Ritual and Music of North China

Volume 2: Shaanbei

Stephen Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351902953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This second volume of Stephen Jones' work on ritual and musical life in north China, again with accompanying downloadable resources, gives an impression of music-making in daily life in the poor mountainous region of Shaanbei, northwest China. It conveys some of the diverse musical activities there around 2000, from the barrage of pop music blaring from speakers in the bustling county-towns to the life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies of poor mountain villages. Based on the practice of grass-roots music-making in daily life, not merely on official images, the main theme is the painful maintenance of ritual and its music under Maoism, its revival with the market reforms of the 1980s, and its modification under the assaults of TV, pop music, and migration since the 1990s. The text is in four parts. Part One gives background to the area and music-making in society. Parts Two and Three discuss the lives of bards and shawm bands respectively, describing modifications in their ceremonial activities through the twentieth century. Part Four acclimatizes us to the modern world with glimpses of various types of musical life in Yulin city, the regional capital, illustrating the contrast with the surrounding countryside. The 44-minute downloadable resources, with its informative commentary, is intended both to illuminate the text and to stand on its own. It shows bards performing at a temple fair and to bless a family in distress, and shawm bands performing at a wedding, at funerals, and a shop opening - including their pop repertory with the 'big band'. Also featuring as part of these events are opera troupes, geomancers, and performing beggars; by contrast, the film shows a glimpse of the official image of Shaanbei culture as presented by a state ensemble in the regional capital. The publication will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and all those interested in modern Chinese history and society.

PART ONE

Introduction

Chapter 1
Shaanbei society and its musics

‘I simply fail to understand how people so close to Yan’an could remain completely untouched by the spirit of Yan’an.’

Xia Yan, commenting on the film Yellow Earth.¹

This book depicts the life of music in the rural society of Shaanbei, the north of Shaanxi province in northwest China, through the changing times of the twentieth century. In this introductory chapter I first give a general outline of the region, and then sketch some forms of musical activity there, before focusing on two genres (bards and shawm bands) in Parts Two and Three.

1.1 Setting the scene

Early spring 1939, in Shaanbei after the beginnings of the socialist revolution and during the war of resistance against the Japanese. Cultural workers of the Communist Eighth Route Army set out through the countryside, still controlled by the rival Nationalist government, to seek Shaanbei folksongs to adapt for the revolution. ‘In this ancient land the melodies of xintianyou songs hover in the air throughout the year.’

Hearing only the sound of the wind, we see a small figure of a man wearing an army uniform trekking alone, dwarfed by the barren mountainous landscape. He is Gu Qing, an idealistic Eighth Route Army cultural cadre. As he comes nearer, he hears a song in the distance:

Life is hard for seasonal workers

They’re hired in the 1st moon, dismissed in the 10th moon.

Gu Qing listens and takes out his pen, but the sound evaporates just as he begins to write down the song in his notebook. Next we see a wedding procession crossing the scarred landscape, the bride carried in a sedan, a band of chuishoushawm-and-percussion musicians leading the way. On arrival at the village wedding, Gu Qing is invited to the feast. As he shares the paltry dishes with the peasants, a ragged peasant sings high-pitched wedding songs. If the peasants are nonplussed at the presence of a government representative, Gu Qing too is evidently taken aback at his surroundings.

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1. Barmé and Minford 1986: 267. For the film, see §1.4 below.

These are the opening scenes of Chen Kaige’s ground-breaking 1984 film Yellow Earth,² which I will introduce further below. For the fieldworker, it strikes a simple but deep chord: the obstacles one meets in finding and ‘capturing’ music – ‘plucking the winds’, as the Chinese term for fieldwork translates literally³ – and the difficulties of ‘becoming one with the masses’, as the Communist cliché goes.

Still on a simple level, the film shows the vast problems faced by the Communists in their goal of reforming a poor feudal society. Poverty seems insuperable, accompanying ‘backward’ traditions such as the sale of brides and processions to pray for rain. The citation at the head of this chapter shows how Communist ideologues were affronted by the notion that the peasantry could be so resistant to change during what was supposedly a time of exciting revolutionary transformation. Sure, Chen Kaige’s film was a fictionalized imagination of 1930s’ Shaanbei, but his artistic licence contained a basic truth.

I first visited Shaanbei in 1999, with few romantic illusions of following in the footsteps of Yellow Earth fieldworker Gu Qing. My forays in other regions of rural China had shown that tradition was still strong there after the collapse of the commune system in the 1980s. I soon came across an itinerant bard performing a ‘story for well-being’, inviting the gods into a peasant household to bring the family relief from misfortune (see Illustration 2 below and ʘC4):

On a dark night in a small village near the Black Dragon Temple, a bard performs a story for well-being. These bards are usually blind, though since the 1980s some sighted men have been encroaching on their ‘food-bowl’, like tonight’s performer. As a bard arrives in a village, a family beset by misfortune, with a handicapped son or ailing livestock, may request him to set up his altar and invite the gods to bless the family as he performs a long historical drama of romance and suspense. He punctuates the story with the rhythmic click of clappers tied to his leg, strumming the sanxian lute to the rustle of slim strips of wood tied to his wrist. In return the family gives him a place for the night on the kang brick bed of their cave-dwelling, a couple of bowls of noodles and a few kuai in cash. Bards have continued to earn their living by walking from village to village to sing stories, tell fortunes, cure illness, and serve as godfathers by ‘hanging the locket’ to protect children from misfortune. TV may be replacing their stories as entertainment, but chronic hardships and persistent belief in divine efficacy still demand that families invite a bard into their home to perform.

