation derided their ethnicity, the connection arguably degraded ragtime music as it refused to take it seriously as a style, and the depiction of their accented, lower-class speech placed them firmly at the bottom of the social ladder. Being put on show, after all, also meant being subjected to the harsh gaze of the audience, to become an object of consumption. Significantly, the songs would most likely be performed by non-stammerers for other non-stammerers (although those who did stammer could, of course, hear them as well). The stammerers in the songs were mere figments of their writer’s imagination, specifically created to be “performed”, “bought”, and “used” to serve the purposes of entertainment and consumption. Whereas stammerers were approached as agents on the market in therapeutic manuals, popular music banked on the characteristic sound of stammering in order to “sell” stammerers, rather than selling something to them. […]

In an ironic reversal of the therapeutic logic, [the stammering song] turned fluent speakers into stammerers (thus perhaps proving that speech could indeed be manipulated to a great extent). […]

The culture that emerged from this “modern” consumerist world was shaped by women, down-at-heel sailors, and young black boys as well. […] One could wonder if the worlds of the privileged stammerer and the imaginary one in songs coincided at all.

It’s good to see the factors of race, gender, and class featuring in the analysis of disfluency.

Comment te dire adieu

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Hardy 2

Like I say a little prayer, Back to black, Carminho (among many gems on my Playlist of songs!!!), and festive Bach, it makes me unbearably happy to hear the exquisite chanteuse * Françoise Hardy singing Comment te dire adieu (1968)—the nuances of her expression capturing the ambivalent mood, both in close-up:

and lounging languidly on a chaise longue:

Serge Gainsbourg’s drôle lyrics are brilliant:

Sous aucun prétexte je ne veux
Avoir de réflexes malheureux
Il faut que tu m’ex——pliques un peu mieux
Comment te dire adieu

Mon coeur de silex vite prend feu
Ton coeur de Pyrex résiste au feu
Je suis bien perplexe, je ne veux
Me résoudre aux adieux

(Je sais bien qu’un ex——amour n’a pas de chance, ou si peu
Mais pour moi un ex——plication voudrait mieux)

Sous aucun prétexte je ne veux
Devant toi surex——poser mes yeux
Derrière un Kleenex je saurais mieux
Comment te dire adieu
Comment te dire adieu

(Tu as mis à l’index nos nuits blanches, nos matins gris-bleu
Mais pour moi une ex——plication vaudrait mieux)

Sous aucun prétexte je ne veux
Devant toi surex—poser mes yeux
Derrière un Kleenex je saurais mieux
Comment te dire adieu
Comment te dire adieu
Comment te dire adieu

She sounds soooo cool, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hurting going on here. Instead, she finds inner strength through a flurry of insouciant wordplay on “ex“—not least Pyrex (a niche hommage to kitchenware in French chanson) and Kleenex. Sex is just a sibilant away….

Nor does she let up in her gorgeous sprechstimme interludes (above a change to triple metre on strings), stressing ex——amour and ex­——plication (as in the sung ex——pliques and surex——poser) with an ecc——entric hiatus, negating the natural rhythm of speech—not so much a speech impediment as the kind of deliberate pause advocated by therapists to prepare the stammerer to approach the following syllable (especially plosives) with easy onset!

True, she would make the Paris phone directory sound irresistibly seductive (cf. the HP sauce label), but here her spoken sections further the dramatic effect, ex——punging, ex——orcising her ex——perience. They’re punctuated by a funky syncopated trumpet motif, courtesy of Caravelli, worthy of Hardy’s fellow-Parisian Messiaen—who three years previously had completed the Sept haïkaï…

Then there’s the extra visual frisson of veux, malheureux, aux adieux, mieux. One even hopes to hear her pronouncing the x there (I wonder how this works: do native French speakers somehow hear it in their heads?).

À propos, like many men, Monsieur Pyrex, the passionless, fire-resistant subject of this nonchalent lament, clearly needs his head ex——amining.

The music is suitably minimalist, eschewing melodic or harmonic development—recalling more the theme tune of Soap than the ballads of Michel Legrand (see also Un homme et une femme).

Comment te dire adieu is actually a chic upbeat French recasting of the soupy ballad It hurts to say goodbye, which had recently been recorded by Margaret Whiting and then Vera Lynn—just the kind of ballad I’d love to have heard Dusty sing (cf. You don’t own me; see also How can I miss you when you won’t go away?).

Françoise Hardy subtly subverts both the melodrama and the “gamine elfin waif” trope (see also Feminine endings). Put this song on the British school syllabus and there’ll soon be a legion of fluent young Francophiles…

Her German version of the song works well too; while the lyrics are less detached, they make a bit of an effort to keep the “ex” theme going:

Nach zwei Cognacs ex bekamst du Mut
Deine Abschiedstexte waren gut [Das Lied von der Erde for generation X?]
Ratlos und perplex nur dachte ich
Was mach ich ohne dich

Stets war mein Komplex du bist zu schön
Charm hast du für sechs, ach was, für zehn **
Liebt denn so was exklusiv nur mich
Was mach ich ohne dich

(Ob du daran denkst
Wie einsam und verloren ich bin
Nein, du hast schon längst
Eine Andere im Sinn)

Gib mir keinen Extrakuss jetzt mehr
Der nur noch Reflexbewegung wäre
Ratlos und perplex nur frag ich mich
Was mach ich ohne dich
Was mach ich ohne dich

(All die Nächte mit dir
Voll von Glück bis zum Morgengrauen
Die und dich stahl mir
Eine andere Frau)

Diese Dame X, die dich mir nimmt
Fliegt auf deine Tricks wie ich, bestimmt
Dann als Dame ex sagt sie wie ich
Was mach ich ohne dich
Was mach ich ohne dich

 And she sings it in Italian, with yet another angle on the story:

Non voglio un pretesto per pietà
Sai che io detesto falsità
Sii un po’ più onesto quando vuoi
Finirla fra di noi

Non restar perplesso ad inventar
Scuse che del resto non van mai
Oltre ad un modesto rendez-vous
A cui non vieni più

(Io so bene che i castelli di carta
Con un soffio van giù
Non ne hai colpa tu)

Non voglio un pretesto per pietà
Sai che io detesto falsità
Dammi il fazzoletto quando vuoi
Finirla fra di noi
Finirla fra di noi

That first verse is good:

I don’t want an excuse for piety
Know that I detest falsity
Be a bit more honest when you want
To finish it between us.

One might think Spanish regional languages would offer potential for the exes too. Anyway, the nuances of mood in these various versions are intriguing. Possibly a multilingual EU directive to Brexit Britain? 

Françoise Hardy did a more melancholic version with her soul sister (twin?) Jane Birkin in 1976 (Comment lui dire adieu!):

Later Birkin gave an intense live arabesque rendition (1996/2002), with ex——emplary decorations on solo fiddle:

The 60s, eh?! Ex——traordinare! I am officially applying to be reincarnated as Serge Gainsbourg.

Hardy

* English pronunciation shontooz, as in A French letter, n.2.

** Cf. the classic

What comes between fear and sex?
Fünf.

Covid: ex-plosives

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plosives

Leaf Lalm And Larry On

Since Covid struck, there’s been considerable research on droplets launched by speech (e.g. here); singing, too, has been scrutinised for its risks to public health. Here I’d like to add speech therapy into the mix (see e.g. Modifying disfluency), a topic that such studies hardly take into account. *

The main culprits are plosives—both unvoiced (p, t, k) and voiced (b, d, g) plosives p-p-posing a p-p-particular p-p-problem for us stammerers.

On the languagelog site there’s been much arcane, erudite discussion of multi-lingual spoof health advice, including posts by Mark Liberman, Ben Zimmer, and Victor Mair. More pleasing to a general Anglophone audience is this drôle fantasy by Peter Prowse:

Since consonants project over a greater distance than vowels, a three-tier system will be introduced in an effort to slow the spread:

Replacing P with F: anyone speaking to other feofle in a fublic flace will have to stop using the flosive sound; failure to do so could lead to a fine—or even frison. The whole fofulation, even members of Farliament, will have to flay their fart in this.

Replacing T with N: although this may cause some initial confusion—for example, neachers in schools will face challenges when neaching the nen nimes nable—we are confident any froblems will be nemforary; and measures under nier noo will help nurn the nide of this fandemic.

Replacing K with L: after a further brief feriod, we will bring in Near Three. The rules under Nears One and Noo will conninue. We have lonsidered these measures larefully, in line with relommendations from frofessors at Lambridge Universiny.

These new rules will affly also to other languages sfolen in this cunnry, including Nerdish, Folish, Fortuguese, and Inalian. I urge feofle to Leaf Lalm And Larry On. Nogether, we will lonquer the Lovid fandemic and renurn noo normaliny in no nime an all.

To be fair, it’s stressed, especially initial, flosives that are farticularly frojectile—and the major hurdle for stammerers. But requesting PPE may still present a challenge.

Levity apart (and here’s my pretext for relaying the topic here), it makes a good reminder for us stammerers to approach words with light contacts (“easy onset”)—and for fluent speakers, to imagine our chronic tribulations.

* Separately, several sites offer guidance for stammerers during Covid; this one has many links, including a BBC video. Of course, stammering is part of general issues in communicating; communication via masks is a challenge for all (cf. Masked drama in Asia). With so little social contact, I haven’t had much experience of negotiating stammering in a mask. I seem to be more reluctant to stammer “openly”, even if it’s invisible. When encountering a (silent) block, I apparently need people to see that I’m at least making an effort (also a reason why sufferers find phone-calls difficult), even if it’s precisely the tension of the mouth that is my undoing.

Amidst the pandemic it’s been suggested that (fluent) people should take up ventriloquism. I wonder if there are any stammering ventriloquists—perhaps a cruel dummy mercilessly taking the p-p-mickey out of their stammering minder… That would be great therapy.

For more melodious public health advice, click here.

A stammering musical Bodhisattva?

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Prelude to shengguan score, Hanzhuang village,
Xiongxian county, Hebei.

A Buddhist monk called Miaoyin 妙音, “Wondrous Tones”, is associated with transmissions of the grand shengguan suites that have punctuated the vocal liturgy of amateur village ritual associations around Xiongxian county in Hebei since the late 18th century (see also under Local ritual).

Hannibal Taubes, ever on the trail of recondite historical byways, leads me to Gadgadasvara, a minor-league figure among the great Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism. Since his name literally means “stammering tones”, even if he’s an imaginary being, he may appear to be a promising early Indian candidate to complement my list of great Chinese stammerers—and a musical one, to boot (see also stammering tag). But there are several strands to unravel here, both for ancient India and late-imperial China.

Gadgadasvara, as described in chapter 24 of the Lotus sutra (e.g. here and here),

emits rays of light from his topknot and between his eyebrows and illuminates the world of the Buddha Kamaladalavimalanakṣatrarājasaṃkusumitābhijña [Kevin for short—Ed. Try saying that with a speech impediment].
[…]
Gadgadasvara passes through many worlds, and his beautiful form is described. He arrives at Vulture’s Peak Mountain on the seven-jeweled platform and presents a necklace to Śākyamuni Buddha, inquiring after him on behalf of Buddha [Here we go again—Altogether now] Kamaladalavimalanakṣatrarājasaṃkusumitābhijña. *
(source here).

Gadgarasvara Nepal

Modern bronze image of Gadgadasvara, Nepal.

Svara is not just “sound” or “voice”, but the comprehensive system of musical pitches as represented by sargam solfeggio (see e.g. here). Sources do indeed allude obliquely to Gadgadasvara’s mastery of music:

In the worlds through which he passed, the land quaked in six ways, seven-jeweled lotus flowers rained everywhere, and hundreds of thousands of heavenly musical instruments sounded spontaneously without being played. 

Still, musical accomplishments play only a minor role in his transcendent CV:

According to T’ien-t’ai’s Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sutra, this bodhisattva is called Wonderful Sound because he propagates the Lotus Sutra throughout the ten directions with his wondrous voice. Among the many sutras, Bodhisattva Wonderful Sound appears only in the “Wonderful Sound” chapter of the Lotus Sutra.

And he doesn’t seem to be among the numerous cosmological deities who feature in the rich mythology of Indian music.

As to gadgada, the etymology of stammering, faltering, even sobbing, is clear. However, there seems to be no suggestion that the Bodhisattva was ever actually portrayed as a stammerer. Moreover, would any Indian, now or at any earlier point in history, be conscious of the etymology? Instead, the name has long been interpreted as “Wonderful Voice” or “Wonderful Sound”, and that is how it was rendered in Chinese.

So alas, Gadgadasvara is not an ancient mystical precursor of the characters listed here. In short, neither stammering not music make fruitful avenues to explore! Aww.

Conversely, Moses (like Marilyn Monroe) has been widely recognised as a stammerer, although the evidence is open to dispute (see e.g. here and here). The image on the left (from the latter article, p.169) shows the ancient hieroglyph for “stammer”!

* * *

From Lotus sutra scroll. Source: British Library.

In medieval Chinese translation, Gadgadasvara became Miaoyin 妙音 “Wondrous Tones”—which seems a faithful rendition of how the Sanskrit name has been understood.

After that inconsequential excursion to the ancient world of scripture-revelation, let’s return to our musical monk in Qing-dynasty Xiongxian county. It remains to be seen how distinctive it was for a monk to be given the name Miaoyin. For the double-character names chosen for Buddhist and Daoist clerics, either the first or second element was stable within each generation (cf. Customs of naming), and miao 妙 was often adopted for the first; the second character yin 音 seems less common than sheng 聲 (sound)—such as the cohort of young monks at the Guangji an temple in Beijing in the 1930s (see my In search of the folk Daoists of north China, p.223).

Anyway, even if Miaoyin received his early ritual training in Beijing before being deputed to staff a rural Hebei temple, such occupational “musical monks” (yiseng 藝僧) performing rituals around the old city were most unlikely to be familiar with the Lotus sutra, which is not among the ritual manuals that they performed—so our musical monk clearly wasn’t named after Gadgadasvara.

Still, while he would have been utterly remote from the abstruse concerns of ancient Buddhist cosmology, the prelude to the Hanzhuang score does indeed describe him as “Chan master Miaoyin, Wang ‘Bodhisattva’ Guanghui” (妙音王菩薩光輝禪師)—the honorific “Bodhisattva” suggesting his local reputation.

Anyway, do get to know the wondrous tones of the shengguan ritual suites attributed to Miaoyin, still being performed by ritual associations in Hebei villages (cf. ##8 and 14 of playlist in sidebar, and for the process from singing the oral gongche to instrumental performance, ## 9 and 10—with commentary here)!

Gongche solfeggio score, Hanzhuang: Hesi pai prelude to Qi Yan Hui suite.

Long story short: like “And did those feet in ancient time?“, my title seems to resemble those questions they ask you at airport check-in—to which you’re pretty sure the answers are going to be “No”, but you have to keep on your toes just in case.

* I don’t mean to labour the point à la Stewart Lee, but in search of wisdom, I find this helpful explanation:

The Sanskrit term Kamaladalavimalanakṣatrarājasaṃkusumitābhijña can be transliterated into English as Kamaladalavimalanaksatrarajasamkusumitabhijna or Kamaladalavimalanakshatrarajasamkusumitabhijna.

Thanks for that.

The enchanting world of Tibetan opera

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All images here from Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, The singing mask.

Tibetan opera is just enthralling.

Best studied of the various dramatic genres among the Tibetan peoples is ache lhamo of central Tibet—a seamless blending of sacred and secular, human and divine, comedy and deep introspection (cf. European mystery plays, or indeed Mozart’s The magic flute).

Usually I leave audio/video clips for a later section, but here I want to plunge right into this enchanting world, with its intoxicating singing, in this excerpt from Sukyi nyima performed by former members of TIPA from Dharamsala:

As a caveat against reification, such footage reminds us that, as with all musicking, lhamo is a social event—performed over a whole day (or more) under an awning in the open air. In the words of Jamyang Norbu, it “combines the relaxed informality of village cricket [!], the magical world of pantomime, and the open-air eating and drinking of a good picnic”.

Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy makes a fine guide to lhamo, with her experience among Tibetans both inside the PRC and in exile—an order that now seems suitable. [1]

She edited the attractive, instructive volume

  • The singing mask: echoes of Tibetan opera (2001)
    (some chapters here).

In her Introduction, she sums up the main themes within the “fragmented and politicised” research. Both in the PRC and in exile, lhamo has become an icon of “popular” Tibetan culture, with concomitant folklorisation. Though ritual elements are strong, in the PRC it is perceived as a necessary counterpart to monastic culture. Professionalisation has brought modifications to vocal styles, costume, and movement, as well as in context and economic conditions.

Within the PRC, Isabelle comments that lhamo became a focus of the “mind-boggling” search for entirely secular elements within Tibetan culture”, an ideological mold that “obliterated the deep ties that opera had with religious and institutional aspects […] not only in its content and symbolism but also regarding its social context”. More generally, I note that the dichotomy fails to do justice to the rich variety of performance genres along the sacred-secular continuum.

As Isabelle observes,

any attempt at (re)presenting Tibetan culture today is inseparable from an implicit ideological and political commentary on the situation of Tibet, through history and at present. Tibet’s past still has a very long future. Given all these difficulties, how can one make a valid representation of the tradition of opera? Who can claim representational authority? An academic point of view would understand that a valid representation needs to incorporate in a critical way all the key diverging views.

