Browse

This book is about traditional songs. Folk song scholarship was originally obsessed with notions of completeness and narrative coherence; yet field notebooks and recordings (and, increasingly, publications) overwhelmingly suggest that apparently ‘broken’ and drastically shortened versions of songs are not perceived as incomplete by those who sing them. This study turns the focus on these ‘dog-ends’ of oral tradition, and looks closely at how very short texts convey meaning in performance by working the audience's knowledge of a highly allusive idiom. What emerges is the tenacity of meaning in the connotative and metaphorical language of traditional song, and the extraordinary adaptability of songs in different cultural contexts. Such pieces have a strong metonymic force: they should not be seen as residual ‘last leaves’ of a once complete tradition, but as dynamic elements in the process of oral transmission. Not all song fragments remain in their natural environment, and this book also explores relocations and dislocations as songs are adapted to new contexts: a ballad of love and death is used to count pins in lace-making, song-snippets trail subversive meanings in the novels of Charles Dickens. Because they are variable and elusive to dating, songs have had little attention from the literary establishment: the authors of this book show both how certain critical approaches can be fruitfully applied to song texts, and how concepts from studies in oral traditions prefigure aspects of contemporary critical theory. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs.

China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, the author's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai have allowed him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. The text then focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a ‘musical’ reading of gendered performance.

The book, derived from the Balzan musicology project ‘Towards a global history of music’, describes cultural traditions and communication patterns of music, dance and theatre in the world region between India and the Mediterranean in the last 2000 years. The new metaphor of the ‘Music Road’—the western half of the ‘Silk Road’—refers to the travels of musical songs, instruments and ideas across both space and time. The book has an introduction and 16 chapters, each by a different author. Highlighted are the following cultural traditions: ancient Gandhāra (first centuries ce); traditions of the Alexander legend; the musical philosophy and practice of Muslim societies; colonial India and the West; Greek music and nationalism (19th–20th centuries); travelling music-theatre companies in the Eastern Mediterranean; the ‘Gypsy rhapsody’ in European art music. The keynote chapter by Martin Stokes reviews the work of Villoteau and Lachmann, advocating a fusion of historical thought and ethnomusicology. The book offers case studies not only on music per se, but also on fine art, dance, musical theatre, on the theology, philosophy, historiography and literature of music, and on East–West relations in the musical practice of colonial and modern times. It is argued in the introduction and implied elsewhere that the musical culture of this world region, and its interactions with the West, have always been on the move, that its diversities and disruptions are counterbalanced by numerous internal and external linkages, and that the reifying term of ‘orientalism’ might be replaced by ‘the East–West imagination’.

The Sibe are an immigrant group, Qing dynasty bannermen who made a three-year ‘long march’ from Manchuria in the 18th century to serve as a border garrison in the newly conquered Western Regions of the Qing Chinese empire. They preserved their military structure and a discrete identity in the multi-ethnic region of Xinjiang and are now officially recognised as an ethnic minority nationality under the People's Republic. They are known in China today as the last speakers of the Manchu language, and as preservers of their ancient traditions. This study of their music culture reveals not fossilised tradition but a shifting web of borrowings, assimilation, and retention. It is an informed account of culture and performance in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. The book approaches musical and ritual life in this ethnically diverse region through an understanding of society in terms of negotiation, practice, and performance. It explores the relations between shamanism, song, and notions of externality and danger, bringing recent theories on shamanism to bear on questions of the structural and affective powers of ritual music. The book focuses on the historical demands of identity, boundary maintenance, and creation among the Sibe, and on the role of musical performance in maintaining popular memory, and it discusses the impact of state policies of the Chinese Communist Party on village musical and ritual life. It draws on a wide range of Chinese, Sibe-Manchu language sources, and oral sources including musical recordings and interviews gathered in the course of fieldwork in Xinjiang.