Musicologist Xiao Mei is one of the funniest and most fiercely intelligent people I know.
When she goes on fieldwork trips across China she describes her experience as something “akin to a baptism” as if she is initiated or purified by what is about to unfold. She is inspired by a number of theoretical models, but her writings “in the field” are all about the human dimensions, the human interactions. Echoes in the Field: Notes on Musical Anthropology (Tianyede huisheng—Yinyue renleixue biji) published in 2001, reads like a musical travelogue. She tells her then six year-old daughter that she has a dream to travel across China to document musical performances. Her daughter tells her that she also has a dream to travel the world when she grows up.
Xiao traverses back and forth from her fieldworks to Beijing and Shanghai comparing herself to an astronaut returning home to planet earth. She returns to her home in Beijing, but has yet to regain her sense of gravity. The first thing she does is to head straight to Haagen Dazs. It’s the ice cream that grounds her.
Xiao has been on many journeys over the past twenty years—she has trekked across many regions of China to document music performances, worked with UNESCO on “endangered” living musical traditions, collaborated with Dietrich Schüller, Director of the Phonogrammarchiv at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on sound and video recordings in China, and gathered a large international circle of friends including the American-based musicologist Bell Yung, the distinguished author and scholar of Indonesian music, Margaret Kartomi, and the American composer Eli Marshall.
Chinese music scholars have collected and compiled the nation’s living music traditions for over a century. This is not to say that Chinese historiography did not document music, but the official dynastic histories contain virtually nothing on the living music traditions of the day, recording instead the musical styles and practices of bygone dynasties—specifically yayue (lit: “refined, elegant music”)—court music that had to be strictly maintained and preserved in accordance with time-honoured musical practices.
The early twentieth century changed all that. Chinese intellectuals began the task of compiling histories of Chinese music that included the music of ordinary people. In time, musical performances, the voices of elders and the custodians of music traditions were recorded. These traditions were not necessarily found in notated scores, but invariably transmitted over time through a process of oral transmission.
Yang Yinliu (1899-1984) considered by many to be the doyen of ethnomusicology in China, and his cousin Cao Anhe (1905-2004) worked together on some of the most important fieldwork recording projects from the late 1940s onwards. Moon Reflected in the Second Spring (Erquan yingyue), one of the most popular of all Chinese tunes, recorded by Yang and Cao on a Webster Chicago wire recorder in the summer of 1950, was performed by Hua Yanjun (A’bing) several months before he died. Other recordings supervised by Yang included the twelve muqam—large-scale suites consisting of sung poetry, dances tunes and instrumental sections—in 1951, and wind and percussion music in Wuxi in 1962. These recordings, as many others became part of the Chinese Traditional Music Sound Archive at the Music Research Institute in Beijing.
It is not only the Chinese who have conducted fieldwork and documented musical performances. Stephen Jones—long smitten by the rustic soundscapes of northern China—has done extensive fieldwork on the music associations in Nangaoluo village in Hebei province. He has collaborated with Xiao Mei and other Chinese musicologists that spans some twenty years. Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (2004) has given Nangaoluo a past that otherwise would have been lost to English-speaking audiences.
These stories celebrate village life and the music rituals that give meaning to that life. These stories also celebrate elemental things, the rhythms of the working day, the labour of the fields, the lighting of the cooking fire, and the preparation and eating of food. The writing of such stories is also a biography of Jones himself, his encounters and interactions with local villagers. “If England had colonized Hebei province instead of Hong Kong,” Jones has jokingly commented, “I’d be its governor. Music that accompanies funerals, ritual festivals and temple rites would be performed in my residence every morning…”*
The young American composer Eli Marshall is another musical explorer who has done fieldwork recordings in China’s southwest. He’s blown away by all the musical treasures this country has to offer. “Fifty-six official ethnicities, each with their own internal differences, each a little sound universe and then there are the popular or ‘modern’ manifestations, and a rich history of Western classical music as old as America’s.*
In the summer of 2002, Marshall heard a peasant wind and percussion ensemble in Nangaoluo village which opened up a world of sonic colours. “It was a wall of sound hitting me in the chest, so many timbres in a cymbal, something we were not taught in orchestration class in the United States.” Almost a century earlier, the American violinist, conductor and composer Henry Eichheim (1870-1942) was dazzled by a wind and percussion ensemble in Wuxi, Jiangsu province: “I can’t imagine that with only eight people, music of such depth and richness can be created: I am an admirer of this music, but with no understanding.”*
Fieldwork is very personal. It gives us a deeper appreciation to understand music as an integral part of social and cultural life with a value that transcends aesthetics or entertainment. We also observe that music making is not a spectacle, but a ritual where participants explore and cultivate relationships. When Marshall was in the Yongning Basin in southwest China in the early autumn of 2004, he was reminded of how music can articulate some of our deepest values and impulses. “I talked to many older people who in their youth had sung as part of their daily life. They were in touch with something special, something genuine, where every sound and nuance had a real meaning in their lives.”*
Olivia Kraef, who has done fieldwork research on the Yi people in Liangshan since 2004, recalls that it was the singing that drew her in, but she says it could have easily been the people she interacted with first, then the singing. “I went from listener to participant observer, to performer and back again. I’ve lived with them: the mountains that generate the songs, the drinking, sharing and the emotions transformed again back into these songs. For me, Nuosu songs are so real; they are a living testimony to the spirit of a great people.”*
One of the most exciting stages for me in fieldwork is to just observe the sonic gestures, the latent musical possibilities of what might happen. In the summer of 2005, I accompanied a music discovery tour group from the US who included the composer Stuart Wallace and the writer Amy Tan to Guizhou (Wallace has collaborated with Tan to write an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter). We were in the heartland of a northern Dong (Kam) village. It was a hot muggy late afternoon, the humid air laden with the smell of ox dung. A group of us were walking along a narrow path and commenting that a “mosquito happy hour” would soon eat us all. An old woman carrying a bundle of firewood stopped and began to sing.
It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was trying to filter emotions, hidden narratives of this old lady’s past. Raw emotion from any singer always hides the technical effort, the discipline and training of the voice. It was a direct display of natural reflexes, but it was obvious that this old lady had been singing for most of her life. Her nuances of her voice spoke of the land, the mountains and rivers. I was here and now in the present, but her voice took me back to some distant past, long ago and far away.
Note 1: Quoted in Yang Yinliu. “A Bewildered Western Musician.” Chinese Music 7(1), 1984:4
Note 2: Personal communication, September 18, 2004.
Note 3: Personal communication, August 20, 2007, Beijing.
Note 4: ‘Thoughts on the plains of Hebei province’ (‘Yizhong pingyuanshangde sixu’), in Zhang Zhentao Zhuye qiule lu, Jinan: Shandong chubanshe, 2002: 11.
Note 5: Personal communication, August 25, 2002, Beijing.