With that qualification, most articles are based on documenting the tradition before the transformations since the 1960s; and on the Lhasa tradition, in particular that of the Kyormolung troupe—also a popular theme of studies within the TAR. Most of the splendid photos show the early period.

The main periods, and areas, can be outlined thus: before the Chinese occupation of 1950; until the 1959 rebellion and escape of the Dalai Lama into exile at Dharamsala; and the reform era within the PRC.

The volume proper opens with a reprint of Jeanette Snyder’s ground-breaking 1979 overview, based largely on her studies in Dharamsala in 1963–64, giving a historical introduction and vivid accounts of the unfolding of the drama. Citing a 1958 list, she provides details of the four major and six minor troupes engaged by the (Tibetan) government for the summer Shotön festival at the Norbulingka.

After Tashi Tsering’s chapter on the early history of lhamo through the life of the saintly Thang stong rgyal po, Lobsang Samten focuses on the ritual prelude (see also here) and coda (“auspicious victory of the gods”), both substantial sequences of blessings led by hunters, princes, and goddesses. With the help of actors themselves, as well as scholars of classical Tibetan, he elucidates their complex orally-transmitted language, providing valuable clues to performance vocabulary.

lhamo 130

Perhaps this is a suitable moment for an outline of the elements of lhamo in performance.

In a largely oral tradition (with most performers illiterate), the voices are accompanied by a mere two percussionists on drum and cymbals, without melodic instruments (like the strictest traditions of Chinese ritual—but unlike modernised versions of professional lhamo groups in the PRC). Some masks are worn (cf. Noh). The plot is punctuated by dance, some popular songs, and comic interludes, with some characters akin to panto.

lhamo 111
Norbu Tsering.

And so onto Isabelle’s chapter with Tenzin Gönpo, which addresses the nuts and bolts of the two main vocal styles, with comments from the great Norbu Tsering (1927–2013), whose autobiography is a major resource. The lack of notated examples is of no consequence, but one longs for video, or at least audio, of their demonstration.

The authors discuss fast chanted recitation and, most remarkably, the intense, moving namthar arias—high and guttural, free-tempo, melismatic, with glottal tremulations, sung solo with supporting chorus.

The namthar play a rather similar role to the arias of Bach Passions, though the resemblance perhaps ends there… Here the authors discuss the incipit, inflexions (“change through bending”), glottalisations, non-lexical ornamental interpolations (a common feature of other Tibetan genres, and in much singing around the world, e.g. Navajo), and (also in fine detail) the role of the chorus that supports the solo namthar. They cite a wonderful description by Jacques Bacot in 1921—in Isabelle’s translation:

The king is the one who sings the slowest, as is becoming for such a solemn and august character. In a way, he stutters at the end of his sentences. The last syllable (in Tibetan, the verb encapsulating the idea) cannot merely go out from his mouth and hurry. It sort of falls off his mouth, separate, precious, like a gift anxiously awaited. And all his court, as if suspended during his speech, collects the king’s last word and sings it with him. The feeling is admirable.

Next they analyse namthar melody, discussing in turn terminology, leitmotivs, male and female melodies (gendered concepts as in dancing), “long” and “short” tunes, the special category of “sad” songs, the relation of principle and practice, and the incorporation of folk elements.

This whole discussion adds to our already complex notions of “improvisation”; and it makes a model integration of emic and etic approaches. Though Isabelle proclaims her lack of qualification to broach “musical” issues, this chapter shows how much untrained scholars can—and must—contribute to study of soundscape, confounding the feeble disclaimers of scholars of Daoism.

The authors conclude by observing increasing standardization, mainly within the PRC but also in exile.

The volume ends with a chapter by Jamyang Norbu—always a stimulating, frank commentator (cf. The Lhasa ripper, The mandala of Sherlock Holmes, and Women in Tibet, 2). He gives a fine introduction to the challenges faced by the exile community from 1959 in establishing the lhamo scene in Dharamsala, under the guidance of Norbu Tsering, as they pieced the melodies together like a jigsaw from the memories of various people”. Jamyang Norbu reflects on his early years as member of the Drama Society, forerunner of TIPA, which he served as director from 1980 to 1985.

lhamo 113

Jamyang Norbu: “My inability to sing opera arias did not prevent me from playing the role of the village idiot in the story”.

At first living conditions were grim, and many of the performers in poor health. In Dharamsala too, there was a lively debate over the tensions between tradition and innovation. Some monks objected to the scenes in lhamo satirising religion, but

I replied that opera performers had been performing such satires and making such irreverent jokes even in the old days, and that I would certainly not stop this democratic tradition in our performing culture.

Indeed, in an adaptation of Prince Norsang he managed to insert a scene satirising religious intolerance: a priest, realizing that whatever ritual he performs will cause offence to one sect or other, is reduced to singing a popular Hindi film song instead.

Morale was low, with performers suffering from the traditional prejudice against actors and musicians; funding was also a problem. Gradually they created a viable tradition, mustering sets, costumes, masks, and props, and training performers. While adhering to the traditional accompaniment of drum and cymbals, they experimented with three different sizes of drum. They also recreated the Shöton opera festival in Dharamsala.

In 1981 Jamyang Norbu wrote a new lhamo script Chaksam (“The iron bridge”), based on the trials of Thangtong Gyalpo (cf. Tashi Tsering’s chapter), with Norbu Tsering adapting the melodies. Jamyang Norbu’s questioning spirit is evident. Observing that “the Tibetan opera is frankly Lhasa-centric and unabashedly medieval in outlook”, he notes the stereotyped depictions of regional characters as villains and buffoons. So, wanting to have “at least one opera where a humble Tibetan layperson from outside Lhasa was the principal character”, he wrote the story around two lowly pilgrims—one from Kham, the other from Amdo. And he also sought to educate younger Tibetans in the texture of life in the past.

As they refined their productions, they also worked on giving contemporary relevance to the comic scenes. They paid attention to the whole pageantry of performance. Lhamo became a meaningful part of community life. Only the quality of singing was considered inferior to the halcyon days of old Lhasa.

In 1985 Jamyang Norbu was ousted from TIPA amidst political intrigue, again featuring his experiments in drama. He comments on the later fortunes of lhamo in Dharamsala, and other diaspora groups, reflecting on the challenges of maintaining Tibetan culture outside Tibet.

In order to truly survive, not only in museums, or in the accolade and admiration of foreign friends, Tibetan culture, especially performing culture, must be able to entertain and inspire a new generation of Tibetans, and must have real meaning in the lives of Tibetans everywhere.

In 1986 Jamyang Norbu edited Zlos-gar, an important early introduction to the Tibetan performing arts. Meanwhile he has kept a keen eye on the revival within the PRC.

For a vignette evoking a rainy TIPA performance of opera in 1995, see Keila Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala (2002), pp.70–72.

* * *

As ever, such careful work on documenting the tradition should complement studies of ongoing change. There’s always more fieldwork to do among both professional and amateur troupes. [3]

I look forward to reading Isabelle’s magnum opus (976 pages!)

  • Le théâtre ache lhamo: jeux et enjeux d’une tradition tibetaine (2017) (reviewed here), with historical background, the relationship with Buddhism, social ethnography, and a focus on the practical aspects of performance.

* * *

We’re now ready to immerse ourselves in the trials of the pious Nangsa woebum (plot summary here), as performed by TIPA in Dharamsala, unfolding over nearly seven hours! Starting here:

followed by Parts 2, 3, and 4.

We can also compare online videos from within the TAR, like this excerpt from Sukyi Nima at the Norbulingka for the 2014 Shöton festival:

And here’s the first of eighteen short clips from a 2019 Shöton performance at the Norbulingka (they don’t follow on, so type 羅布林卡藏戲):

Returning to the exile scene, after our initial introduction to Sukyi Nyima, we can again relish it complete—here’s the first of fifteen instalments (again, they don’t often appear in sequence, so you may have to type the next section into the YouTube search box):

One of the most charming stock characters in world drama is the truth-speaking parrot (“Despite the warnings King Sengey receives from his sagacious parrot advisor, he banishes Sukyi Nyima from the kingdom”).

lhamo 122

But in between the more popular songs and dances, the rapid narration and the slapstick, it’s the searing intensity of the namthar singing that is most captivating.

Update, 2022
The renewed outbreak of Covid in the TAR came at the time of the Shöton festival, prompting this remarkable performance at a roadside checkpoint:

[1] See her section in the New Grove dictionary, §III, 5; her bibliography of Western-language sources, §7; and for Tibetan and Chinese sources, see here.
In Chinese, note also the opera volumes (Zhongguo xiqu zhi and Zhongguo xiqu yinyue jicheng) of the Anthology for TAR. For all its ideological perspective, as with the volumes for Han Chinese traditions, a wealth of information is contained among the many rubrics of the xiqu zhi—such as masks, costumes, professional and amateur troupes, venues and performance customs, and historical artefacts.
For more comparisons of the PRC and exile scenes, see e.g.

  • Kati Fitzgerald, “Tibetan opera in and outside the Tibet Autonomous Region”, Asian theatre journal 31.1 (2014)
  • Daniel Wojahn, “Preservation and continuity: the ache lhamo tradition inside and outside the Tibet Autonomous Region” (2016); and especially
  • Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, “Easier in exile? Comparative observations on doing research among Tibetans in Lhasa and Dharamsala”, in Sarah Turner (ed.), Red stars and gold stamps: fieldwork dilemmas in upland socialist Asia (2013).

See also Echoes of Dharamsala.

[2] As with Flann O’Brien‘s references to the ouevre of De Selby in The third policeman, the footnotes often dwarf the main text, but are most edifying. Please excuse the brevity of this footnote.

For the related tales of folk lama mani performers, see here.

[3] For some more adventurous recent innovations within the PRC, see Isabelle’s article “Quelques voies de renouveau pour le théâtre traditionnel tibétain depuis les années 2000” (2019).

How to mangle, and relish, words

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Windsors

For a fruitful way of spending your time under isolation, The Windsors (Channel 4, three series now available) has much to delight in—not least linguistically.

The entire cast is brilliant. Charles (Harry Enfield) and Wills (Hugh Skinner, gormlessly idealistic to follow his cameo as feckless Will in W1A) have great fun with their posh accents and mannerisms; but it’s the personas, and voices, of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie (Ellie White and Celeste Dring, wonderful) that I find most fascinating (or rather fascinatoring).

Along with their spectacular vapidity, their facial expressions and body language contributing to the effect, they both mangle and relish their vacuous words, constantly finding new ways of distorting vowel sounds—and even lavishing their regal attention upon the last word of a sentence, managing to elongate final consonants.* So just as you think the sentence is fizzling out with its usual innocuous ending, there’s a whole concentration of extra input. It’s like a VAR replay, slowing up even more to show if the ball really crossed the line.

Celeste Dring was inspired by Made in Chelsea—indeed, her very name surely qualifies her for the role. At least they go easy on the whole AQI uptalk thing???, though it is well suited to the Sloaney style (“I’m like, hellooooo?”).

A taster (“I think a job is where you have to go into a building, or something…”):

In their attention to enunciating vowels and consonants I detect a progression from series 1 to series 3. Good start-up words to practise include “now”, “house”, “years”, “money”, “water”.

The princesses deserve an award for elocution, if perhaps not for advancing the cause of women.

 

* BTW, the extensive stammering tag on this blog is worth consulting. One feature of speech impediments is that we (that’s an inclusive “we”—disfluencies of all kinds may afflict royalty and their loyal, servile subjects alike) tend to stammer on initial consonants: it’s getting going that’s the problem. One technique in “prolonged speech” therapy, a means of desensitisation, is to elongate the consonants, smoothly (easier for ssssustainable nasals and fricatives, whereas p-p-p-plosives have to be repeated). Now the fragrant princesses have got me wondering if it might be fair to give the neglected final consonants a chance too.

Coronavirus 2: songs from Gansu, and blind bards

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ZGS vid

To follow blind bard Liu Hongquan’s song mourning Li Wenliang, thanks to Alex Davey and others on Twitter I note some great new satirical songs about Coronavirus by the enterprising Gansu folk-singer Zhang Gasong 张尕怂 (b.1989).

His own song about Li Wenliang appeared only very briefly on Weibo (see his regular posts there at weibo.com/zhangdabenshi). Another one, criticising a range of responses to the crisis, with incisive visuals, was also soon deleted from Chinese social media. Here’s a playlist:

And he created this song to cheer up his granny by satirising his unexpectedly lengthy sojourn upon returning home for New Year —a common predicament:

Musically the gutsy style, with funky sanxian lute, is reminiscent of the blind bards of Shaanbei—like Liu Hongquan’s song, the “northwest wind” makes an incisive medium.

On Zhang Gasong there’s a lengthy article in Chinese, with a clip from the documentary Huanghe gayao 黄河尕谣. What’s more, I find that he’s a fellow-stammerer (among posts under the stammering tag, note Great Chinese stammerers)! Here’s the trailer to Stammering ballad (Zhang Nan, 2018):

Brought up in a poor village of Baiyin municipality beset by frequent drought, he relished the huar song festivals at temple fairs; he managed to attend college, but found himself drawn back to his local culture, becoming a collector as he studied with noted folk performers.

Zhang Gasong studying Liangzhou xianxiao with Zang Shande (left) and blind female singer Feng Lanfang (right).

A busy touring schedule has brought him celebrity—though he finds the idea of “touring” (xunyan 巡演) poncey: “it’s pretty much like being an itinerant singer”. As his horizons have expanded, he’s absorbed new pop styles; yet he’s aware of the dangers of losing himself in the urban jungle, and as he astutely comments, he doesn’t like to be forced into representing a contrast between rural and urban China.

Here’s his song “Tell the truth”:


Appendix
Zhang Gasong’s work in collecting the local song cultures of Gansu, with its complex ethnic tapestry, is part of a long tradition dating back to the Maoist era. As ever, it’s worth consulting the folk-song and narrative-singing volumes of the Anthology:

  • Zhongguo minjian gequ jicheng, Gansu juan 中国民间歌曲集成, 甘肃卷 (1994)
  • Zhongguo quyi zhi, Gansu juan 中国曲艺志, 甘肃卷 (2008) (see here)
  • Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Gansu juan 中国曲艺音乐集成, 甘肃卷 (1998)
  • Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Gansu juan 中国戏曲志, 甘肃卷 (1995) (see here)
  • Zhongguo xiqu yinyue jicheng, Gansu juan 中国戏曲音乐集成, 甘肃卷 (2006).
Feng Lanfang

Feng Lanfang (centre).

Just one instance: Zhang Gasong visited Wang Yue 王月 (b. c1936; see also here), Zang Shande 臧善德 (b.1945), and female performer Feng Lanfang 冯兰芳 (b.1965) to study melodies from the Liangzhou xianxiao 凉州贤孝 (“virtuous and filial songs of Liangzhou”) genre, popular around the region of Wuwei. Belonging under the wide umbrella of morality songs “exhorting virtue“ quanshan 劝善, widespread in China, its history and structure are outlined in the Gansu narrative-singing volume. [1] Like so many genres around China (such as Zuoquan in Shanxi), it is mainly performed by itinerant blind singers for life-cycle and calendrical observances.

Research was carried out under Maoism, with official attempts to reform “superstitious” content of limited effect. Activity resumed more openly in the 1980s, coinciding with the Anthology fieldwork. In recent years Liangzhou xianxiao has been espoused by the Intangible Cultural Heritage project, with considerable media coverage—while (here I go again) substituting reified festivals on urban stages for serious ethnographic fieldwork on its life in a changing society.

Some of the great perfomers whom Zhang Gasong visited may be found in online videos; here’s Feng Lanfang, incorporating topical themes into her morality tales (cf. Bards of Shaanbei, under “Old and new stories”): [2]

For a roundup of posts on Gansu, click here. For some archive recordings of huar songs and narrative-singing from the northwest, note the CDs here; and for a recent project from Naxos, Folk music of China, vol. 1: folk songs of Qinghai and Gansu. See also my roundup of posts on narratvie-singing. Yet more instances of the remarkable resilience of Chinese tradition through successive modern crises…

[1] Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Gansu juan: introduction pp.636–40, transcriptions 641–92, biographies 693–4. More recently, see e.g. Li Wulian 李武莲 ed., Liangzhou xianxiao jingxuan 凉州贤孝精选 (2011).

[2] As I’m sure you’ll notice, the final instrumental melody (from 16.54) was mistakenly uploaded at high speed!

A recognition sextet, and more stammering

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Sextet

To follow my Mozart opera dream:

Of all the wonderful music in The marriage of Figaro, I think we in the orchestra all lavished particular loving care on the Act 3 sextet Riconosci in questo amplesso, in which Figaro recognizes his parents.

The focus on the rather naff dramatic business tends to distract from the riches of the exquisite music—there’s so much delight in caressing the orchestral accompaniment. Here’s our 1993 recording:

A minor bonus for me personally is the role of the stammering notary Don Curzio (sadly, I wasn’t employed as a voice coach). His imp-p-pediment is harder to suggest in metered song than in recitative—this clip includes the recitative as performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris:

But Kleiber’s 1955 recording manages to include it in the sextet itself (@2.45):

* * *

The figure of the stammering lawyer or notary goes back to Tartaglia in commedia dell’arte and Il Tartaglione, foil to Polecenella in Neapolitan puppetry. Don Curzio’s stammer was created by the Irish tenor Michael Kelly; indeed, Mozart feared that it detracted from his music, but Kelly convinced him to keep it since it was an audience-pleaser—Typical!

