The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language

Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409405887
• eBook ISBN: 9781351885317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

In studying one of the world's oldest and most enduring musical cultures, academics have consistently missed one of the richest forms of Chinese cultural expression: performed narratives. Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson explores the relationships between language and music in the performance of four narrative genres in the city of Tianjin, China, based upon original field research conducted in the People's Republic of China in the mid 1980s and in 1991. The author emphasizes the unique nature of oral performances in China: these genres are both musical and literary and yet are considered to be neither music nor literature. Lawson employs extensive examples of the complex interaction of music and language in each genre, all the while relating those analyses to broader cultural issues and to patterns of social relationships. The narrative arts known as shuochang (speaking-singing) are depicted as genres that constitute a unique communicative discourse"the communication of stories in song. The genres subsumed under the native conception of shuochang include Tianjin Popular Tunes, Beijing Drumsong, Clappertales and Comic Routines. The maximum utilization of shuo (speaking) and chang (singing) in all their varying manifestations constitutes the vitality of the traditional narrative arts in the city of Tianjin"the center for these arts in North China. The variety of narrative forms provides entertainment for audiences representing all social strata of Chinese society. The author argues that Chinese narrative traditions represent a foundation from which certain Chinese literary and operatic traditions have borrowed, such as how the novels from the Ming-Qing period draw on the performed narrative arts both in style and in content. Hence, an understanding of performed narratives is not only useful to scholars in Chinese literature and music, but also to scholars interested in broadening their understanding of China generally.

PART I

Background

Chapter 1

Introduction

From September 1985 to August 1986, and for a week-long trip in February 1987 and a month in January 1991, I was able to conduct research on the narrative arts in Tiānjīn, China. Relying on transcriptions and analyses of key performances (determined by the performers), interviews, and participant observation, this work is a synchronic investigation of language–music relationships in four of the narrative genres as they were performed in Tiānjīn at the time I was doing research. Hence, my research is a snapshot of the community from the middle to the end of the 1980s, focusing primarily on traditional performances of the senior generation of performers who had shaped the narrative arts during the early to middle years of the twentieth century: Wáng Yùbaǒ, Lù Yǐqín (and her teacher, Luò Yùshēng), and Mă Sānlì. Not only was my emphasis on the senior performers a necessity in terms of Chinese cultural etiquette,¹ but all members of the community continually referred to the older, pre-1949 pieces as truly representative of the spirit of the Tiānjīn narrative arts. While I was not fully aware of the significance of this generation and its signature performances at the time I initially went to Tiānjīn, I have since realized that I had a unique opportunity to witness the end of an era through documenting and studying their performances.

When these senior performers were in a position in their careers to solicit disciples in the traditional fashion, Chinese society had already changed dramatically. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, traditional systems of patronage and pedagogy shifted to a collectivized approach. The first group of post-Liberation students in the Tiānjīn narrative arts was auditioned in the early 1960s, and the second group was selected in the mid 1970s. These students, who would have established sole allegiance to a single performer in pre-1949 China, were now students of a troupe, the Tiānjīn Municipal Narrative Arts Troupe (the most important troupe in the city). A new style of education ensued, replacing the strong contractual commitments between masters and disciples of pre-Liberation China with a binding allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party.

The post-1949 students had relationships with several teachers in the Troupe, thereby diluting the pedagogical power of the master–disciple allegiances of pre-Liberation China. This was by design. The new Chinese standard was to promote the basic ideals of the Chinese Communist Party by equalizing relationships between superiors and subordinates that existed as vestiges from the old society. Since the founding of the Academy for the Northern Chinese Narrative Arts in 1986, all subsequent generations of students have become even more removed from the senior generation I studied. This is because the current teachers at the Academy are all performers of the post-1949 system of collectivized training that was itself somewhat removed from the oldest generation of performers with whom I worked intermittently from 1985 to 1991.

The senior performers I studied still maintained many aspects of the pre-1949, traditional mindset, but most of them retired by the end of the 1990s. With their retirement, the signature pieces of that generation were no longer performed, and the potential impact of the senior generation was minimized further. Hence, this book presents a glimpse into an era of performance that has gradually faded into anachronistic obsolescence.

The one performer who was not a member of the senior generation is Zhāng Zhìkuān, whose performance is highlighted in Chapter 9. As the oldest member of the group of students that had been accepted in the 1960s, he was old enough to have studied his narrative genre with the late Lǐ Rùnjiē as a traditional disciple, yet also young enough to have been part of the post-Liberation style of pedagogy. He represented a fascinating link between the senior generation that still clung to traditional values and styles of learning and the immediate post-Liberation generation that was officially encouraged not to forge an exclusive relationship with a single master performer.