These bards are the subject of Part Two.

Another common occasion for music is at funerals, where again there is little trace of modern ideology; the officially-prescribed cremation with its secular ‘memorial meeting’ has never been observed outside the cities, earth burial being universal. At a funeral I attend in a hill village, a chuishou shawm band leads the coffin and the wailing mourners on the procession to the grave; a geomancer performs his magic and later exorcizes the house. Chuishou no longer smoke opium or beg, but in some parts of Shaanbei they are still more or less outcasts. They are the subject of Part Three.

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2. Some of the above is adapted from Tuohy 1999: 43. The opening paragraph is adapted from the opening subtitles of the film.
3. Hence the title of my book Jones 2004.

All this seems to echo Chen Kaige’s picture of a backward area still handling chronic problems in age-old fashions, irrespective of Communist dictates. Perhaps this was fair enough, since the commune system had long since been dismantled: anyone with any experience of the reforms since the 1980s might expect Communist culture to be taking a back seat. But changes were indeed to be found emanating from the towns, along the main transport arteries – changes now more market-led than politically dictated. The new rampant capitalism in the shape of media-broadcast pop culture eventually inspired a development in the shawm bands – the ‘big band’ sound (jacket photograph, ʘD3):

At another funeral in a poor village perched above a landscape of barren terraced mountains, grizzled Chang Wenzhou (most senior and illustrious chuishou in the area, from a famous lineage going back at least eight generations) leads his big band in a medley of brash pop hits, young sax and trumpet players in shades swaying around funkily, drummer proudly beating the hell out a drum-kit.

This change did not reach Shaanbei until 1995, but now looks likely to take root more efficiently than the ‘revolutionary’ culture of Maoism ever did.

1.2 Shaanbei and its sub-regions

Shaanxi province (classically known as Qin after the ancient kingdom there), along with parts of Gansu and Ningxia, forms the northwest frontier of the Han- Chinese-dominated territory of the People’s Republic. Further to the west and north lie the minority-dominated areas of Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Shaanxi consists of three regions: the central area Guanzhong spreading out from the capital Xi’an; the southern area Shaannan; and the northern area Shaanbei, subject of this book. These three regions are very different physically and culturally. Shaanbei as a whole has less in common with the central Shaanxi plain of Guanzhong to the south than with areas to the east (Shanxi province, east of the Yellow River, from where many Shaanbei people migrated) and west (eastern Gansu and Ningxia).

Shaanbei has such a reputation as a kind of heartland of Chinese culture that it is worth reminding ourselves that it is something of a frontier backwater – unlike central Shaanxi and Shanxi, which are indeed ancient cultural centres. Its reputation derives largely from its position as base of the Communist resistance after 1936. Physically, the whole area is characterized by its dusty yellow soil, known as loess, and the terraces carved into the rolling hillsides by generations of peasants to create what arable land they can.

Shaanbei consists of two regions, or prefectures: Yan’an and Yulin. The Yan’an region, the southern part of Shaanbei, centred on Yan’an municipality, contains 13 counties. Before the 1935 arrival of the Communists, the area was severely prone to banditry. Its northern area, bordering on the Yulin region, including counties like Zichang, Ansai, and Zhidan, has much in common with the area discussed in this book.

Following Chinese scholars, I focus on the northern half of Shaanbei: the 12 counties of the Yulin region (see Map, and Table 1), whose official population in 1998 was over 3.1 million. This region, in turn, may be divided into three areas. My main base is the area southeast of Yulin municipality; while the survey includes material from the counties of Jiaxian, Wubu, Hengshan, Zizhou, and Qingjian, I mainly discuss Mizhi and Suide counties – already a large and diverse field.

Table 1 Counties of the Yulin region

County	area (km^2)	townships	villages	population
Yulin (municipality)	7053	32	488	398,000
Mizhi	1212	15	396	207,000
Suide	1878	23	661	335,000
Jiaxian	2144	24	653	236,000
Wubu	428	10	221	76,000
Zizhou	2043	22	550	289,000
Qingjian	1881	18	639	208,000
Hengshan	4084	21	357	301,000
Fugu	3212	23	362	204,000
Shenmu	7635	22	978	346,000
Jingbian	5088	26	206	259,000
Dingbian	6920	30	333	283,000

Source: Shaanxi 1999, figures applying to ‘administrative villages’ (larger than ‘natural villages’) in 1995.

Also part of the Yulin region, still further northeast, in largely desert land leading to Inner Mongolia, the counties of Shenmu and Fugu are even more sparsely populated; musically too this area is quite distinct. Thirdly, the western part of the Yulin region (known as Sanbian, ‘the three borders’) includes the counties of Jingbian, Dingbian, and Hengshan, with closer cultural links with Ningxia province and the eastern protuberance of G...