Besides all the musical portrayals of disfluency that I mentioned in this post (including Rossini’s “stupefaction ensemble”), we can add Vašek in Smetana’s The bartered bride:

An earnest yet drôle article considers it a sympathetic portrayal; but

some nameless “laryngologists” [!] were quoted maintaining that it is quite impossible to stutter in Vašek’s way. No systematic phoniatric analysis of his fluency disorder has been published. The present study is assessing and enumerating Vašek’s tonic, clonic and tonoclonic speech blockades. It also delivers musical examples of his effective stuttered phrases and compares them to scientific descriptions and objective registrations of physical (external) and psychical (internal) symptoms of stuttering in phoniatric textbooks. It confirms the complete agreement of Smetana’s artistic expression of speech disfluency with the real stuttering.

And the role of Dr Blind in Die Fledermaus led me to this blistering review (“Mark Saltzman as Dr Blind was made to labor under the delusion that stammering jokes are funny”—no turn is left unstoned). But Barbara Hannigan’s portrayal of Gepopo still takes the b-b-biscuit.

 

Alternative Bach

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Bach

In a new three-part series on BBC Radio 3 (hurry!—only available for a limited time), harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani challenges mainstream ideas of what’s “right” or “wrong” in how Bach’s music is performed, with some fascinating early and recent recordings.

In Programme 1, “Traveller” (as a successive migrant himself, an evocative theme) after nods to Leonhardt and Harnoncourt, he includes Wanda Landowska, Leonid Kogan with Karl Richter, and Ralph Kirkpatrick; makes a case for a Karl Münchinger rendition (by which I am underwhelmed); and features the first-ever recording of  Bach’s early cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden—from 1931 Barcelona (pre-Franco), in Catalan.

Programme 2, “Outsiders”, features a 1946 Klemperer recording of Brandenburg 2, with the solo trumpet part on soprano sax (which to my ears is its only virtue), and Grigory Sokolov (though I don’t think anyone is claiming that you can’t play Bach on the modern concert piano). The Christ lag in Todesbanden theme continues with another rare Nadia Boulanger recording from 1937 (and in the years following World War 2, still before the “early music” movement, the cantata was among several to be performed and recorded).

Programme 3, “Innovators”, begins with Wendy Carlos on Moog synthesiser. This confuses me. I like the sound; the album has been praised for its “amazing sensitivity and finely wrought nuances, in timbre, tone, and expressiveness”, and Glenn Gould approved too. But I just hear mechanical metronomic monotony, devoid of nuance—or is that the point? Just as no-one said it’s enough to play old music on old instruments, it’s not enough to play it on new ones either. We also hear the curiosity of Emil Telmanyi’s misguided “Bach bow”; Sigiswald Kuijken playing the 6th cello suite; and Anner Bylsma on viola da gamba. Esfahani ends with Schoenberg’s 1928 arrangement of a Bach partita conducted by Essa-Pekka Salonen—and almost relevant here is the charming story of the board of the LA Phil succinctly dismissing the maestro’s choice of repertoire.

Of course, for innovations there’s a lot more potential material for further programmes, from Jacques Loussier and beyond. To complement my own rendition of the Goldberg variations and my many posts on stammering, here’s Uri Caine:

* * *

Much as I enjoyed the series, surely the notion of “authenticity” has become something of a straw (um) person—doctrinaire Ayatollahs are not so common in early music as outsiders imagine.

Indeed, I think most of this can be dispelled by reading Richard Taruskin and John Butt, and listening to John Eliot Gardiner’s renditions (even if Taruskin has trenchant reservations about the latter). Fine as the recordings of Gardiner’s teacher Boulanger are, in the energy and intensity of his performances he develops her tradition with the benefit of later insights.

Christ lag in Todesbanden has remained one of his signature pieces over several decades, always reinvigorated (see also here). Here’s a live performance at the 2021 Proms:

For introductions to the cantata, see here, and wiki.

So: questioning supposed orthodoxies still makes a stimulating theme, but I suspect we can now only appreciate interpretations from earlier in the 20th century with the benefit of the bedrock of later HIP style, which has brought us so many invigorating new insights.

The post-war period that led to the establishment of so-called HIP orthodoxy in early music was one of great experimentation. It’s worth citing from John Eliot’s recollections of his studies with Boulanger and his own early experiments with period style (Music in the castle of heaven, pp.3–12):

The person who crystallised all these ideas for me was Nadia Boulanger, justly recognised as the most celebrated teacher of composition in the 20th century. When she accepted me as a student in Paris in 1967, she had just turned 80 and was partially blind, but with all her other faculties in tip-top order. […]

As he formed his own choir and orchestra at Cambridge, he was underwhelmed by the Bach style prevailing there:

How had the wonderfully exultant music that I had known since I was a child come to be treated in such a precious, etiolated way?

And he found the “oppressive volume and sheer aggression” of Karl Richter’s Munich performances “a world away from the mincing, ‘holy holy’ approach of King’s or the Bach Choir in London, but hardly more inspiriting.”

Here, as in most of the live performances or recordings that I had access to, Bach came over as grim, sombre, po-faced, lacking in spirit, humour, and humanity. Where was the festive joy and zest of this dance-impregnated music?

He describes his early experiments with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, and how by 1978 they had “hit a brick wall”:

The fault was neither theirs nor mine, but that of the instruments we were using. However stylishly we played them, there was no disguising that they had been designed or adapted with a totally different sonority in mind, one closely associated with a late-19th- and early-20th-century (and therefore anachronistic) style of expression. With their wire- or metal-covered strings they were simply too powerful—and yet to scale things down was the very opposite of what this music, with its burgeoning, expressive range, called for. To unlock the codes in the musical language of these Baroque masters, to close the gap between their world and ours, and to release the well-spring of their creative fantasy meant cultivating a radically different sonority. There was only one thing for it: to re-group using original (or replica) Baroque instruments.

As he goes on to explain, “more intrepid pioneers” got there rather earlier. But such experiments were based not on orthodoxy but innovation, expression, joy.

People were quick to realise that there really is a difference in performance between those who are committed to re-making music and inhabiting it afresh, and those just bent on dispatching it with efficiency and technical skill.
[…]
As Richard Taruskin was quick to point out, sound scholarship does not necessarily result in good music-making. At a time when a fashion for “under-interpretation” was beginning to take hold in England among certain early-music practitioners, Taruskin was also one of the first to question what he called “the naive assumption that re-creating all the external conditions that obtained in the  original performance of a piece [excluding people’s ears, minds, bodies, and social conditions, of course!] will thus re-create the composer’s inner experience of the piece and allow him to ‘speak for himself’, that is, unimpeded by that base intruder, the performer’s subjectivity.” He also identified a danger in an over-reverential attitude to the concept of Werktreue (“truth to the work”), one that inflicts “a truly stifling regimen by radically hardening and patrolling what had previously been a fluid, easily crossed boundary between the performing and composing roles.”

In the UK and elsewhere in the 70s, the personnel of early and contemporary music scenes often overlapped (see here, under “Performance practice”)—both seeking to innovate, to escape the confines of received conventions.

Now, it’s great to rediscover the radical nature of early recordings, and I’d be the first to lament the bland auto-pilot knit-your-own-yogurt sackcloth-and-ashes of the HIP fringes. But Esfahani almost seems to be indulging in PC gone mad gone mad. The early music scene that evolved since the 1960s was anything but fusty: what drove musos to it was seeking to communicate with an energy that would speak to modern audiences. So, much as I like many of Esfahani’s examples, I like a lot of HIP renditions even more.

Still, Busoni’s piano arrangement of the Bach solo violin Chaconne (included in this remarkable playlist), played by the astounding Hélène Grimaud, makes another chance to relish changing ways of interpreting the past anew.

* * *

I’ve touched on related issues in several posts, linked in Reception history. See also e.g. The Feuchtwang variations, and Bach, um, marches towards the world. On a lighter note, see here; and for vignettes on my days in the English Baroque Soloists, here and here.

For Esfahani’s weird sequel on Mahler, see here.

More stammering songs

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Baroque, vaudeville, fieldwork, and blues

possum pie

As part of my series on stammering I’ve already featured several songs about speech impediments, like There once was a man from Calcutta, Rossini’s “stupefaction ensemble”, Gepopo, and Uri Caine’s take on Bach. Now, thanks to this page from Judy Kuster (part of a site containing rich material), I find a plethora of further links, worth reading together with two splendid discussions, here and here.

As the latter page observes,

By the rise of vaudeville, the stuttering song was established enough that it was considered its own small genre, a specialty for comic singers—Sammy Stammers, from 1894, is a typical example. These stuttering songs fit naturally into a coarse period whose popular music mocked the Irish, Jews, Asians, and blacks.

And in all these cases, modern audiences can only await their cue from the victims to benefit from, even enjoy, such creations.

In the heady days before PC (“gone mad”), there was a b-b–bumper crop in the early days of the recording industry, showing at least that stammering was a significant element in public consciousness. It’s good to contextualize it in the context of other disabilities:

  • Joseph Strauss and Neil Lerner (eds.), Sounding off: theorizing disability in music (2006),

among many interesting chapters (not least on Glenn Gould!), includes

  • Daniel Goldmark, “Stuttering in American popular song, 1890-1930”,

showing how stutterers there were portrayed in music between 1890 and 1930. Note also an article by Josephine Hoegaerts.

Here’s a medley of short clips:

Intriguingly, several of the most popular songs focus on female sufferers, always in a minority—like K-K-K-Katy (Billie Murray, 1917), which, on a roll, he followed up with the “incredibly insulting” You tell her I S-T-U-T-T-E-R.

Oh Helen (1918) contains the ingenious lyric

Oh H-H-Hel, Oh H-H-Hel, Oh Helen please be mine
You s-s-simp, You s-s-simp, You simply are divine
You m-m-mud, You m-m-mud, You muddle me it’s true
Oh D-D-Dam, Oh D-D-Dam, Oh Damsel I love you 

i'm always

Still, there’s a disturbing undercurrent of romance. As the Locust St. post oberves,

The poor stuttering protagonist falls in love but his impediment makes it hard for him to express his feelings. There are typically two outcomes. There is the (relatively) optimistic: in “Stuttering Dick,” as in “The Stuttering lovers,” an Irish folk song, the stuttering guy finds a stuttering girl, and the two live in bliss. Then there is the more popular and more tragic scenario, when the stuttering character falls in love, can’t communicate his feelings, and winds up scorned and ridiculed.

todd

Charles L. Todd records among Mexican migrants, California 1941.

Turning to ethnographic fieldwork, here’s the full version of the unusually endearing song that opens the YouTube medley above. Sung by Lloyd Stalcup, a 14-year old Texan migrant worker, it was recorded in 1940 at Shafter FSA (Farm Security Administration) Camp in California as part of the fine Voices from the Dust Bowl project by Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin of the Library of Congress (with evocative fieldnotes here):


But as non-PC goes, the pick of the b-b-bunch—as politicians are discovering, if you’re gonna be offensive, why not go all the way?—has to be Possum pie (or The stuttering coon, 1904), with lyrics by Joseph C. Farrell, music by Hughie Cannon:

Of course, few of these songs attempt to break out of the rhythmic mould to reflect more accurately the irregularity of stammering. Ironically, the impediment disappears when singing, and in rhythmic speech, but neither offers more than temporary relief. I wonder if there are any east-European songs in the parlando-rubato form beloved of Hungarian scholars, or even Bulgarian aksak “limping” treatments…

Delving further back, for us early music fans Andrew Oster has a chapter in Sounding off about Demo, a stammering dwarf (YAY!) in Cavalli’s 1649 opera Giasone. Here the fast repetitious ornament trillo or gruppo, a kind of throat tremolo (defined by Caccini, used expressively by Monteverdi—and recently by Abrahamsen in the mesmerizing let me tell you (see Soundscapes of Nordic noir), is put to comic use:

It reminds one of the drunken stammering poet in Purcell’s The fairy queen (1692—also featuring a Chinese man and woman, BTW):

Now all we need for a full house is a drunken stammering black Jewish Chinese gay dwarf, FFS.

The links above take the story on to pop since the 1950s; but for blues fans, I’ll play out with John Lee Hooker—one of the more realistic impersonations of the sound. You can decide if it’s “a revelation—the singer isn’t a poor victim but a player, wooing a girl through his stammer” or if it’s just “good old-fashioned sexual harrassment”:

* * *

This may just be a coincidence of the birth of the recording industry, but it looks rather as if stammering songs reached peak popularity in the wake of World War One. So recalling that many Chinese stammerers are also documented in historic periods of warfare, we may wonder if there’s some correlation between social trauma and disfluency in speech. Speech therapy is clearly among the needs of current refugees, for instance. Still, if conflict were a simple stimulus, our forebears would all have been at it. And I’ve no idea how one might make a more comprehensive global diachronic survey—taking account of class, economic conditions, gender, and so on.

For more stammerers in opera, see here; and for an Azeri song, here!

Some great Chinese stammerers

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As a card-carrying stammerer, I’m always on the lookout for fellow-sufferers—not least in China.*

I’ve already described my encounter with a stammering shawm player in Shaanbei (here, under “Status and disability”), and suggested a motto for the Chinese Stammerers’ Association, as well as noting an entertainingly crap Chinese therapy. I’ve noted how the public nature of Chinese life may force the stammerer to confront the issue.

Now (thanks to NBL on languagelog) I learn of the illustrious stammerer Deng Ai 鄧艾 (197–264 CE), a military general in the Romance of the three kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi 三國演義).**

On further study, this clue leads to a whole world of Sanguo nerds, largely through the medium of video gaming…

Chapter 107 of the Romance of the three kingdoms reads:

The other man is presently a lower official. His name is Deng Ai […]. He lost his father when he was young, but he always harbored great ambitions. Whenever he saw mountains or valleys, he would instinctively point out the best places to station troops, store grain, or stage an ambush. Everyone else laughed at him, but Sima Yi appreciated his talent and came to include him when discussing military strategy. Deng Ai has a speech defect. He always stutters when he’s trying to speak, so that whenever he had to make a report he couldn’t help saying ‘Ai Ai…’.*** Sima Yi once teased him about it, asking him, “You’re always saying ‘Ai Ai’. How many Ai’s are there?”

But Deng Ai immediately replied, “They say O Phoenix, O Phoenix, when there’s only one phoenix.” From this, you can see that he has a quick and alert mind. You must watch out for these two people.

姓鄧，名艾，字士載。幼年失父，素有大志。但見高山大澤，輒窺度指畫，何處可以屯兵，何處可以積糧，何處可以埋伏。人皆笑之，獨司馬懿奇其才，遂令參贊軍機。艾爲人口吃，每奏事必稱『艾，艾』。懿戲謂曰：『卿稱艾艾，當有幾艾？』
艾應聲曰：『鳳兮鳳兮，故是一鳳。』其資性敏捷，大抵如此。二人深可畏也。

Putting down a heckler with a quote from the Analects of Confucius—now that’s niche! Beat that, Stewart Lee. Later, as Deng Ai rose to power, he mastered his stammer, addressing his troops—another tough gig.

Here’s a typically cute Chinese video!

Actually, this illustrates how a certain insider knowledge on a seemingly technical topic may illuminate our studies—such as geographical and topographic features in early literature, or the availability of materials for painting or sculpture; or for Daoist ritual, how participant observation, an understanding of vocal, percussive, and instrumental melody in performance, should be a basic aspect of research. “Yeah?”

* * *

Some useful Chinese sites (like this) list many other illustrious Chinese stammerers, ancient and modern. Starting with the early legalist philosopher Han Feizi 韓非子, and the poet Sima Xiangru 司馬相如, there’s a g-glut [measure word] from the pre-Tang era. For the aficionado of Tang poetry we have Meng Jiao 孟郊, writing (and stammering) in the aftermath of the cataclysmic An Lushan rebellion. (In a post on stammering songs I speculate whether there’s a link between fluency and social trauma.)

Celebrated 20th-century stammerers (putting aside Wang Guowei, who seems to belong in Confucius’s “deliberate” category) include the philosopher Feng Youlan 馮友蘭, influential both within and beyond China.

gjg

Gu Jiegang and his family, 1954.

Most notable for my tastes is the folklorist Gu Jiegang 顾颉刚 (1893–1980), to whose 1925 fieldwork on Miaofengshan one often refers [Innit though—Ed.]. He might have made a drôle companion to interpret my own questions in the field. Lu Xun abruptly goes right down in my estimation as I learn that in their literary feud he uncharitably took the piss out of Gu’s impediment (B-b-bastard).

* * *

But my favourite reference to early Chinese stammering has to be a passage from Sima Qian’s Records of the grand historian (Shiji), to which the erudite Hannibal Taubes, always alert to niches that might attract me, alerted me. It appears in the biography of Chancellor Zhang 張丞相列傳, referring to the stammering minister Zhou Chang:

及帝欲廢太子，而立戚姬子如意為太子，大臣固爭之，莫能得；上以留侯策即止。而周昌廷爭之彊，上問其說，昌為人吃，又盛怒，曰：臣口不能言，然臣期期知其不可。陛下雖欲廢太子，臣期期不奉詔。上欣然而笑。既罷，呂后側耳於東箱聽，見周昌，為跪謝曰：微君，太子幾廢。

In Nienhauser’s 2008 translation (p.213):

When the Emperor wanted to depose the heir and install Ju-yi, the son of Beauty Ch’i, as the heir, the great ministers firmly challenged this, but none was able to win him over. The Emperor [eventually] because of the Marquis of Liu’s strategy desisted. But Chou Ch’ang having been mighty in the court disputes, the Sovereign asked him for his arguments. Ch’ang was a man with a stutter and furthermore was filled with anger. He said, “My mouth cannot speak, but surely I kn-kn-know this is not permissible! Even if Your Majesty wants to depose the Heir, your subject surely will n-n-not accept the decree!” The sovereign laughed delightedly. After [court] had been dismissed, Empress Lü, who had been eavesdropping from the chambers on the eastern side, saw Chou Ch’ang, knelt down to him, and thanked him.“Without you, Sir, the Heir would certainly have been deposed.”

