Helen Rees - Lives in Chinese Music

EDITED BY

Helen Rees

University of Illinois Press

URBANA AND CHICAGO

2009 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

C 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lives in Chinese music / edited by Helen Rees.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-252-03379-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. MusiciansChinaBiography.

2. MusicChinaHistory and criticism.

I. Rees, Helen, 1964

ML385.L54 2008

780.92'251dc22 [B] 2008027201

Many people have contributed to the successful completion of this volume. First, I wish to thank the eight contributing authors, who have not only produced work of great novelty and interest, but have also consistently worked to time, patiently answered innumerable queries, and courteously borne with several delays in the editing process. Second, we all benefited from the insights and attention to detail of the two anonymous referees who read the manuscript for University of Illinois Press (UIP). Third, we have been extremely fortunate in having Judy McCulloh, Laurie Mattheson, Rebecca Crist, and Angela Burton of UIP overseeing publication. As always, they have been efficient, responsive, and encouraging at all stages of this project.

As the volumes editor, I wish to express my personal gratitude to several more colleagues: Nancy Guy, Stephen Jones, Tim Rice, and Xiao Mei, who although not directly involved in the project nevertheless offered thought-provoking observations and suggestions for interesting sources to follow up; Copenhaver Cumpston, art director of UIP, and Romeo Guzman, UCLA doctoral student and technical assistant in our Ethnomusicology Laboratory, for expert guidance and help in preparing the photographs for publication; and Katie Noss Van Buren, for bibliographic assistance at a crucial point. Final preparation of the manuscript was facilitated by a Research Enabling Grant from the Council on Research of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Finally, we would all like to thank the many wonderful musicians who inspired this volume and who generously invested considerable time, energy, and trust in our efforts. We hope that they will all be pleased with the result.

HELEN REES

Musicological traditions differ in the extent to which they write the individual into their texts. At one extreme, both scholarly and popular writings on the Western art music tradition stress a parade of great composers, conductors, and performers, the most admired of whom have acquired heroic status. Similarly, few overviews of Indian classical music omit mention of renowned performers acknowledged as major shapers of their traditions. Today, the appeal of much popular music on all continents depends on larger-than-life personalities, whose life histories become interwoven into all discussions of their art. At the other extreme, partly as a reaction against the deification of great men prevalent in historical musicology, many early publications on nonliterate musical traditions authored by Western comparative musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists showed little scholarly interest in individual musicians as such, preferring to present musical phenomena as typical products of the larger social organism, to represent the norm (Blacking 1967:27). Writing in the early 1980s, Bruno Nettl noted the irony of the situation as he saw it at that time: There is a curious disparity. While ethnomusicologists experience a great deal of face-to-face contact with individual informants and teachers in the field the literature provides surprisingly little information about the individual in music (1983:278). Philip Bohlman, writing just a few years after Nettl, provides a rationale as to why this may have happened in the case of folk music, so often invoked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a symbol of national pride and identity: Were folk music a force of cultural and national unity, it could not also change at the behest of a few unusual individuals or those recognized as musical specialists. After all, folk music was a measure of generations, not the estimation of one persons lifetime (1988:69).

The shift, suggests Jonathan Stock, is due not only to our frequent encounters with exceptional individuals in the field, but also to the recent concern with the politics of ethnographic representation, and an awareness of a new emphasis in allied fields on individual role and agency (2001:5).

The sense of a crisis of representation in the human sciences, to use the phrase coined by anthropologists George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer (1986:7), is certainly echoed loudly in the ethnomusicological literature from the 1980s on. Its effects are seen, for example, in critiques of the ethnocentric omission of indigenous analyses and experience in earlier work (e.g., Wachsmann 1982:198200); examination of the influence of colonialist situations and attitudes (e.g., Agawu 1992; Nketia 1998); concern for the protection of indigenous cultural and intellectual property (e.g., Guy 2002; Stillman 2002); an interest in self-reflexivity in fieldwork (e.g., Barz and Cooley 1997); the desire to write ones musical consultants into the text in their own words (e.g., Browner 2002; Howard 2006; Shelemay 1998; Deborah Wong 2004); and the intention, where language permits, to have musicians read, critique, and even dialogically edit the text in concert with the author (Feld 1990:23968).

These developments naturally mesh with, and have been influenced by, a parallel rise in the social sciences of theoretical interest in the importance of agency in society and culture. As far back as 1984, anthropologist Sherry Ortner identified a growing interest in analysis focused through a bundle of interrelated terms: practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience, performance, and in the doer of all that doing: agent, actor, person, self, individual, subject (1984:144). The late 1970s and first half of the 1980s saw a trend in this direction in the field of ethnomusicology as well (Rice 1987:476; Ruskin 2006). Anthony Seegers classic 1987 study of Suy music, based on lengthy fieldwork in the early 1970s and shorter periods thereafter, was reissued in 2004, with a new afterword in which the author implicitly notes this change in emphasis, commenting, If I were starting to write this book today, I would pay more attention to individual choice in performances (2004 [1987]: 141).

A final factor that may also be impelling a move away from culture to the subject as the locus of musical practice and experience (Rice 2003:152) is the rapid march of globalization and the concomitant early

Given this background, therefore, it is not surprising that Western-language ethnographic monographs on all types of musictraditional, non-literate, folkloric, as well as classical and popularnow frequently lay great emphasis on the life histories, experiences, and utterances of musicians, audience members, and other culture bearers. Most clear-cut in this regard, naturally, are outright biographies, such as those of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthm (Danielson 1997) and Latin great Tito Puente (Loza 1999). However, numerous other more generically titled monographs also highlight individual agency, interpretations, and experience. Deborah Wong neatly encapsulates her incorporation of all these elements in her recent book on Asian American musicians: I argue that music is performative and that it speaks with considerable power and subtlety as a discourse of difference. Indeed, the sounds I address are many thingsloud, angry, anguished, joyful, defiant, nostalgicand the Asian American musicians who make this noise have a lot to say about what they are doing. I trace their words, their music and how they are heard (2004:3).