I have chosen to focus on Tiānjīnshídiaò (Tiānjīn Popular Tunes), Jīngyùndàgŭ (Beǐjīng Drumsong), Kuaìbărshū (Fast Clappertales), and Xiàngsheng (Comic Routines)—four of the ten most popular narrative genres in Tiānjīn.² I hasten to add that this book is not meant to be an exhaustive study of the narrative arts of Tiānjīn. Rather, it is an exploration into the ways in which the manner of performance influences and is influenced by the kinds of information that may be communicated during the course of performance.

I had two major reasons for making performance the focal point of my research. First, while I have listed significant native Chinese printed sources in the bibliography as a resource for further scholarship,³ I have purposely chosen to focus on performative information that goes beyond the level of detail found in most printed anthologies. Seeger’s explanation of prescriptive versus descriptive notation (1977: 186) is useful in explaining my approach. The Chinese printed “prescriptions” for performance found in most compilations are bare-bones blueprints that are meant for the interpretation of skilled culture bearers and knowledgeable scholars. My transcriptions and analyses are “descriptions” of particular performances that attempt to reveal some of the richness of linguistic and musical communication possible within narrative performance that is not transcribed or notated, and therefore not immediately apparent to the non-native.

Second, analyzing performances provided information that would have been difficult to learn solely through the interview process. Interviewing consultants supplied significant material for this study, but often the people I interviewed were initially compelled to give me information that reflected the standard political line of the Chinese Communist Party; only after many months did they feel comfortable enough to tell me what they truly believed. And when they did share more sensitive information with me, I was asked to be careful in the way I transmitted that information.⁴ By highlighting publicly and politically sanctioned performances, I was able to study and analyze performances as “a point of entry for understanding how people achieve what they want within their own environment, how they act out their assumptions about each other, and how they challenge authority” (Robertson 1987: 225) without having to risk asking too many probing questions that might have jeopardized my informants.

Finally, although I touch upon certain diachronic processes of change in researching each narrative form, a more detailed historical study of the narrative arts phenomenon is beyond the scope of this project. Apart from its predominantly synchronic perspective, this research also emphasizes musical data in an attempt to counterbalance the approach of previous studies on the narrative arts that consider primarily literary or linguistic information over the musical.

1. ¹ I quickly learned that foreign researchers should always defer to older performers and senior members of the community, who are at the top of the social hierarchy. I discuss the importance of relationships and hierarchies in greater detail in Chapter 5.
2. ² I have limited the number of genres for several reasons. First, a balance had to be reached between selecting enough material for sufficient representation and limiting the genres in order to manage the data. By focusing on two genres that are sung and two that feature a delivery style more akin to the spoken vernacular, I feel I have achieved a balance between spoken and sung genres that is manageable. Additional reasons for selecting the four genres include accessability to consultants and availability of printed and recorded materials.
3. ³ Please refer to Caì 1980, Mă 1986, Hoú et al. 1980, Liú 1981, Liú 1985, Mínzú 1961a and 1961b, Péng 1982, Shī 1985, Zhāng 1960, Zhāng 1983, and Zhū 1985.
4. ⁴ Consequently, the identity of my informants has been concealed in order to protect them from any possible political reprecussions. Please refer to the “Note on the Text” for a description of my system for referencing my informants in the Bibliography.

Chapter 2

Prologue

The Narrative Arts

My first experience with the narrative arts came unexpectedly as a student of Professor Lui Tsun-yuen at the University of California at Los Angeles. Professor Lui was a renowned master of the pίpά, a four-stringed, pear-shaped lute that is held vertically and played with the backs of the fingernails. On one occasion, he brought his instrument to class in order to demonstrate some of the great masterworks of the pίpά repertoire. After performing several pieces, he picked up his instrument once again, almost as an afterthought, and began to accompany himself while singing lyrics in his native Sùzhoū dialect. I remember that when one of the students asked him to explain something about this last piece of music, he responded emphatically that what he had just played was not music. When asked why it was not considered music, he laughed and explained that it was a folk form, a kind of storytelling, but definitely not music. From my limited background at that point in time, it sounded like other kinds of Chinese vocal music I had heard, so I was genuinely confused. It was not until many years later that I began to understand how and why these sounds constituted a separate art form that was not music, but something entirely different.