More um, fluently, Joseph Needham and Christoph Harbsmeier (Science and civilisation in China, volume 7: the social background, part 1, pp. 43–4) translate the relevant passage thus:

“I cannot get the words out of my mouth.” he replied. “But I know it will n-n-n-ever do! Although Your Majesty wishes to remove the heir apparent, I shall n-n-n-ever obey such an order.”

Indeed, even for those who are otherwise fluent, having to speak truth to power before a capricious amoral emperor might bring on a speech impediment. One inevitably thinks of the current wranglings around the White House—for my Hollywood screenplay I have Michael Palin lined up as Zhou Chang, with a bit part for Stormy Daniels as Concubine Ji.

While the great Han scholar Michael Loewe was introducing me to the riches of the Shiji all those decades ago, he somehow omitted to draw my attention to this—out of tact, perhaps?!

This topos is sometimes combined with an allusion to the Deng Ai story in the phrase qiqi aiai 期期艾艾.

Dong YuHannibal has further supplemented my list of illustrious Chinese stammerers with a biographical sketch of the muralist Dong Yu 董羽. As described in Song[/sheng]chao minghua ping 宋[/聖]朝名畫評 by the Song-dynasty author Liu Daochun 劉道醇, Dong Yu was an attendant to Li Yu 李煜 (Li Houzhu), last emperor of the short-lived southern Tang in the Five Dynasties period. A native of Piling in Jiangsu, Dong excelled at depicting dragons, fishes, and seas. The sketch opens with the comment “with his stammer, he couldn’t get his words out, so he was known as The Mute”.

None of Dong Yu’s ouevre seems to survive, so here’s a detail from the Nine dragons handscroll by Chen Rong, from 1244:

Dragon Chen Rong 1244

Gratuitously, here’s a dragon-shaped cloud above the Sea of Marmara this summer:

Marmara dragon

For a wealth of images from Dragon Kings temples in north China, note Hannibal Taubes’s website.

Note also the fine songs about Coronavirus by the stammerer Zhang Gasong.

So we can add such luminaries to the list of historical stammerers like Moses and Demosthenes, and later Marilyn Monroe and Ed Balls—one of those niche pub-quiz topics, like left-handed calligraphers, or Norman Wisdom and Albania.

But what about the suffering workers, eh?!

* BTW, more colloquial than the standard kouchi 口吃 is jieba 结巴 (jiejiebaba!), but still more common in north China is jieka 结卡.

** See, I Have No Kulture (paltry excuse: I’ve been busy with Tang poetry, and Daoist ritual under Maoism).

*** Call me a pedant, but while it’s perfectly possible to stammer on a vowel (and a diphthong), written Chinese doesn’t capture the likely nature of the impediment here. Repeating whole syllables or words is less common than repeating initial c-c-consonants.

Guide to another year’s blogging

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Li Manshan doing paperwork for Hoisting the Pennant ritual, 2003 https://stephenjones.blog/the-film/

Struggling to encompass all this? I know I am. While we inevitably specialize in particular topics, it’s important to build bridges. I guess it’s that time of year when another guide to my diverse posts may come in handy—this is worth reading in conjunction with the homepage and my roundup this time last year.

I’ve added more entries to many of the sidebar categories and tags mentioned in that summary. I’ve now subheaded many of the categories; it’d be useful for the tags too, but it seems I can’t do that on my current WP plan. Of course, many of these headings overlap—fruitfully.

Notably, I keep updating and refecting on my film and book on the Li family Daoists. I wrote a whole series resulting from my March trip to Yanggao (helpfully collected here) and Beijing (starting here, also including the indie/punk scene). Other 2018 posts on the Li family include Yanggao personalities and Recopying ritual manuals (a sequel to Testing the waters).

To accompany the visit of the Zhihua temple group to the British Museum in April, I also did a roundup of sources on the temple in the wider context of ritual in Beijing and further afield, including several posts on this site.

I’ve posted some more introductions to Local ritual, including

Gender (now also with basic subheads) is a constant theme, including female spirit mediums—to follow the series on women of Yanggao, starting here. Or nearer home, Moon river, complementing Ute Lemper.

Sinologists—indeed aficionados of the qin, crime fiction, and erotica—may also like my post on Robert van Gulik (and note the link to Bunnios!).

I’ve added a few more categories and tags, notably

Women of Herat https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/29/women-of-herat/

Twin Peaks https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/17/twin-peaks/
The conformist https://stephenjones.blog/2018/11/08/the-conformist/

The film tag is developing, with a side order of soundtracks—for some links, see here.

cof
Gepopo https://stephenjones.blog/2018/09/13/gepopo/

I’ve given basic subheads to the language category (note this post on censorship), which also contains much drôlerie in both English and Chinese. Issues with speech and fluency (see stammering tag) continue to concern me, such as

Following Daoist football, the sport tag is worth consulting, such as The haka, and a series on the genius of Ronnie.

Some posts are instructively linked in chains:

More favourites may be found in the *MUST READ* category. Among other drôlerie, try this updated post, one of several on indexing and taxonomy; and more from the great Philomena Cunk.

Most satisfying is this collection of great songs—still not as eclectic as it might become:

Do keep exploring the sidebar categories and tags!

 

 

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

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Moon river

This is just an alert to a substantial update on my post Moon river, featuring—in addition to Audrey Hepburn, Amy Winehouse, and Stacey Dooley, the gorgeous major-7th leap, as well as the dodgy language of “femme fatale” and “elfin waif”—thoughts on Truman Capote’s novella, stammering, and fado…

Capote

 

Moon river

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MR

À propos my Daoist ritual spinoff of Strictly, the brilliant (ethnographer!) Stacey Dooley‘s recent waltz reminds me what a brilliant song is Moon river:

Pace Andy Williams, the classic sung version is that of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961):

Johnny Mercer’s lyrics, “a love song to wanderlust” (cf. Roaming the clouds), are complemented by Henry Mancini’s melody.  I just love the leap of a major 7th:

I’m crossing you in style some day / There’s such a lot of world to see,

always effective—as in the finale of Mahler 9 (introduced by quintuplets!) and, um, Raindrops keep falling on your head! Indeed, there’s another brilliant touch: following “We’re after the same rainbow’s end“, when that sequence returns with

Waiting round the bend, My huckleberry friend,

for the first phrase the melody omits the low tonic, making us nostalgic for the missing major-7th leap (waiting, indeed), until it returns for the second phrase.

So Moon river (nearly cut from the film, PAH!) makes a perfect expression of Holly’s persona—and indeed that of Stacey Dooley, with her documentaries from around the world.

The dominant interpretation currently seems to be that Hepburn’s screen characters make her some kind of feminist role model. But “it’s complicated”—certainly in this film, which largely replaces the edgy feel of Truman Capote’s novella (1958, set in 1943) with a “sugar and spice confection”; indeed, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part! I tend to side with more critical reviews, such as this, this, and this. After I cited some dodgy sexist terms to describe talented female performers, gamine and ingénue are among those for which there are both male and female equivalents, but the latter are far more commonly used, and flawed. Oh, and how ahout “elfin waif”…

For Hepburn’s actual life, Darcey Bussell (another fragrant icon) made a fine documentary Looking for Audrey (2014), including her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland.

* * *

Capote describes Holly as an American geisha—rural child bride Lulamae, reinventing herself in New York. Film adaptations can be effective, but in this case the novella portrays her with more nuance and depth. So—not least because I’m so averse to Hepburn’s “elfin waif” shtick—I find Capote’s silent invisible original far more moving, and Holly herself far more poignant and (as she would say) sympathique.

Inevitably, at the end of the film the narrator and Holly fall in love and stay together, whereas in the novella their relationship remains platonic, and Holly disappears.

Lending significance to Moon river, the name-slot for Holly’s mail-box reads:

Miss Holiday Golightly, travelling

She reflects on how she demurred from a break in the movies offered by a Hollywood agent:

But he’s got a point, I should feel guilty. Not because they would have given me the part or because I would have been good: they wouldn’t and I wouldn’t. If I do feel guilty, I guess it’s because I let him go on dreaming when I wasn’t dreaming a bit. I was just vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing. My complexes aren’t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it’s essential not to have any ego at all. I don’t mean I mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and some day I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.

And Holly does indeed sing and play guitar:

Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, just wanna go a’travellin’ through the pastures of the sky

With a Brazilian suitor in tow, she takes to Linguaphone:

Oh screw it, cookie—hand me my guitar and I’ll sing you a fado in the most perfect Portuguese.

That would surely have rivalled Carminho’s exquisite song.

In the novella, I note with proprietoral pride that Holly’s fellow-geisha Mag Wildwood (intriguingly, Capote gave her the full name of Miss Margaret Thatcher Fitzhue Wildwood)—as if being a redhead over six feet tall isn’t enough—is a stammerer (Marilyn Monroe might have resented the competition):

Even the stutter, certainly genuine but still a bit laid on, had been turned to advantage. It was the master stroke, that stutter: for it contrived to make her banalities sound somehow original, and secondly, despite her tallness, her assurance, it served to inspire in male listeners a protective feeling.

* * *

For Moon river on the ethereal theremin, click here.

Amy Winehouse (see my tribute here) may seem an unlikely exponent of the song, but she was grounded in ballads, as we can hear in her “late” sessions with Tony Bennett. Here she is, subverting the waltz, making the song sugar-free—maybe it doesn’t quite work, but even at the age of 16 she was always exploring, discovering new personal connections:

Click here for a discussion of the song in the BBC Radio 4 Soul music series.

From my playlist of songs, it’s clear that, with some noble exceptions, I find female voices more moving than male ones—and I’m right!!!

Just another reminder that a global view of musicking invites us to delight in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse!

Confucius he say—slowly

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While I am most averse to the current wave of vapid patriotic moralising in China, I am partial to the occasional judicious quote from Confucius—like my tribute to the Li family Daoists on their 2017 French tour.

Further to my motto for the Stammerers’ Association (“We have ways of making you talk”), Who Better Than Confucius (answers on a postcard please) to supply a maxim for the Chinese branch? James Legge’s classic translation of Analects §4.24 goes

The Master said, “The superior man wishes to be slow in his speech and earnest in his conduct.”
子曰：君子欲訥於言而敏於行。

cof

The distinguished Tian Qing, my favoured calligrapher-by-appointment—see here for the sign that he wrote for Li Manshan’s latrine)—has kindly written the maxim for me in lishu script. For Shan Fuyi’s scroll with the ingenious poem that Gaoluo villagers wrote for me, click here.

The 訥 there (“slow”) has also been rendered as “hesitant” (for an allusion to the dictum in the name of a fine scholar of Tang culture, click here). Of course, unlike Moses, there’s no suggestion that Confucius was himself a stammerer. In his calligraphy Tian Qing has dispensed with the “wishes” character, since as he observes wryly, I’ve already attained the “slow in speech”… But rather than advocating a speech impediment, Confucius’s bon mot may serve for the afflicted as a reminder of slowed speech, or even deliberate stammering, as therapy—perhaps with Robert Peston as model, rather than Gepopo.

There’s some data on stammering worldwide, but historically, I wonder how common it was in ancient China. Perhaps further broken down by age and sex, as Keith Richards might have called his autobiography.

There’s a related, more expansive passage in Analects §1.14:

The Master said, “He who aims to be a man of complete virtue [:] in his food does not seek to gratify his appetite, nor in his dwelling place does he seek the appliances of ease; he is earnest in what he is doing, and careful in his speech; he frequents the company of men of principle that he may be rectified—such a person may be said indeed to love to learn.”
子曰：君子食無求飽，居無求安，敏於事而慎於言，就有道而正焉，可謂好學也已。

Here “careful in his speech” appeals less to me than “hesitant” in the first quote. To borrow from ethnomusicology, it’s not just tempo, it’s timbre too—or else, if we’re not careful, we’ll end up sounding like Jacob Wee-Smug (aka Minister for the 18th century, or The Haunted Pencil, “a man who has all the authenticity of a character at a murder-mystery weekend“), and Nobody Wants That…

BTW, this classic quote from the Tree Frog illustrates just how far he is prepared to go to Get Down with the Kids, sonorously describing Teresa May’s Brexit plan as

 the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200

(see also here, and here).

High fives all round. Also BTW, I now wonder if Confucius’s 敏于事 (Legge’s “earnest in what he is doing”) might even be rendered as “diligent in ritual” (cf. Doing things). As to “appliances of ease” (again, I might suggest “comfort” or “security”), I’ve never been one for a microwave myself.

“Such a person may be said indeed to be a pompous misogynist“. Drawing a veil over Confucius’s views on gender (indeed, feminist critiques, and even defences, of his ouevre are in vogue, if not in Vogue: see e.g. Su Zheng, cited here), if he were with us today (cf. WWJD), if he couldn’t get a job as advisor to some dictator in a banana republic minus the bananas, he could make a fortune selling Christmas-cracker maxims. Gary Larson has a fine cartoon on Confucius at the office with some of his rejects (“Looks like we’re in for some rain”).

For a handy claim to classical erudition, see here. As ever, Laozi has the best line:

He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know
知者不言，言者不知。

And for Liezi, see here. For illustrious Chinese stammerers, ancient and modern, see here.

Modifying disfluency

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Marilyn
Not such a gratuitous illustration: one of the Great Stammerers,
as well as a worthy pretext for a link to female jazzers.

I’ve already featured stammering quite often on this blog (see tag). Rather than expecting you to listen to this in the form of a six-hour podcast, these notes may serve partly as a reminder for myself, for others wrestling with vocal fluency, and indeed for anyone who knows anyone who is. But they may be of wider interest too: effective communication isn’t merely about disorders commonly identified as “stammering”.

We all labour under various habitual ailments through life, but on reflection the constant struggle with fluency is still an extraordinary experience. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking…”, I spent the first forty years of my life trying at all costs to avoid stammering—indeed, to speak in public at all. And the more one struggles to avoid it, the harder it is to modify:

stammering is what we do when we try to avoid stammering.

It’s largely thanks to China that I have been gradually and belatedly chipping away at the iceberg of fear. I’ve even grown used to presenting the Li family Daoists and the Zhihua temple group on their foreign tours.

It’s a good start to confront the event itself, but monitoring one’s speech as one goes along is another challenge: I rarely catch myself in time as I use all the habitual fruitless little avoidance techniques—backtracking, trying to get a run-up (like crashing through a hurdle), and so on. In the end, it just about works, but there’s always room for improvement: a gamut of physical and conceptual techniques is available.

Theory
Among the substantial literature, from the days when I was doing occasional group therapy courses (and it’s not a one-off fix), I remain most impressed by

  • Malcolm Fraser, Self-therapy for the stutterer (1987, 11th edition 2010!), available here,

which I heartedly recommend, even if I make only sporadic progress in implementing its suggestions. I note that it has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Lithuanian, Finnish, Slovakian, Danish, Russian, Czech, Zulu, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Arabic, Polish, Thai, Portuguese—and Chinese (5th edition here; for less helpful techniques reported in the China Daily, see here; and for my encounter with a stammering shawm player, here). That still leaves plenty of worldwide stammerers in need of the book’s guidance.

Like Life, speech therapy goes through fads. We can dismiss short-term solutions like sing-song inflection (indeed, singing), metronomic speech, finger-tapping, foot-stamping. Even prolonged (slurred, or perhaps legato) speech, while an important part of one’s toolbox, is only a temporary relief. We need a wide range of approaches at our disposal, without depending on particular crutches.

Of the major therapists (mostly sufferers themselves), great pioneers were Charles van Riper and Joseph Sheehan. So here’s yet another iceberg: we need to reveal all the accumulated covert behaviour that makes up our stammering. Therapy pays as much attention to psychological as to physical techniques.The basic aim is eliminate all such behaviour and avoidances, at various levels:

  • To stop avoiding situations themselves. Of course, some situations are more stressful than others. At one end of the continuum would be spending time with a small group of old friends; at the other, delivering a worldwide live TV broadcast on an unprepared topic that one knows absolutely nothing about. Naked.
  • To stop avoiding particular words (staggeringly common!): to catch ourselves substituting words, and stop it!
  • And then, when stuck on a word, or anticipating a block, we mustn’t fear/avoid/postpone the sound of stammering.

Our goal shouldn’t be “fluency”, and certainly not to “avoid stammering”. Strangely, in solitary preparation at home, where blocks don’t naturally occur, it’s about reminding myself what they feel like when they do—manufacturing, monitoring, and then modifying them.

Conversely, during and after a presentation (or indeed just routine conversation), often I don’t experience fluency, I’m merely relieved at not stammering too badly. But to build on fluency we need that sensation.

stammering stan

Please excuse me for featuring this cartoon yet again, but it says it all.

