In her introduction to Lives in Chinese Music, editor Helen Rees quotes Mark Slobin's 1993 declaration that “we are all individual music cultures” (Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, Wesleyan Musical Press). The two volumes under consideration in this review are evidence of ethnomusicology's move away from the study of music “cultures” to “subject-centred” ethnography (p. 3). While acknowledging that biographical writing is “inherently fictive” (p. 45), these two books do much to enrich our understanding of the infinite variety of individual musical experience in modern China.
There is historical and geographical unity here, but we do not hear a repeated story of invasions, civil war and revolution, of voices silenced or called on to serve politics. If these accounts show us anything, it is that while the historical and political events may form a backdrop to artists' lives, they are not foregrounded in their personal or musical histories, which are rather measured by births and deaths, marriages, musical encounters, migrations and jobs.
The seven lives presented in this book span the 20th century − the earliest having been born in 1899, the youngest, rocker Teng Ge'er, in 1960 − and the greater Chinese cultural world, including Shanghai, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the diaspora. The accounts cover an admirable range of musical genres and socio-cultural categories: male–female, centre–margin, rural–urban, amateur–professional, majority–minority, scholar–practitioner. Moreover the relationships between researchers and subjects are equally varied: friends, pupils and teachers, visiting fieldworkers, and even those who never met, but relied instead on textual sources and the memories of others. A price we pay for this variety is that there is little cross-fertilization between chapters. But indeed, why should there be? Several of the musicians express a close attachment to their local musical cultures, and on migrating found little in common elsewhere.
In the first part of the volume are two men born in 1919 in the Yangtze River Delta. Frank Kouwenhoven and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck give an evocative account of their meetings with Zhao Yongming, nicknamed “Mountain Song Cicada,” a fantastic singer of Wu county (Jiangsu) shan'ge (mountain songs). Dragged out to the cultural office to sing for these two foreigners, the frail peasant muttered, “What's the use of you recording them, or writing them down, if you don't know what it's all about” (p. 27). Over the next two years the two researchers learned much about the difficult life of Zhao, about his vast repertoire of songs, as well as “something about the limitations of fieldwork, about the sadness of forming friendships that cannot last” (p. 29). Shao Binsun, the subject and associate-author with Jonathan Stock of the second chapter, was a well-known singer of Shanghai Huju opera who evolved a modern style which eventually took his name “Shao pai.” Stock addresses the editor's express aim of paying careful attention to tradition bearers' own words, and is also one of the few authors to provide notation or detailed analyses for musical illustration. In the second part of the volume, two “literati” musicians: Bell Yung on qin player Tsar Teh-yun (on which more below), and Peter Micic, who revisits the life of Yang Yinliu, the pioneer of Chinese music research and “gatherer of a nation's music.” Micic draws on archives of Western missionaries to supplement Chinese-language documentation. The final three chapters, on “music on the cultural frontiers,” introduce one overseas Chinese (Grace Liu, a leading figure in the Cantonese opera scene in England) and two minority nationality musicians: Uyghur dutar player, Abdulla Mäjnun, and Mongolian rocker, Teng Ge'er. Like Yang Yinliu, Grace Liu has been actively involved in creating a nation's music within Liverpool's Chinese diaspora and as part of a larger multi-cultural project. Teng Ge'er, as a “State's First Rank Performer” with the Central Nationalities Song and Dance Troupe, both conforms and challenges the orthodox styles of minority representation, so that Baranovitch is able to collapse neat distinctions between state and unofficial artists. In her chapter, Rachel Harris warns against the implication that Mäjnun is somehow representative of Uyghur music or of “ethnic minority music in China” (p. 168), even as he is actively involved in constructing it. She deftly portrays Mäjnun (his adopted name means “intoxicated fool”) as a performer and expert whose music, like Zhao Yongming's, sits uneasily within notions of national traditions.
The subject of Bell Yung's chapter in Lives, qin player Tsar Teh-yun, is given fuller coverage in his book The Last of China's Literati. Rather as the qin itself has been thrust into an inappropriate spotlight by its 2003 nomination as a Unesco Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, Madam Tsar, as she is usually known, makes a reluctant subject for biography. She was clearly uncomfortable talking about her private life, and Yung tells us only those aspects of her life that impacted on her music and poetry – particularly those feelings of loss, for her family, her home, and the lost world of her childhood. As Yung illustrates, these feelings meld well with the qin's historic repertoire, and in particular with her signature piece, the 12th-century Xiaoxiang shuihun (“Waters and Mists of the Rivers Xiao and Xiang”). Tsar was equally reluctant to share her musical voice – she didn't give public performances but played only within yaji (elegant gatherings) of qin aficionados − and made only one published recording, for the American musicologist John Levy in 1966. Yung describes Tsar's privileged upbringing around Shanghai, which combined refined Chinese accomplishments with Western education (including lessons on the organ). She started learning the silk-stringed zither qin, with renowned master Shen Caonong, only when she was 36, by which time she had a husband and child, and was undergoing the first of several moves. The last 50 years of her life were relatively uneventful. Settled in Hong Kong, she continued a life of artistic cultivation. As her circle of literati (wenren) friends moved away or simply grew old, a new group gathered around her of qin enthusiasts from all over the world. Robert van Gulik visited her in 1950. Somewhat marginalized because of her gender when she first entered qin circles, in Hong Kong she became a sought-after teacher who carefully selected her students for their temperament and virtue (ideally a tranquil heart (jingxin) and upstanding heart (zhengxin), pp. 137–8). Yung describes how she taught them by rote. In the absence of any recording, we rely on his words for a sense of Tsar's style of playing − a preference for a free sense of rhythm, ambiguous phrasing and rich “shaping” of notes – that is, subtle timbral variations and ornamentations (p. 116). For Tsar, mood was more important than technical accuracy. Although we may regret the lack of musical sound, and of examples of Tsar's calligraphy, the volume does contain 22 of Tsar's poems, in Chinese with English translation.
Bell Yung, her biographer and the foremost qin scholar outside China, first met Tsar when she was already 73 years old, and then studied with her. His account is thus constrained by Tsar's modesty, her elevated status, his respect for her, and the death or old age of those who knew her best. Nevertheless, he draws on letters, diaries and society reports to enrich his account. If deserving of the epithet “last of China's literati,” it may have been simply that by living to the age of 102 she outlived all rival claimants to the title. Yung himself questions the use of the word “last” in his title, but concludes that even if there are still wenren cultivating the life of a “carefree cloud,” the cultural milieu that for so many centuries supported their lifestyle has disappeared (p. xv).
We owe so much to the Chinese musicians who share their knowledge with us, that it may prove uncomfortable to call into question the self-presentation of our subjects. Nobody puts this clearer than Mäjnun, the admirably outspoken teacher of Rachel Harris, in Lives: “It is the pupil's job to say good things about his teacher and argue with those who criticise him” (p. 158). Is this any greater deception than that of the disinterested authorial voice of earlier ethnographies? These books are invaluable in redressing the balance of power between Chinese musician and Western scholar, giving voice to once anonymous “informants.” The authors in this collection make clear their subjectivity: these are friends, partners, teachers or even idols. By presenting these very different lives in Chinese music, these books take us some distance from un-problematized accounts of bounded music cultures (even where such cultures are constructed by the musicians studied), and towards understanding how music has been individually experienced in China. A final and familiar complaint is that it is the skilled musical expressions of these subjects that bring them to our attention, and yet there are no accompanying recordings. The internet may give readers access to the music of the better known amongst them. Others, for now, remain elusive.