My interest in the narrative arts of China eventually brought me to the study of Lord’s The Singer of Tales (2000), a work about the oral-formulaic processes in ancient Homeric poetry and in a more modern manifestation of those compositional processes in Balkan epic poetry, the latter created in the act of performance by illiterate Yugoslavian bards. I read this book before my fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China and was inspired to study orally performed stories in a country that boasts over 150 different forms of storytelling, allowing China to claim the distinction of having the largest number of storytelling genres and representing the most diversity of any narrative tradition in the world.¹

I conducted my research in the recognized center for narrative tradition in north China, the city of Tiānjīn. Even before embarking into the field, however, I realized that the orality-literacy problem implied by The Singer of Tales was not going to be the central focus of my study of oral performance in Tiānjīn. Since Chinese is a tonal language and since most of the performed genres are sung, I was interested in the ways these performers balanced a semantically intelligible linguistic communication of the storyline (according to the tonal requirements of the language) with the aesthetic needs of the delivery style in the act of performance. As a student of music, I wanted to look at this body of performed oral poetry in order to ascertain the role of “music” in the communication of stories, Professor Lui’s comments notwithstanding.

During the course of my fieldwork I discovered that the key to understanding how the plot and nuances of the stories were communicated in a comprehensible and yet aesthetically pleasing manner was implied by the traditional, pre-1949 name of the Tiānjīn narrative arts, Shuōchàng, which literally means “speaking-singing.”² The relationship of shuō (speaking) with chàng (singing) implies a balance between force and counterforce, the story versus the method of delivery, and this balance was negotiated uniquely in each genre. Moreover, at the nexus of the language–music relationship in each genre I discovered the communication of subtle, nuanced information that could not be expressed through either the spoken word or music alone. This unique and elusive form of communication and entertainment occurred precisely at the interface between shuō and chàng so that the name for these genres is not only appropriately descriptive but also holds the key to understanding their value as a communicative tool in the course of performance.

As Alan Merriam points out in The Anthropology of Music, when language is associated with music it is frequently a different kind of language than language not so associated (1964: 190). What exactly is communicated by the musically embodied language (or the linguistically laden music) during the course of a performance of Shuōchàng? And what is the significance of the fact that this is performed for an audience rather than read as a script (or listened to from a recording since the advent of the modern media)? First, the substance of communication in a performance is different from that which is communicated by the written word alone. The subsequent chapters about my research on Tiānjīn Shuōchàng demonstrate that certain sensitive cultural issues such as the expression of local identity and social protest may be communicated safely only within the context of performance. The ephemeral nature of oral performance actually protects the musically rendered (and therefore sometimes linguistically “distorted”) messages from the kind of scrutiny to which written communication is subjected. In addition, the aesthetic dimension of the delivery style is a vital, highly engaging feature in the minds of most culture bearers, a dimension that, in itself, provides another level of cultural expression—a kind of celebratory experience for members of the audience. Hence, both the substance and manner of communication are peculiar to the performative nature of the genres.

As I continued to investigate the performance of the narrative arts, I found them fascinating both as an object of study because of the interrelationships between language and music and also as a method for analysis of social interaction, particularly in the case of the comic routines discussed in Chapter 10. The results of this research underscore the value of turning to the heightened activity of performance as a time when cultural assumptions are most exposed and core values expressed (Bruner 1986: 9), thereby highlighting some of the important cultural issues that are not often openly discussed because of the fear of social and political reprisal. I discovered that narrative performance provides a reflexive commentary that emerges from within the culture itself—a commentary that I did not create as the ethnographer, but one that serendipitously provided me with a potent place to begin my analysis and interpretation. As Bruner explains:

The advantage of beginning the study of culture through expressions is that the basic units of analysis are established by the people we study rather than by the anthropologist as alien observer. By focusing on narratives or dramas or carnival or any other expressions, we leave the definition of the unit of investigation up to the people, rather than imposing categories derived from our own ever-shifting theoretical frames. Expressions are the peoples’ articulations, formulations, and representations of their own experience. (1986: 9)

In trying to understand the reflexive potency of Shuōchàng by focusing primarily on the intimate details of the different vocalization techniques used in delivering the narrative, I discovered a useful paradigm. Schechner describes the concept of “performance magnitudes,” which range from a micro analysis on the level of individual brain events on one end...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Music Examples
• Contents of CD
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• PART I BACKGROUND
• PART II PERFORMANCES
• PART III APPENDICES
• Bibliography
• Index