  • pausing: well-meaning encouragement to relax, take a deep breath, and so on, are of little avail when one’s efforts aren’t based on thorough preparation, So—instead of

rushingheadlongtogetasmanywordsoutaspossiblebeforemeetinganuncontrollable

B—

internalize the experience of taking pauses (breathing!!!) while you

  • keep moving forward—a major step to replace backtracking, postponing, or trying to get a run-up;
  • monitoring: finding out what you do when you stammer, including extraneous bodily movements and eye contact; superfluous and counter-productive filler words;
  • desensitizing and “easy/voluntary stammering” (stammering on purpose on non-feared words, in a variety of ways!): this can be an amazing sensation. See also here.
  • modifying blocks: easy onsets, light contacts, extended sounds.

Amidst the whole blinkered panic that besets us, humour can play a useful role, as in my stammering games, or Gepopo.

Putting it into practice
Thing is, modifying habitual addictive behaviour needs a lot of work: an investment of time and energy. One tends to have other things to do, and accept one’s wretched fate.

“It’s easy for you to say that…”

We should aim to enter speaking situations with forethought: to bear goals in mind. We’re advised to prepare before making a phone call, or asking for things in shops, or even talking with friends; again, the goal can be modest, like remembering to pause, or using a deliberate (easy) stammer at least once in such situations…

In private practice, extreme slowed speech is a great feeling; after all, public speakers vary in their speed of delivery, and some of the most effective are those who speak remarkably slowly (see below). But both this and voluntary stammering may be tough to practice in the heat of the social moment, as we flounder around helplessly, lurching from one crisis to another.

Conversely, in the company of the Li family Daoists I generally rise to the occasion. Whereas in London, not only do I rarely talk in public but I hardly ever talk to anyone at all, at my happy meetings with people in Yanggao, and on tour with the band, I’m propelled into constant sociability, often in the company of a large group; and then I manage public speaking with quite minor preparation. It’s so much easier when I’m on a roll. I love Li Manshan’s comment:

“Wotcha doing when you get back to Beijing?”, he goes.
“I’m going to be giving lectures (jiangke)…”
His local dialect, or his lively mind, instantly converts this to jieka “stammering”:
“Old Jonesy, you don’t have to go back to Beijing to stammer—you can just keep on stammering away here!”

Still, simply talking regularly isn’t a panacea if one merely reinforces negative behaviour. And even after relatively successful presentations in Beijing and the British Museum this year, I was taken aback by my disfluency at a more recent London appearance—a film screening that I had already successfully negotiated many times. With this reminder that I still constantly need to put in the work, I prepared more thoroughly for my latest presentation, and it went better again. I still wasn’t exactly monitoring and modifying, but at least I wasn’t avoiding blocks; I got through it, somehow—and that’s progress.

It can be tough for the audience too: I sometimes put in a little aside to help defuse mutual embarrassment, like “You may also like to entertain yourselves by trying to work out what goes wrong when I encounter a helpless b-b-block!”. Intriguingly, this sentence tends to emerge rather fluently—just to show how it’s all about being open.

Anyway, by now, with positive experiences to build on at last, I think I can just about do it; but it requires constant vigilance. I need to keep hearing myself stammering, which may involve manufacturing blocks in preparation, and then getting into the habit of modifying them.

* * *

To be fair, the bar for academic presentation is rather low. More often than not, the goal here seems to be merely to fulfill the embarrassing task of speaking at all, rather than the noble pure aloof form of silent text—an audience being no more desirable than in the toilet. One often witnesses mumbled delivery, avoidance of eye contact or any physical attributes that might suggest human communication, as if engaging the audience, even making one’s topic sound interesting, is some demeaning concession to populism. Stammerers probably shouldn’t find this a consolation.

Whether or not we’re afffflicted with a recognized bona fide imp-p-pediment, effective public speaking is much to be appreciated. While I’m deeply envious of fluent communicators, they too achieve their results with practice—like Robert Peston, whose random hesitant delivery, with its arbitrary accents and intonation, is brilliantly compelling, even while suggesting someone taking the p-p-p-mickey out of
de-li-ber-ate       sssslo-o-owed    speeeeech.

Note the nice fortuitous mention of the iceberg… For Peston’s (real) cameo with the great Philomena Cunk, see here (episode 5, from 13.04).

Effective therapy is based on getting the problem out in the open, and even posts like this are a tiny part of that.

For brilliant help in the UK, there are the British Stammering Association and the City Lit. But it’s up to us!

 

Pontius Pilate, and the mad jailers

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pilate

Hot on the vertiginous goose-stepping heels of Gepopo…

In my series on stammering I’ve already covered Michael Palin’s authentic depiction in A fish called Wanda.

But he was already on the case of various types of imp-p-pediment with Monty P-Python, as in the iconic Pontius Pilate scene (taking the pith) in The life of Brian:

Michael Palin also does a great turn as the benign schoolmaster:

Returning to s-s-stammering, still more disturbing are the cameos from the mad jailers (this time played by Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle)—hideously well-observed, right down to the stamp of the foot to force the word out. In the first scene here, they taunt the ever-well-meaning Palin; and the second (from 2.07) is the coup de grace, with the jailers nonchalantly reverting to fluency once alone together—reminiscent of Larson’s cows:

Some stammerers may find that tough going, but I’d suggest it’s all part of chipping away at the iceberg of fear.

One of the benefits of group speech therapy sessions, however excruciating, is to watch one’s disfluent speech played back on video, so as to observe all the ways in which we sabotage the whole vocal apparatus—extreme tension of the lips and throat, holding the breath, futile movements of eyes, hands, and body, and so on. Disfluency takes many forms. Sufferers are often so trapped in desperate attempts to avoid stammering, and their audiences so trapped in embarrassment, that neither may have a clear idea of what exactly it is that is preventing them from uttering the word. The crucial first stage is monitoring.

And a further technique is for the sufferer to imitate such features deliberately—choosing a consonant on which to tense the mouth and lips, repeating it quickly or slowly with varying degrees of tension, even reproducing the way we backtrack and then start over, deciding how many repetititititions to do. Varying the severity of the block like this can create the precious experience of having control over one’s speech for a change. And then (maybe) one can insert “easy stammers”, and if not actually refrain from stammering, at least be aware of some options.

It’s easy for you to say that, SSSteve…

Anyway, far beyond its niche exploration of speech impediments, The life of Brian is brilliant! More insights, on the uncritical veneration of sages, here.

Gepopo: pa-pa-pa-panic

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Gepopo 2

Speaking (sic) as a stammerer, I’m always on the lookout for coverage of speech imp-p-pediments (see e.g. We have ways of making you talk; Stammering games; Pontius Pilate, and the mad jailers; Lost for words; and for more stammering songs, see here).

So in György Ligeti‘s wacky, grotesque, absurdist opera Le Grand Macabre (see e.g. this article by Tom Service) I note the character of Gepopo, whose extreme vocal irregularities occupy a special place in the spectrum of communication issues.

The astounding Barbara Hannigan introduces the role she has made her own:

The character Gepopo, the chief of the secret police of Brueghelland, approaches Prince Go-Go to warn him and the people of Brueghelland that intelligence has learned of a huge comet heading through space towards them which will destroy their planet. Unfortunately, Gepopo is paralyzed with fear and paranoid hysteria, so his almost unintelligible, coded warning is not easily understood by Prince Go-Go, who, mainly interested in a hearty meal, drives Gepopo to further convulsions of highflying vocal panic as the piece draws to a anxiety-ridden finale.

Gepopo

Shades of the Pearl and Dean theme tune? So far this passage has not found favour as an in-flight announcement (cf. The perils of the tannoy, and Putana da seatbeltz; for airline acronyms, see here). But I digress…

Psychotic, deranged, Gepopo is hardly an advertisement for easy stammering—no more to be recommended as speech therapy than Rossini’s “stupefaction ensembles”. BTW, reasons for the far higher ratio of male to female stammerers are still not well understood.

Here’s Barbara Hannigan in an, um, “orthodox” stage version:

Gepopo’s three arias (“Pssst! … Shsht! … Cocococo!“, “Aah! … Secret cipher!“, and “Kukuriku! … He’s coming!“) are also performed as a cycle arranged by Elgar Howarth for the concert stage as Mysteries of the macabre—here conducted (suitably) by S-S-S-Simon:

Dazzling as it is, I’m not sure it’s exactly PC to distract the audience from Gepopo’s demented sadism with a fantasy schoolgirl uniform—perhaps the transgressive, meretricious device suits Ligeti’s concept (discuss…). We might also compare this version:

Feminist scholars have unpacked gender roles in music—including Berg’s Lulu, closest to Hannigan’s heart (see here). Such an approach could be instructive with Gepopo too.

 

With thanks to Rowan—
whose own vocals, while not so ambitious,
are “less irritating than Glenn Gould”
(The Feuchtwang Variations, n.3).

 

 

At home with a master Daoist

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As weird holidays go, this is pretty weird…

To supplement my various articles on particular themes (a ghost village, a funeral, the murals of Artisan the Sixth, Elder Hu, In search of temples, and so on), this diary records the more domestic side of my recent trip chez Li Manshan—like my notes on our French tour last May, the kind of thing one hardly finds in inscrutable accounts of hallowed Daoist ritual.

As I land in Beijing, pausing only to catch up with my wonderful hosts Matt and Dom and to buy a SIM card, I take the midnight train to Yanggao—smashing my personal best time for Fastest Ever Escape From Beijing. You may like to begin by reading my updated description of my first couple of days there.

Catching up
Despite improved transport and smartphones, progress seems superficial. This is still another world from the skyscrapers and Party congresses touted by the international media. Like anywhere else in the world, indeed. And it’s hard to see evidence of greater repression—people are well used to it.

Li Manshan’s home village of Upper Liangyuan still has some over six hundred dwellers, which counts as a lot round here; but it seems forlorn, stagnant. It’s ever clearer that the rural population is “left behind”—elderly people sitting outside awaiting their turn. Litter remains an intractable problem, blighting what might almost be an idyllic landscape.

Having been worked off his feet for many years, now that Li Manshan is in his 70s he’s giving way to Li Bin, who’s busier than ever. Li Bin has three funerals to do today, one a solo attendance at the grave (“smashing the bowl”, “without scriptures”) for a Catholic family, who still need the procedures for the date and siting of the burial. On the 17th (or rather the 2nd, chu’er—I soon get used to the lunar calendar) he has to smash two more bowls.

So now Li Manshan only works nearby—decorating coffins, doing grave-sitings and visits to determine the date for burials, as well as the occasional funeral. Soon after I arrive he zooms off on his motor-bike to Yangguantun to decorate a coffin. I’m happy to try and sleep off my journey from London.

doggie

Visitors are always announced by a barking dog, like a doorbell. The Lis have a new doggie, rarely off its tether by its kennel in the courtyard. It’s frozen. When I tell Li Manshan’s wife (busy making funerary headgear) about our poncey UK winter gilets for dogs, she shrugs, “He’s fine, he’s got fur ain’t ‘e?!”

LMS wife sewing

Li Manshan’s (only) disciple Wang Ding returns from a funeral to unload the decorations for the soul hall, now improved and more convenient. Renting out this equipment to funeral families is another source of income for Li Manshan. Giving Wang Ding a hand, I tell him I wrote a little post about him after our little French tour last year; he hasn’t got internet, so he will look at my blog at Golden Noble’s place. He can speak pretty good Yangpu, but even after all these years I find their dialect as tough as ever.

I hardly bother to wear my glasses any more—like clarinetist Jack Brymer, who when rehearsing a contemporary piece would wear his for the first five minutes, and then only keep them on if he thought it was worth it…

The domestic routine
Li Manshan’s first tasks on rising are to fold the bedding, take out the chamber pot, fetch kindling for the kitchen stove and our little stove in the west room, and boil water. He does his bit with the housework: sweeping, mopping, stoking the stove, preparing water—though he leaves most of the cooking to his wife. The little coal stove is cute and effective, but mafan. At last I learn that the central foyer is called tangdi 堂地. Both living rooms are equipped with a low wooden table, actually rather handsome but covered in plastic, to place on the kang, used for meals and writing. Plastic rules OK—and a jolly good thing too.

meal

Our diet consists mainly of baozi dumplings, [1] noodles, crêpes, mushrooms, eggs, bits of meat, meatballs, doufu, cabbage, nuts. Sometimes our meals evoke the classic film Yellow Earth—indelible image of the fieldworker overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of poverty and traditional culture. But we giggle a lot too.

Again Li Manshan stresses how much he prefers country life. I soon get used again to its basic routines, not least visits to the latrine in the southwest corner of the courtyard—taking paper (The Thoughts of Uncle Xi would be useful, but it’s not to hand/arse), and a torch if dark, to balance on a ledge; adjusting trousers, squatting (not getting any easier)…

Amazingly, for my visit in autumn 2013 Li Manshan modified his old latrine, building a little roofed pier (so to speak) over a floor on pillars projecting from the spacious pit. Like the world, it was built in seven days. After designing it on paper, he borrowed 230 bricks, as well as stone slabs, tiles, and so on, from neighbours; then he got down and dirty over a week at the height of summer. I felt embarrassed, but he pointed out that it would be good for them too.

We refer to it as The London Embassy (Lundun dashiguan, pronounced like “Taking turns to squat in the big shithouse”). The great Beijing cultural pundit Tian Qing even bestowed his illustrious calligraphy on Li Manshan, albeit in the more polite version.

So (thanks to me) the latrine is pretty comfortable, but it makes a suitable image to imagine the poverty of the olden days (including the Maoist era—a sobering contrast with the bright propaganda posters of the time): the old and infirm trudging to an open pit in the snow, with no paper, no sanitary products, no torches in the dark.

I’m so pampered, compared to Li Manshan’s lifetime “enduring suffering” (shouku 受苦). From my book (pp.132–3):

Shoulders unable to carry, hands unable to grasp, soft and sensitive skin…

Coming across this phrase in 2013 as I made inept attempts to help Li Manshan with the autumn harvest, I thought it might have been coined to parody my efforts. Rather, it’s a standard expression used to describe the travails of urban “educated youth” in performing physical labour after being sent down from the cities to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution to “learn from the peasants”. The experience was a rude shock for such groups all over China; brought up in relatively comfortable urban schools to believe in the benefits of socialism, and often protected from understanding the tribulations of their own parents, they were now confronted not just by the harshness of physical labour, but by medieval poverty.

Li Manshan is thrilled with my little gift of a set of UK coins, working out which is which. He proudly offers me a black banana, white and tasty on the inside, but decides to eat it himself; we have a giggle over glossy modernized bananas (cf. “banana republic, but minus the bananas”). His wife passes the time by playing “matching pairs”, a kind of dominoes. A female friend of hers drops by for a chat. They’re all very humorous, beneath a somewhat dour exterior. Li Manshan and his wife seem like counsellors.

In reply to villagers’ curious enquiries about how many kids I have, Li Manshan is now in the habit of replying wu, which they hear as “five” 五 but in his creative head means “none” 无. This surprisingly shuts them up—I worry about having to embroider stories about their careers, my numerous grandkids, and so on, but no. Anyway, Li Manshan would be up for this. He observes that since my surname is Zhong 钟 (Clock), my son might be named Biao 表 (watch).

We share a nice supper of noodles, and more dumplings. The CCTV evening news is on as wallpaper [Breaking news! CCP holds meeting! Xi Jinping still in power! Old gits in suits dead bored!]. It’s ignored until the weather forecast comes on, but Li Manshan loves the nature programmes.

“Wotcha doing when you get back to Beijing?”, he goes.
“I’m going to be giving lectures (jiangke)…”
His local dialect, or his lively mind, instantly converts this to jieka “stammering”:
“Old Jonesy, you don’t have to go back to Beijing to stammer—you can just keep on stammering away here!”

I manage both.

Writing
Though Li Manshan is doing fewer funerals these days, he has always got ritual paperwork to do—whether it’s writing talismans, shaping paper for funerary artefacts, or writing mottos for the soul hall (our film, from 10.41;  Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.194–200).

He’s bought big reams of thick paper from Yangyuan county. He recalls that when Li Qing recopied the ritual manuals in the early 1980s, mazhi hemp paper was available from the Supply and Marketing Co-op.

One day our siesta is disturbed by a group coming to ask Li Manshan to “determine the date”. After seeing them off he spends the rest of the afternoon writing several dozen sets of four-character funerary diaolian mottos for the soul hall (my film, from 10.43)—enough for a couple of months. Again he recalls how Li Qing used to write them in the scripture hall for each particular funeral. I devise a new game: arranging the squares in a different order to make a popular phrase or saying. For starters, how about 東方妙，西方福 (“oriental mysticism is all very well, but things are kinda cushy over here”).

A trip into town
One morning we call up the wonderful Li Jin to arrange a nice quiet lunch in town, just the three of us. Li Manshan’s wife chooses a posh shirt and jacket for him.

In 1953, when he was 8 sui, Li Manshan walked into town with his auntie to see the big xiangong parade there. Now we walk up to the main road to catch the No.2 bus into town; it arrives soon, a mere 3 kuai each, taking under half an hour—fun, and good to be independent. I go to have my head shaved at my favourite barbershop, and we meet up with Li Jin at Li Bin’s funeral shop. But then Li Manshan’s (much) younger brother Third Tiger shows up too, and he drives us in his posh car to a posh restaurant (attached to a posh hotel) up a little hutong, with no sign (which is always a good, um, sign)—we’re the only customers. But then entrepreneur Ye Lin (another old mate, formerly head of the Bureau of Culture) arrives too, and Li Bin; so altogether it’s less of a quiet meal than I hoped.

lunch LJ LB LMS

lunch Sanhu

Third Tiger has brought a case of Chilean 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon from Central Valley, a gift from a friend. We polish it off, though later the ganbei toasting seems a bit unsuitable…

Third Tiger had been looking forward to early retirement from his important state job—even claiming in my film (from 55.23) that he’d like to get back to Daoist ritual—but it won’t be happening any time soon. He’s done well as a Party cadre, his only flaw being that he can’t really hold his drink—this should surely be the first question on the application form:

How much baijiu liquor can you knock back before you fall over?

Inevitably Third Tiger foots the bill. I remind my companions of the donkey joke—I’m inadvertently “cadging a free meal wherever I go” again…

After lunch, Li Bin takes us on a fruitless visit to the Cultural Preservation Bureau to learn that the compilation of Yanggao temple steles is still not published. Then we drop in on a shop up the road to sort out a standoff between my camera and my Mac; the guy is even more pissed than me, but does a fine job. We exchange cigarettes, and he refuses any money.

Li Bin is happy to take us home to Upper Liangyuan, and on the way we drop in on the grandson of the great Li Peisen at his funeral shop, to see if he can show us the three manuals not in Li Qing’s collection, which I didn’t copy. He and his wife seem affable, but he can’t find them. It’s hard to know if he’s being cagey: he does show Li Manshan Li Peisen’s thick Yuqie yankou volume, so maybe he really can’t find the others. I ask him, without much hope, to call Li Bin if he does find them. Li Manshan cares more about this than I do.

I’ve also been wondering if the related Wang lineage in Baideng has any ritual manuals we haven’t seen, but when Li Manshan calls up Wang Fei there, he says they have no more than him.

More Heritage flapdoodle
Next to the main sign above his funerary shop, Li Bin has optimistically put up a new sign: “Hengshan Daoist Music, Training Base”.

HSDYT shop placard

This pie-in-the-sky still has precisely no takers, but Li Bin remains involved in a mysterious project with the county Bureau of Culture. We all laugh at the emptiness of the title—but it acts like a protective talisman, a kind of insurance policy.

Pacing the Void: Old Lord Li gets online
Like me, Li Manshan got his first smartphone after returning from France last year. He can read WeChat messages, but hasn’t cared to try and get online—yet. I think he can do it. Actually, WeChat doesn’t seem such a big deal here—sure, the younger people are on it, but the main way of communicating is just phoning. So there.

Getting online with my Mac thanks to the wifi of Li Manshan’s cool shepherd neighbour, I show him the charming TV version of The Dream of the Red Chamber with child actors. He loved reading the novel in the 1980s.

I give him a guided tour of my blog, starting with the posts I wrote about our French tour last year (e.g. here), my tribute to his carpentry skills, and the trio on Women of Yanggao (starting here). We look further at the ritual paintings in Li Peisen’s collection, which leads us to seek murals by Artisan the Sixth.

Then I introduce him to my other world, telling him about Yuan Quanyou, Hildi, and the 80th-birthday party for the great Stephan Feuchtwang where Rowan and I played Bach on erhu and sanxian—after listening to the recording there (now also sounding a bit crap), I try to attone by playing him Sun Huang’s astounding Saint-Saens (or Sage Mulberry, as he’s known in China), but he’s underwhelmed—the conservatoire erhu is of even less relevance to him than to me. And he’s none too clear about the qin zither, despite painting it regularly on coffins (my film, from 18.30).

LMS huacai

Li Manshan decorates a coffin, 2013. Top: qin zither.

I tell him again about the adorable crazy Natasha, showing him my tribute to her—it was he who helped me regain the will to live after her death in 2013.

Over the next few days Old Lord Li becomes ever more scholarly, devouring the new book on the modern history of the county (only up to 1949, alas!), the gazetteer, and all the online stuff I show him. (You may note that he has reverted to his old hat—was the baseball cap he wore in France a haute-couture choice to impress the laowai?!)

He gets into Ming reign-periods online. I show him the Baidu article on the 1449 Tumu incident (very near Yanggao), making the link with the disgraced palace eunuch Wang Zhen and the Zhihua temple. As he gets hooked on some pre-Tang story in the county gazetteer, I turn the tables on him, commenting “I dunno about that, I wasn’t even born then!”

As he gets used to scrolling on my Mac keypad, I show him the blurb for the Chinese introduction to the already-voluminous Daojiao yishi congshu series, which he reads carefully. When I show him Hannibal Taubes’ amazing site, he thinks that Yanggao temple murals are not so well preserved as those of Yuxian—but I suspect it could also be that Hannibal is really on the case.

I tell Li Manshan of the useful saying “When the rites are lost, seek throughout the countryside”, which is always a succinct way of explaining what we’re doing traipsing around poor villages.

On my blog he’s interested to pore over ritual manuals from other areas. I find an online text for the pseudo-Sanskrit mantra Pu’an zhou, which they never sang, only played on shengguan. When we listen to my recording of Ma yulang with the Gaoluo ritual association (playlist # 10, with commentary here), he’s shocked at how crap they are! I explain that they’re an amateur group, not like our occupational Daoists working together daily. But he’s curious to learn if the melody is similar to their version, a question I haven’t yet addressed.

We discuss the Kangxi yun section in the hymn volume that Li Qing recopied in 1980—I’ve often wondered what it’s doing there, as part of a series of shuowen solo recitations formerly used for the shanggong Presenting Offerings ritual segment. It was actually written not by the Kangxi emperor but by his father Shunzhi. The version copied by Li Qing is a variant.

Kangxi yunAs we read up further, we now speculate that since Kangxi saw the poem on a visit to Wutaishan, and as Buddhist ritual manuals do contain poems, it could have got into one such manual there; spreading further north, it might thence have got into Daoist manuals too—which, after all, contain plenty of Buddhist elements (my book, e.g. p.226).

I wonder if the title Kangxi yun is distinctive to the Li family. If Li Fu copied it from the manuals of his master in Jinjiazhuang, it wouldn’t have been at all old when it was copied by the Zhang family Daoists there. More work for a historian there… Li Manshan buries himself in the Baidu articles on Shunzhi’s mother and Nurhaci.

He knows nothing of Trump, Syria, or the Ukraine famine. While envying him his blissful ignorance, I embark on a political education session; he reads avidly when I show him the relevant Baidu articles. The article on the Ukraine famine looks rather good—though one can hardly expect Baidu to compare it to the Chinese famine following the Great Leap Backward.

After returning from a brief trip to Waterdrop 滴滴水 village with Li Bin, I check the 1948 and 1990 population statistics (first two columns below) in the county gazetteer, but they seem incongruous. Old Lord Li inspects the table for the whole of Zhangguantun district and deftly corrects them. Clever guy!

renkou edits

Born at a different time in another place, Li Manshan might have become a university professor.

2nd moon 28th
As yet another idée fixe in Airplane goes, “Looks like I picked the wrong day to” get my head shaved—it’s really rather cold. Li Manshan kept reading till late last night. We stay home for a study day. He fields another “determining the date” request by phone.

Before midday a couple comes for a prescription about her illness. They’ve come all the way from Datong county, learning of his reputation on the grapevine. Sure, people may also consult mediums, and of course hospitals—the latter terribly expensive, but as Li Manshan observes, their best bet.

LMS krz

The mood is serious as ever when the wife throws the coins and Li Manshan writes down the results. They watch him work it all out, in silence; then she asks questions, the conversation deepening. Li Manshan feels his role (often) is to console them, to lend moral support. As he later tells me, in fact the prescription looks ominous, and mostly he trusts the coins, but he can’t tell them “You’ve had it”, can he? They persuade the couple to stay for lunch (baozi dumplings, cabbage and doufu, onions), washed down at the end with water from the pot. It’s a friendly and sincere scene. They only paid him with five cigarettes, and Li Manshan was fine with that.

Li Manshan’s siesta is devoted to further reading, and he’s only just nodded off when another guy comes for a prescription.

Another great supper: thick-sliced noodles with eggs, dunking meatballs in the broth. Li Manshan glances over at the news, nudging me—some Party bigwig is being interviewed, the caption reading:

中国人大代表 Zhongguo Renda daibiao
Representative of the Chinese People’s Congress,

which he brilliantly converts from three binomes into

中国人，大代表 Zhongguoren dadabiao
Chinese bloke, big cheese.

We fall about laughing. I just love the way this man’s mind works! The following week I’m showing my film at People’s University in Beijing, which is also abbreviated as Renda—so I manage to press the expression into service there.

I clean my teeth in the courtyard, enjoying using my fancy electric Rabbits Don’t Shit, sorry I mean toothbrush (its first outing in China). Since Li Manshan always shoves a fag in my gob as soon as I get back anyway, I beat him to the draw. Whenever I spot an unfamiliar brand, I ask him, “Landlord? Poor peasant?”

3rd moon 1st (chuyi)—which, I note guiltily, is Saturday.

courtyard in snow

Right: sunflower stalks stored for use in making funerary treasuries.

OOH it’s snowing! I’ve been hoping to go in search of more Daoists to Yingxian county with Li Bin and bright young Taiyuan ethnographer Liu Yan, but my carefully laid plans come to nought; the motorways are closed. Li Manshan sweeps the pathway to the latrine, then zooms off back to Yangguantun to smash the bowl in a simple burial for the poor family there. When he decorated the coffin on 2nd moon 25th it was the fourth (not third) day after the death. He explains that there’s no difference between rich and poor in determining the date: it may turn out that poor families also have to store the coffin for over twenty days.

I discreetly perform much-needed ablutions. Li Manshan comes home frozen, unable to see through the snowstorm on his motor-bike. Gradually it eases up.

I show him my photos of the funeral I attended yesterday. He’s always been a laissez-faire leader, but even he draws the line at Wu Mei playing drum while on his mobile. We get a riff going:

“Maybe he was following the drum patterns online?!” he jokes.
“Oh yeah, right—I always felt sorry the so-called Hengshan Daoist Music Ensemble because they were too poor to afford music stands, but now they can read from their mobiles! You’re dead keen on ‘development’, aren’t you?!”—referencing the rose-tinted cliché common in online articles about him.
“Naughty disciple!”
“Naughty master! 青出于蓝。。。”

Wang Ding turns up on his dinky sanlun truck and we help him unload more altar decorations into the south room of the courtyard, redecorated as the village Training Base of the so-called Hengshan Daoist Music Ensemble—and thus, like its town counterpart, entirely unused.

3rd moon 2nd (Sunday, known as libai ba, eighth day of the week, as on their electronic wall-clock)
Foggy at first, gradually the sun comes out. For the first time Li Manshan worries about his cough, and resolves to quit smoking—which, impressively, he manages for nearly a whole hour. Actually he’s not smoking as much as in the old days when he was busy doing funerals with the band.

Having taken a siesta after our fascinating excursion to find murals by Artisan the Sixth, I go outside to clean my teeth, but yet again my oral hygiene is thwarted by the arrival of “Fag Devil” Li Sheng, who insistently shoves another fag in my gob. Typical…

I keep up with Tweety McTangerine’s latest lunacies by consulting the Guardian online. But I dissolve in fits of laughter at Stewart Lee’s latest offering there.

3rd moon 3rd
At 7am a guy comes to discuss some work. At 8.20 the formidable wife of an old friend of Li Qing’s comes to moan about her son’s marital problems. Li Manshan is courteous, but considers her “crazy”. I understand virtually nothing, but eventually she makes an effort with me as she pours out her grievances, slapping me regularly on the arm. Village poverty and problems seem intractable, despite advances and propaganda. The only solution touted is thorough urbanization, bringing its own worrying prospects.

Li Manshan isn’t feeling too well, but he takes a break from making paper artefacts to accompany me on a visit to the temple to Elder Hu in the Lower village.

3rd moon 4th
On our last day together, after returning from an intriguing trip to Jinjiazhuang, Old Lord Li suddenly thinks of the slow hymn Eternal Homage (Yong guiyi 永皈依), and we have a nice session on it. It’s one of his favourites, but they rarely use it, and now he can’t remember the opening. He can’t read cipher notation, only gongche solfeggio, so he gets me to sing it from Li Qing’s cipher-notation score. Their more recent green volume has gongche solfeggio underneath too, so he can just about follow it once I get him going.

Yong guiyi textSo Li Manshan gets to record me singing a piece I barely know, but I never get to record him. Anyway he always sets off from a really low pitch, so the result tends to sound a bit like Tibetan chanting. When the band sings a cappella hymns for funerals, Golden Noble has a good ear for starting off on a pitch suitable for the range.

In the version they learned, the first section ends after Fo you Niepan shi 佛有涅槃时. Li Qing’s cipher-notation score isn’t divided into sections, but their more recent green volume is. The latter uses the degree shang 上 as do—including the shengguan suites, which I find strange. Li Manshan is fine once he gets through the opening phrase.

Yong guiyi jianpu

We take a siesta before my journey back to Beijing, but soon wake up. Absurdly, he now asks me to transpose Li Qing’s cipher-notation score of the major shengguan melody Yaozhang into gongche solfeggio. Without thinking to consult the precious photos of Li Derong’s old score (which Li Manshan no longer has) I wrongly assume that it would use the early shengguan system with he 合 as do, but hey. After singing it for him as he records it on his phone, I explain to him that he’ll need earphones to play it back…

Li Bin has another busy day today, having to do two reburials as well as decorating a coffin, so I’ll take a cab to the station. This no longer feels so distant. Li Manshan insists on coming along to see me off, and we leave before 4, dropping his wife off at Baideng township for a hairdo. He refuses to let me pay for the cab. My total expenses for nine inspiring days in Yanggao came to 24 kuai—just over £2.

We take the ring road, passing loads of new high-rises, and bid each other a fond farewell. The station is virtually empty, and the train isn’t busy either.

Back in Beijing, I feel like a country bumpkin. Showing my film three times over the next week, I’m happy to make Li Manshan a big star there. After the last screening I call him up to report, and to wish him well before I go back to London.

[1] As in the poseur’s celebrated line (Fieldworkers’ joke manual No.37), useful when someone asks if you know any classical Chinese:

[smugly] “I studied the Four Classics and Five Scriptures—Confucius, Mencius, various dumpling shapes, I’ve studied them all!”
Wo xuedeshi sishu wujing—Kongzi Mengzi baozi jiaozi, dou xueguole!
我学的是四书五经。孔子孟子包子饺子，都学过了！

Oh well, it’s funny in Chinese—Trust Me I’m a Doctor (there goes another 200 kuai).
Similar story here!

In search of temples—and another Daoist lineage

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* This is the latest in a series of vignettes (starting here) from my recent stay with
the wonderful Li Manshan (for similar excursions, see here and here) *

Jinzhuang LWM

“Nothing to see here—move along please.”

The still-extant main gateway, main hall, and music tower date from the Ming and Qing, occupying 800 square metres. The main hall is three rooms wide, two rooms deep, with single eaves and a “hard-mountain” vaulted roof 单檐硬山顶. Most of the murals have been covered over in mud, and some are exposed to the elements.

That’s the enticing account in the 1993 Yanggao county gazetteer article on the Dragon King temple (Longwang miao) of Jinjiazhuang village, west of Li Manshan’s home in Upper Liangyuan. [1] Even if the temple was now in poor repair, I was keen to see it. Besides, I’ve always meant to make a pilgrimage to this village, where Li Manshan’s ancestor Li Fu began learning Daoist ritual in the 18th century (see Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.71–3).

Over the years, whenever I ask Li Manshan about the temple, he merely shrugs—nothing left there, he says (and he should know). Still, now that he’s getting ever deeper into local history, I finally show him the passage in the gazetteer, and he quite sees why I’m curious, deciding that we should make a trip over to Jinjiazhuang the next day.

On my last morning with Li Manshan he is already up and busy when I wake at 6. After breakfast he fields yet another call asking him for a burial date (my book, pp.186–9), and then he asks his nice cab-driving neighbour to take us over to Jinjiazhuang in his posh new car, bought last year. Unusually, our driver can even talk standard Chinese—though when he and Li Manshan talk among themselves it might as well be Swahili.

Heading northwest, we reach Jinjiazhuang soon after passing under an elevated section of the new high-speed train line. First we check out the Temple to the Perfect Warrior (Zhenwu miao)—small but perfectly formed, in a typical elevated position (cf. Hannibal Taubes’s photo from nearby Yuxian) in what is now the middle of the village. [2]

Jinzhuang ZWM

A friendly woman fetches the keys for us to take a look inside. The interior has recently-made statues and murals, and seems to be “in use”—though of course, such temples are too small to hold temple fairs.

(left) central altar: The Perfect Warrior flanked by attendants;
(right) mural on the east wall, with the Great Lords of the Three Primes.

This affords me scant consolation for finding not the slightest trace of the famous Dragon King Temple; nor, indeed, of the Temple to the Perfect Warrior in Upper Liangyuan (cf. Li Manshan’s map of his village, and our film, from 8.18).

SLY ZWM site

Another reason why Hannibal Taubes is jolly clever: derelict site of the Temple to the Perfect Warrior in Upper Liangyuan. My photo, 2018.

Then to the site of the celebrated Dragon King Temple, which now turns out to be a drab concrete plaza (see photo at top of page). Even more distressingly, the temple was still standing until twenty years ago; so at least the county gazetteer wasn’t making it up. We meet an old guy who recalls it, and had seen an old stele, long vanished—but he’s illiterate, so he had no idea what it said.

What I don’t get is this. OK, the temple had probably been becoming more and more decrepit for many decades, but if it merited an entry in the 1993 county gazetteer (which not even the Lower Liangyuan temple did, for instance), then why would they demolish it in 1998? By then the county authorities should even have been nominating it for preservation; but even if not, you might think the villagers themselves would see its value (whether for their own culture or—if they had a modicum of canny foresight—as a tourist attraction). But I recall how in Upper Liangyuan no-one cared much about our discovery of the two old steles there (my book, pp.46–9): as young people leave, these villages have long lacked a sense of community, and there is little concern for old buildings.

Another Daoist lineage
While we’re chatting with locals at the magnificent Ming temple—or rather, drab concrete plaza—the village yinyang Zhang Nan (b.1956) shows up, and invites us over to his clean and spacious house for a chat. He’s great; of course Li Manshan has known him for ages, and as usual gets along well with him; our driver is good company too. On our way home they comment that Zhang has a slight stammer; I was so busy stammering myself that I didn’t even notice.

Zhang Nan and LMS

Zhang Nan with Li Manshan.

The Zhang lineage moved here from Hongtong in the early Ming, like the Lis (my book, pp.70–71) and so many others all over north China. Zhang Nan knows of seven generations of yinyang before him (as ever, note the alternation of single and double given names):

  • 1st generation: Lianzhu 連珠
  • 2nd generation: Kui 奎
  • 3rd generation: Wenbing 文炳
  • 4th generation: Bi 弼
  • 5th generation: Deheng 德恆
  • 6th generation: Mei 美
  • 7th generation: Jincheng 進成
  • 8th generation: Nan 楠

Right down to his grandfather, all his forebears performed Daoist ritual, but his father only did kanrizi divination, as does Zhang Nan himself. With more time we might have elicited further names from earlier generations—brothers, cousins, and other disciples.

Assuming that Li Fu (first of nine generations in our Li family of Upper Liangyuan) would have learned ritual from a Daoist family that already had a tradition of at least a few generations, then “first-generation” Zhang Lianzhu must have had still earlier Daoist forebears. So this would make the Zhangs of Jinjiazhuang the longest Daoist lineage that we know of in Yanggao. And where did they learn?!

Though short of revelatory, our excursion to Jinjiazhuang made a good way to spend my last day with Li Manshan—not entirely a wild goose chase.

[1] The gazetteer entry appears not under Temples (miaoyu 庙宇) but under the “Ancient architecture” (gu jianzhu 古建筑) section of Cultural artefacts (wenwu 文物, pp.475–6)—a section that includes the Temple to Elder Hu at Xujiayuan but, strangely, not its sister temple at Lower Liangyuan (see The cult of Elder Hu).
[2] Cf. Willem A. Grootaers, “The hagiography of the Chinese god Chen-wu (The transmission of rural traditions in Chahar)”, Folklore studies 11.2 (1952), pp.139-181, and perceptive updates from Hannibal Taubes.

Stammering games

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stammering stan
John Cleese’s feigned patience with Michael Palin’s imp-p-pediment in A fish called Wanda reminds me that it’s hard for people to know how to react to a stammerer.

Stammering is stressful for both sufferers and their audience, meriting understanding and ongoing research; but alleviating all-round embarrassment, humour can help defuse tension. The experts’ advice to friends is not to try and supply the word for the stammerer, but sometimes when people can’t resist, I may find they’ve suggested a more interesting word than the trite predictable one that I’m actually wrestling with. So I go with it, following their word up with a revised phrase that seems to work—until I meet my next block; when they supply another promising word, I keep going with a further logical sequence… Thus I become a kind of puppet, almost a psychiatrist, for my interlocutor’s free-floating word associations.

Here’s another fun party game to while away those longueurs while I’m stuck on a knotty c-c-consonant. I arrange in advance with my friends that they should choose a special subject—French baroque composers, feminist thinkers 1900–1960, Premier League football teams, take your pick. * This works best in a group, where everyone has their own subject. When I’m floundering on a difficult w-w-word, if they can think of one within their subject before I get my word out, then they win a p-p-point. Thus:

When I’m floundering on a difficult w-w-
West Ham!
if they can think of one within their subject before I get my word out, then they win a p-p-
Pankhurst!

Indeed, if you see potential in an initial consonant on which you don’t necessarily feel an impending block, you can even manufacture one—experimenting with deliberate stammering is one tool that therapists use to help stammerers experience control over their voice. Since we spend our whole lives desperately trying to avoid stammering, to allow ourselves to do so (and then modify it) can come as an amazing relief—though it’s not a panacea.

Like my fantasy Daoist ritual game, hours of fun for all the family. For more on humour and stammering, see here.

* This is somewhat different from the old party games of “Name three 19th-century composers who didn’t die of syphilis” and “Name three American composers who weren’t pupils of Nadia Boulanger“.

The art of the voiceover

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Talking of media voices, how David Tennant must delight in doing his deadpan voiceovers for BBC TV’s brilliant spoof W1A, successor to the equally fine Twenty Twelve.

My current favourite line (here, from 3.58) is

… the Department of Culture, Media, And Also For Some Reason Sport…

which cracks me up every time he says it, even in the more subtle version

Department of Culture, Media, And Also Sport.

He slips in gems like

Reaction on social media has been almost universally divided.

The choice of theme tune is perfect too.

Further to my paltry comments on filming techniques, I did the voiceovers for my first two films (DVDs with my books Ritual and music of north China) myself, much to the amusement of my friends—who, used to my imp–p-pediment, couldn’t imagine a budget vast enough to allow for all the editing. In the end I recorded both voiceovers over a single morning, doing only a few retakes, and it didn’t take the editors too long (cf. Porky Pig).

Still, for my portrait film about Li Manshan, it was much more personal for him to do the voiceovers himself, with English subtitles. After lengthy discussion of the script, we eventually recorded them deep in the night at his home—Chinese villages can be noisy places, with dogs barking, donkeys braying, and tractors making those tractor noises…

See also under Can’t get you out of my head.

Lost for words

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Mi manca

Besides the Pearl and Dean theme tune, and the potentially cruel There was a young man from Calcutta, another song that might make a suitable anthem for the Stammering Association is Rossini’s Mi manca la voce, or “My voice fails me”, from his 1818 opera Mosè in Egitto:

Apart from the sheer beauty of the music, it reminds me of group therapy sessions I’ve taken part in. Despite their protestations, all three stammerers seem to have overcome their imp-p-pediment; but again, singing does often offer a temporary reprieve.

The specious connection with stammering didn’t occur to me when I first relished the quartet from the pit at the Pesaro Rossini Festival in the early 1980s. Of course, joking aside, this is an excuse to play an exquisite composition, a departure from our usual diet of Bach, Daoist ritual, and Billie Holiday.

That’s the best version I can find online. I’m sure scholars of Italian opera can discuss at length the authenticity of such a style—one might assemble a less, um, operatic vocal ensemble, but that’s just me and my knit-your-own yogurt purism for you.

Might the aria have been an inspiration for Harpo‘s mute persona?!

* * *

My distinguished friend Hugh in Verona (where long ago I did my time in the pit at the Arena) draws my attention to this sextet (see also here), which might also be part of a group therapy session for stammerers:

Apart from simple consonants, diphthongs can also pose a challenge. But syllabic, rhythmic speech is an outmoded technique that offers only temporary relief…

As Hugh observes, such operatic set-pieces are known as concertato dello stupore—perhaps “ensemble of the nonplussed” rather than the charming “stupefaction ensemble”.

Here’s another wacky and exhilarating Rossini tongue-twister (with dindin for bells, tac-tà for hammer, bumbum for cannon, and so on):

For more stammering songs, click here; and for another tongue-twister, here.

A fine turn of phrase

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Simon

Further to my old theme of our irredeemably modern ears (and here), Simon Rattle,* on one of his early early-music outings with the Age of Enlightenment, was rehearsing Mozart with the band.

After one finely polished phrase, he stopped us and said admiringly,

“Wow! I’ve been waiting all my life to hear it played like that! … Anyway, now I’ve heard it, I don’t like it—can you just play it normally, please?!”

*As a stammerer, I hesitate (sic) to call him Sir Simon Rattle. As in the (real) line from a waggish Radio 3 announcer:

That was Sir Simon Rattle conducting Brahms’s 4th symphony. Next week’s guest conductor is M-Mark Elder.

But I now learn from Felix Warnock, encyclopedic authority for orchestral stories, that this line goes back to Symphony Hall in Birmingham, when both the CBSO and the Hallé were rehearsing on the same day for separate concerts. At the stage door, bumping into an old colleague he hadn’t seen for some time, one muso asks another,

“Hey! Are you here for Sir Simon?”

So the other one goes,

“No, I’m here for M-Mark!”

Intimate histories

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One of the more niche contemporary works in which I have not only taken part but played a star role is Jack Body’s Intimate histories no.2: Ssteve.

Jack Body (1944–2015) was a lovely man, a fine composer and a great proponent of East Asian music. He was much missed (see obituaries here and here, as well as n.3 here), despite recent allegations.

We met at the CHIME conference in Paris in July 2004. He came up to me after my somewhat s-stop-and-s-start presentation, and I braced myself for the usual polite compliments or tedious academic queries. Charming as he was, far from the pious well-meaning sympathy of us Brits, pretending to ignore my herculean struggles (immortalized in A fish called Wanda), he came right out with it: “Hey SSSteve, that sure is an impressive stutter you’ve got there!” For me at least, that’s already half the battle—helping me get it out in the open. Jack was more Kevin Kline than John Cleese.

We had a laugh and a chat, and he asked me if I’d be prepared to record an interview based on my reflections on both my imp-p-pediment and my route to Chinese music, that he could use as the basis for a new electronic piece. I thought it’d be a good way of publicizing the whole issue of stammering. As you see from his notes, we recorded my ch-ch-ch-chat on a break from our 2005 sessions at SOAS with the amazing Hua family shawm band.

Listening now, I am struck by how much more fluent my speech has become since then. Now, for Jack’s purposes I might even have to fabricate a speech impediment—which indeed is one of the most fascinating ways whereby some speech therapists suggest that we can move towards greater fluency. It is the most amazingly liberating feeling to stammer on purpose, varying the severity and style of the blocks, taking control at last—I do recommend it to fellow-sufferers, even if it takes work to sustain and then modify.

Having exposed my most discomfiting “secret” (sic), I could hardly refuse to further embarrass myself by giving him a few samples of my rubbish erhu and shawm playing too.

In the end I didn’t entirely concur with Jack’s treatment—sometimes I found his musical dramatization of my stammer rather too sinister. And I can’t judge its impact on the listener as a composition. But it makes an interesting take on my distinctive sound, and an intriguing byway in my biography.

We have ways of making you talk

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I have already mentioned my encounter with a stammering shawm player in Shaanbei.

As a stammerer, I’m all for a good stammering joke. Now as a limerick this is no big deal:

But sung as a round, in the fine melody to which it was set, it can be brilliant, with its syncops and manic pile-ups of unconnected final words.

I say “can be”… It sounds great sung in the gentle polished affectionate tones of my Oxbridge chums, one to a part. But for us stammerers, the regimented impersonal nature of such a rendition by a large school choir may seem mesmerizingly traumatic. One imagines poor stammering schoolkids cowering red-eyed with fear in the corner, their anxious parents in the audience. Anyway, let’s just imagine it sung kindly with humour… As usual, it’s all about context, and the intentions of performers and audiences.

It’s easy for you to say that, Steve…

It’s well known that stammerers can sing fluently—indeed, most can do silly voices too, although that’s hardly a long-term solution. I note too that stammering is predominantly male; and that it is also common in Japan, another highly pressurized island culture.

“Stammer” or “stutter” is another instance of US/UK English variation.

And further to the collation of Daoist texts, a note on textual variation: some versions open “There was an old man from Calcutta”. Stammering tends to decline with age—though for sufferers like me it takes variant forms. One wonders whether the old man was an expat, or native to Calcutta; if the latter, his fondness for dairy products may be merely an Raj-esque affectation, or else it may indicate a predilection for paneer and ghee—but that would scupper the p-p-poem.

For a more avant-garde take on stammering, see here; and for the brilliant fugal pastiche Donald Trump is a wanker, here.

You’ll be glad to know that our encyclopaedic resident publication The China Daily covers stammering too:

Feng Kezhi, a 24-year-old garage worker, suffered stammering so much that he once stood in the pouring rain and kept slapping his face but this didn’t cure him. It was Wang’s clinic that brought back his confidence. “There are many people like Feng who need a helping hand and I must try my best to help them”, Wang said.

China presents a fine challenge for stammerers like me.  When the English are confronted by a ferocious bout of stammering, polite embarrassed sympathetic reactions are de rigueur—immortalized by the finely-observed scene in A Fish called Wanda:

Conversely, the Chinese just tend to burst out laughing, a nice honest response.

What’s more, whereas in England we fiendishly covert stammerers can usually get away with limiting our conversations to one or two people, in China one is rarely in a group of less than a dozen; so short of feigning dumbness or unconsciousness, it’s not really possible to avoid public talking. It’s rather good shock therapy: “We have ways of making you talk”—which was of course the motto of the S-S-Stammering Association (hence also the name SS). Progress is only possible once one begins to stammer openly.

It’s good to hear Ed Balls talking (openly, and fluently) about his stammer (see also here):

He joins the ranks of distinguished stammerers like Moses, Demosthenes, the Byzantine emperor Michael II, Wittgenstein, Marilyn Monroe, Kylie Minogue, Maggie O’Farrell, Joe Biden, Amanda Gorman, * and JJJJJerome Ellis—and for China, see here. There’s another fantasy dinner party, hosted by Michael Palin—a notable advocate for stammering, and the greatest ambassador anyone could ever have for anything.

The excellent British Stammering Association used to run a cartoon series called Stammering Stan, which was somewhat controversial. But this will be evocative for stammerers:

stammering stan

Li Manshan has a brilliant stammering joke, which he loves telling me—but it’s best if you hear him tell it himself…

For more stammering songs, click here and here. See also the stammering tag, including this post on chipping away at the iceberg of fear.

* Update: 13-year-old stammerer Brayden Harrington just made a powerful speech for the 2020 Democratic National Convention:

* Another update: in The speaking voice, do listen to the brilliant Amanda Gorman, erstwhile stammerer, at the 2021 Inauguration!

Gorman

Walking shrill: shawm bands in China

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Walking Shrill CD

In extreme contrast to the image of glamorous female soloists on the concert platform, male shawm bands are by far the most common form of instrumental music in China. They perform mainly for life-cycle and calendrical rituals—as you do…

Bands are widely known as “drum music bands” (guyueban 鼓乐班), the members as “blowers-and-drummers” (chuigushou 吹鼓手) or just “blowers”. In Yanggao they are called “drum artisans” (gujiang 鼓匠).

Indeed, these bands are more ubiquitous and indispensable at funeral and temple fairs than groups of ritual specialists. In Yanggao the Daoists and the shawm bands alternate, and often go on procession together.

Such groups are common throughout China—not to mention the Islamic world and early Europe (for a roundup of posts, click here). To give you an idea of just how common they are in China, take the Anthology volumes on instrumental music for Liaoning province. There are no solo pieces, nor any pieces for strings; instead it contains four wind ensemble genres:

  • the music of the shawm bands (guyue 鼓乐);
  • shengguan 笙管 pieces (here a subsidiary repertoire of the shawm bands)
  • yangge 秧歌 pieces (again played mainly by the shawm bands); and
  • “religious music” (sic), with subheads for Buddhist and Daoist music, including vocal liturgy, percussion, and shengguan pieces.

But this overview for one single province contains 1,491 pages, of which 1,113 are devoted to the shawm bands—and as ever, the material published on them was only a tiny proportion of that collected.

That’s an outline for one whole province. In 2001, within the single county of Mizhi in Shaanbei, a local band boss estimated that there were 138 bands working at least part-time there. Again, contrast the qin, with its tiny elite coterie of players, and its vast media presence.

It’s the majestic timbre, heterophony, and complex repertoire of long suites of northern bands, played on XXL shawms, that appeals to me particularly. While my main focus has always been Daoist and Buddhist ritual, its vocal liturgy accompanied by shengguan ensemble, I realised I had to give serious attention to the shawm bands too. So from 1999 to 2005 I took some lengthy time out to document them.

My two books Ritual and music of north China are largely about such bands, in north Shanxi and Shaanbei respectively; both include DVDs. [1]

Status and disability
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. Freelance like household Daoists and carpenters, they had difficulty adapting to the straightjacket of the commune system, but revived by the 1980s.

At least until recently, shawm players often had some disability, notably visual. In north Shanxi, in Yanggao town alone, blindmen Liuru (c1931–2007), Erhur (b.1946), and Yin San (b.c1947), were all fine players and delightful people (for more on blind shawm players in Yanggao, see here; for posts on blind musicians, here).

6 LR,YS

Liuru (left) and Yin San, 2003.

In China and much of the world, blind musicians are thought to have special musical gifts. Erhur learned, and loves to sing, the gongche solfeggio, but pointed out playfully, “Only a stupid musician needs notation”! Take that, qin players (see also here)!

7 Erhur

Erhur, 2003.

Elderly Liuru, living in pitiful conditions, was also devoted to the gongche of the suites.

9 shack

Liuru’s shack in Yanggao county-town, 2003.

I also met several stammering shawm players. Like the fraternity of one-legged men in The third policeman, as a stammerer myself I naturally identified with fellow sufferers like Yuanr, the young shawm band boss in Zhenquan township, Shaanbei—bluntly known as “The Stammerer” (Jiekazi). When I introduced myself he thought I was taking the piss. Both his colleagues and mine had a terrible time trying to conceal their mirth once we got ch-ch-chatting. Imagine the number of tapes you’d need to record the interviews.

Blind boys also often become itinerant bards. For Shaanbei, see here; for a harrowing tale of blind bards in Zuoquan, Shanxi, here; and for blind bards in Gansu, and great songs on the Coronavirus by stammering folk-singer Zhang Gasong, here.

North Shanxi
I studied the Hua family shawm band in Yanggao county (also home of the Li family Daoists) on and off from 1991 to 2005. Over the years I got to know many other bands in Yanggao too; since 2011 it’s been a pleasure to continue meeting them at funerals. Yang Ying, a regular dep for Li Manshan’s Daoist band, is also the leader of his own family shawm band, one of the finest in the area. Shi Ming, Li Qing’s friend from their days in the regional troupe, led a great band in Wangguantun just west.

8 Shi Ming band

Shi Ming’s band, Wangguantun 2001.

The Hua band played magnificently, despite being totally dysfunctional as a family. Led by two senior brothers on shawm and drum who were barely on speaking terms, they played in perfect ensemble, with complex heterophonic melody, and meticulously graded tempi. I still admire their artistry as much as I admire the Li family Daoists.

We did some great tours together (Washington DC, Holland, England), and made the most spectacular CD, Walking shrill, that should be part of everyone’s collection. Go on, order it—it’ll blow your head off.

While we’re about it, I wrote a long detailed analysis:

  • “Living early composition: an appreciation of Chinese shawm melody”, in Simon Mills ed., Analysing East Asian music: patterns of rhythm and melody, Musiké vol.4 (Semar, 2010), pp.25–112.

Only slightly less complex is this intriguing excursion—and there are two tracks (#5 and 11) on the audio playlist in the sidebar, with commentary here. See also these notes on our first visit.

Here the classic style consists of long suites for large shawms. But since soon after I began visiting (“Typical!”), as my books show, such majestic music has largely become a casualty of the “big band” pop style adding trumpet, sax, electronic keyboard, and drum-kit. Hey ho.

Shaanbei

CWZ big band

Chang Wenzhou’s big band at village funeral, Mizhi 2001.

Further west, the barren loess hills of Shaanbei, heartland of the revolution, is renowned inter alia for its shawm bands (chuishou). We met many bands there.

1981 photoShawm players from Mizhi county, assembled for a regional festival in 1981.

Scholar Huo Xianggui, who began collecting Shaanbei shawm music as early as 1971 (!), had regular contacts with some of the great players, including Jin Wenhua, Hao Yongfa, and Chang Wenzhou. In another a revealing story about status, revealing the chuishous’ own sense of inferiority, he tells of an incident with the great shawm player Li Daniu—a poor illiterate opium-addicted bachelor. The Party hoped to cultivate Li’s talent by recruiting him for a state troupe, but he found it hard to adapt. One morning Huo invited Li Daniu to his room, and wanted to take him out for breakfast, but Li wouldn’t go. As Huo was about to go off to get food to bring back, Li insisted on squatting outside to wait for him, with the room locked; only half-joking, he said, “How am I supposed to explain if something in your room goes missing?”

By the 1990s, most distinguished of shawm players in the area was Chang Wenzhou, also a fine luthier, though he could be almost as difficult as the Hua brothers. Li Qishan’s rival band was also very fine.

By contrast to the mercenary atmosphere in Mizhi county-town, I enjoyed my time in the hill village of Yangjiagou with the lowly and unsung village band there. Of no great technical distinction, they merely supplemented their livelihood by doing occasional funerals. The two leading shawm players there, Chouxiao and “Older Brother” (on the left of the photo), semi-blind, were delightful unassuming people.

YJG band

The Yangjiagou band playing for a village funeral there, 1999.

The 1999 funeral sequence from Yangjiagou is one of the highlights (§B) of my DVD Notes from the yellow earth, that comes with my 2009 book.

The northeast
As a kind of footnote, both to this post and to my account of our 1992 fieldwork, in summer 1992, just after our trip to Shanxi, we visited southern Liaoning province to seek shawm bands there.

Northeast China is also renowned for its majestic bands with large shawms. [2] The editor of the Anthology for Liaoning (see above), Yang Jiusheng 杨久盛, had a rare grasp of the material—like his fine colleague in Jilin province, Li Laizhang 李来璋.

Through Yang Jiusheng we found a wonderful young scholar in Panjin county called Li Runzhong 李润中. He was himself son of a fine shawm player—so he had already done rather well for himself.

Besides making the usual transcriptions from his recordings, he had diligently collected rich material on social contexts (including photos, maps, and diagrams), and written brief biographies of some of the leading shawm band players and ritual specialists in the county. Locally published in several thick volumes, his work, like the music of his county, is likely to remain unknown.

This was a period when the Anthology was in full swing, but it was also an insecure time after the chipped “iron rice-bowl” of the commune era. Under Maoism people, in their villages and secure work-units, knew they were screwed; now they had to go out and fend for themselves, and would probably still get screwed. But Li Runzhong, like our friends in Hebei, was passionate about doing the fieldwork.

A vast archive of precious recordings for the Anthology languishes unpublished. Perhaps it was then that I realised someone would have to document this major aspect of Chinese musical life for outsiders.

Liaoning

Liu Yongqing (b.1922) at funeral, Liaoyang city, 1992.

Here are two pages of images from the Anthology volume on Jilin province:Jilin 1

Jilin 2

Further south many bands play a rather light repertoire, though there are some fine genres, such as the longchui 笼吹 of south Fujian (#15 on playlist in sidebar, with commentary here). The Shiyin bayue 十音八乐 of Putian, better known for its “civil” ensemble with strings, also has a ceremonial repertoire for shawms:

For the Anthology coverage of shawm bands around Fujian, see here. Note also beiguan in Taiwan.

Technique
Using circular breathing, the two shawms play continuously in heterophony, often an octave or two apart. Home base (cf. the sheng) is the lowest note, do in the basic scale; the upper player often “walks shrill” with soaring and searing high notes. With drum, cymbals, and gong thwacking away too, the sound is deafening even from a hundred metres away, but sitting in the band is a serious yet intoxicating challenge to the ears.

Our SOAS shawm band
Now from the sublime to the ridiculous:

Having taken part occasionally, and sketchily, in the ritual associations of Hebei on yunluo gong-frame and even sheng, I eventually took the plunge with the shawm too. Shawm music is much harder to learn than either the ritual shengguan ensemble of the Daoists or their vocal liturgy; the instrument itself is a challenge (certainly for a baroque violinist…), and the wild improvised decorations can only be learned through prolonged exposure from young. But hey—I knew it would help me get a handle, however rubbish I was.

13 me and band

I accompany Hua band for funeral, Wangzhuang village 2001. Photo: Chen Kexiu.

At first I didn’t try taking part with the Hua band, but when I got to Shaanbei in 1999 I thought I might have a go on the shawm. Chang Wenzhou showed me the ropes, and I tried a few pieces out with Dage and Chouxiao in Yangjiagou.

FXP 2001

With Feng Xiaoping’s band, Yulin 2001.

In 2001, after more fieldwork in Shaanbei with my Beijing colleagues, I spent some time alone in Yulin, the regional capital. Putting aside my scruples about such a culturally inappropriate context, I went for daily “lessons” several times a week, one-to-one with a younger folk player, Feng Xiaoping. He got his band together for an informal “graduation concert” in his courtyard for bemused neighbours (well, they didn’t have much choice). After getting through a little suite I was completely knackered. The place names used at the dentist sprung to mind. As in Teach yourself Japanese, I drank a little beer.

In Yanggao with the Hua band in 2003, I mainly stuck to cymbals or gong—like their sons do from aged six!

In 1999 I had come down from the mountain, like Moses (also a stammerer, I note), with a whole set of instruments made by Chang Wenzhou. At SOAS I now had a little coterie of like-minded ethnos: Rachel Harris, Simon Mills, Manuel Jimenez, and Morgan Davies, all fine musicians, experts in their own various genres (Uyghur, Korean, Indonesian, Indian), and great mates. So, just for fun and our own instruction, we boldly decided to have a go at learning a few pieces. This is not like learning the erhu in a conservatoire—they are wild complex long semi-improvised pieces.

We made enough progress to give the occasional gig for suitably uncritical audiences—at CHIME conferences in Venice and Sheffield (not Scunthorpe), at SOAS, and even on procession (aha!) at the Lord Mayor’s Parade. We strung a few pieces together in little suites, and had a lot of fun.

Later I also bought a set of instruments in Yanggao (like “the music itself”, they vary from region to region—it’s no good playing Shanxi repertoire on Shaanbei shawms, or vice versa!). We all loved the Hua band’s wild repertoire, but it was considerably more daunting than that of Shaanbei. Still, I had all my recordings and videos, and I was making transcriptions anyway, which served as a useful crutch—another compromise, since picking it up entirely by ear would have been a challenge too far for us. Rachel, Simon, and I took turns on the two shawms, and since the drum is always an anchor, we relied heavily on the intuitive brilliance of Manuel Jimenez.

SOAS shawms

Then in 2005 I managed to get the Hua band invited for a tour of England. My old friend Bureau Chief Li, from the Datong regional Bureau of Culture, who had acted as “group leader” on the band’s 2002 DC trip, came along for the ride again.

Bureau Chief Li has always been most tolerant, nay supportive, of my fascination for folk culture—like a bemused dad baffled by his son’s obsession with Aston Villa. On the National Mall in DC, taking one look at all the performance tents set up for a mind-blowing array of groups from all over the Silk Road, he exclaimed, “Hey Steve, you bring us all this way and they’re supposed to play for another bloody temple fair?!” In England our most delightful gig was in Portesham Village Hall in Devon, home to a great jazz series. This time Bureau Chief Li chuckled, “WTF?! You’ve gone and done it again, Steve—this time you’ve got us a gig in the sodding village brigade headquarters!”

Anyway, during this visit, SOAS impressively invited the Hua band for a brief residency. We solemnly assembled daily in a little recording studio in SOAS and took turns joining in with the band on all the various instruments. One evening Morgan and I took a couple of the youngsters to a blues bar—though no strangers to the considerable vices of Yanggao town, they seemed a little nonplussed.

Now that we’re dispersed to the far corners of the globe, or at least of England, we’re all deeply nostalgic about those years. It’s not that we did it at all well—it could sound excruciating—but we learnt a lot, and it was the perfect way to work up a thirst for a good session in the nearby art-deco bar of the Tavistock Hotel, not least in memory of  hosting the Hua band there in 2005.

Alas, the Hua band has since gone the way of many “blower-and-drummer” families. Drummer Hua Jinshan survived a stroke onstage in Amsterdam later in 2005. Falling ill there doubtless saved his life: if it had happened back home in Yanggao, it would have been curtains. As he recovered in hospital, I could only obey his pleas to wheel him daily to the courtyard for sneaky fag along with a motley crew of inmates. But his younger brother Hua Yinshan died of cancer, and Wuge, Yinshan’s son, was stabbed to death in an unsavoury brawl.

My usual rant
(For a similar one, see here; see also this). If you’ve heard me go on about this before, then go and pour yourself a large G&T.

None of what we tried at SOAS could possibly happen in a Chinese conservatoire. Sure, plenty of folk musicians have become professors there, but once enshrined in the big city they have to develop a more, um, “scientific”, more breezy repertoire. No-one there would dream of learning long suites of up to an hour, in the style of local folk genres, or emulating a bunch of peasants.

The brief of anthropologists/ethnomusicologists is to study people in all levels of society, and to show that all kinds of music-making are valid aspects of social activity, local cultures, in constant flux. Different genres have different aesthetics, all based on social practice.

So we mustn’t assume that state education is the norm. Among all the kinds of music in the world, WAM is rather exceptional, in its notation-based classroom training system and its domination by “concerts”. But that’s the ethos of the conservatoire. All kinds of musicians learn in different ways.

Vocal music too is rarely dependent on the state educational system. In England, aspiring bluespeople, like Mick and Keef, learned their art in art schools. Jazz was only seriously institutionalized from the 1980s, though school bands were always an influence. Elsewhere traditional music may be adopted in similar fashion: there are schools for flamenco, Irish music, muqam, and so on, but often they change the flavour of folk style—and anyway they only represent a miniscule tip of the iceberg.

My old friend Matt Forney, long-term Beijing resident whose towels I have often darkened in between my trips to the countryside, is a fine old-time banjo player. How do spirit mediums in Guangxi, or indeed punks in Beijing, learn? Such folk performers have no need of notation, training classes, WAM theory, and so on. It may be a continuum, but we shouldn’t confuse one for the other.

As to instrumental music: solos are rare in China, as you can see from the Anthology. Solos for erhu, pipa, and zheng are neither a norm nor an ideal. Notable aspects of traditional music-making include oral transmission, versatility, flexibility, and not performed for “concerts”. Folk instrumental music remains male-dominated, whereas since the 1980s the conservatoires have become dominated by women.

So look at these differences between local shawm bands and conservatoire suona soloists: different society, different values, different aims, different music. Even the names of the instruments are different: the urban term suona (found in historical sources) is rarely heard in rural China: instead they use a variety of local names, like weirwa, wazi, or laba. That’s why I fall back on the English word shawm.

Shawm bands
(chuigushou 吹鼓手, guyueban 鼓乐班)		 suona soloists
By far the most common form
of instrumental music in China.		 Not so numerous, even in conservatoires.
Weddings and funerals. Concerts on stage; film sessions.
(formerly) Family training, from young;
largely oral training, in course of rituals.
Some blind or disabled; they may beg
in the off season.
Partial to liquor and drugs.		 Even if from a rural background, they now learn with a “teacher” in the conservatoire.
Notation plays a role.
Upwardly mobile!
(formerly) Long complex suites derived
from imperial tradition.		 Short simple pieces derived from 20th-century modern urban values.

The upwardly-mobile conservatoire suona soloist will never aspire to the social context of the blowers-and-drummers. The most one can hope is precisely what does happen: maybe the former will pick up a few techniques from the latter.

Learning in a classroom, whether in China or elsewhere, is very different from the participant observation of the ethnographer. This difference is clear in China, where the former is done in conservatoires, the latter not at all.

If we learn shawm pieces, we’re unlikely to do it for the same reasons that a young boy in a shawm band family does; his reasons are not the ideal for us—we don’t want their lives. The rural bands may be occupational, but it’s not the kind of professionalism to which conservatoire musicians aspire. Suona soloists in conservatoires learn with a view to doing concerts on stage, or making money in pop/film studio sessions, not doing weddings and funerals.

I should stress again that notation may be a badge of elites, but is not so common either in China or elsewhere, nor is it a criterion for superiority! Notation is not at all important as a learning tool in China or elsewhere, though it may be a totem/fetish for those seeking to establish a “canon”. Of course it may be a useful tool for our analyses…

Yang Der-ruey’s study of a Daoist training school in Shanghai (anyway an exceptional case: most Daoists learn through hereditary family training in the course of rituals) shows the school’s break with tradition, and its irrelevance once they begin working in the real world, collaborating with temple patrons and spirit mediums. Even for amateur genres like Shanghai silk-and-bamboo, the point of learning isn’t to win prizes or even to “perform” in stage “concerts”; it’s a social activity, not to be judged by conservatoire standards.

The kinds of music promoted in conservatoires are very selective: mainly solos that can be taught, with precise scores, one-to-one, like a Brahms concerto or a Chopin étude. The flexibility of traditional ensembles, folk-singers, or a spirit medium, is not required here. But this gives people a very narrow picture of what Chinese music is about, both musically, socially, and historically. One may attempt to create a “canon”, but within the whole field of Chinese or world music it will be no more significant than that of WAM. Such a discourse may even play into a dangerous nationalistic, patriotic, narrative.

In China some examples of the chasm between folk and conservatoire aesthetics are the rare attempts by conservatoire musicians to render traditional music; in failing to subscribe to its aesthetic, they entirely lack the “flavour” that makes it effective, as with their polished stage renditions of the shengguan music of the Zhihua temple, or silk-and-bamboo: meticulously rehearsed from fixed parts, with graded dynamics, and so on.

In general, though, conservatoire musicians neither want to nor could learn local folk traditions. They learn a fixed version of “the dots”, overlooking style, and entirely removed from the social context that nurtures it. They may consider this superior, “improved”, more “scientific”. The musical style of rural shawm bands is also ridiculously difficult—but the point is that there’s no reason at all why conservatoire students would want to learn long shawm suites like this.

In sum, the conservatoires do what they do, and that’s fine. It’s just that as ethnomusicologists we seek to offer a broader soundscape and a broader social range. And anyway, for a sensitive musician, the intensity and grandeur of the folk style will be far more rewarding than those cute little conservatoire pieces.

So after all this discussion of urban (and urbane) concert performance, we should return to the rural ceremonial setting by watching the Hua band playing their hearts out at a funeral—see my lengthy analysis here.

See also my roundup of posts on shawm bands around the world.

[1] See also my Folk music of China, ch.10, and its CD, as well as the 2-CD set China: folk instrumental traditions. In Chinese, my colleague Zhang Zhentao has also written well on them. Cf. my “Men behaving badly: shawm bands of north China”, in Gender in Chinese Music, pp.112–26.
[2] See my Folk music of China, ch.10, and §4 of the CD. Note also two CDs from François Picard: Chine, Hautbois du Nord-Est, musiques de la première lune, and Chine, Hautbois du Nord-Est, la bande de la famille Li (Buda, Musique du Monde, 1995).