Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage

Policy, Ideology, and Practice in the Preservation of East Asian Traditions

Keith Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317092162
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Focussing on music traditions, these essays explore the policy, ideology and practice of preservation and promotion of East Asian intangible cultural heritage. For the first time, Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan - states that were amongst the first to establish legislation and systems for indigenous traditions - are considered together. Calls to preserve the intangible heritage have recently become louder, not least with increasing UNESCO attention. The imperative to preserve is, throughout the region, cast as a way to counter the perceived loss of cultural diversity caused by globalization, modernization, urbanization and the spread of the mass media. Four chapters - one each on China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan - incorporate a foundational overview of preservation policy and practice of musical intangible cultural heritage at the state level. These chapters are complemented by a set of chapters that explore how the practice of policy has impacted on specific musics, from Confucian ritual through Kam big song to the Okinawan sanshin. Each chapter is based on rich ethnographic data collected through extended fieldwork. The team of international contributors give both insider and outsider perspectives as they both account for, and critique, policy, ideology and practice in East Asian music as intangible cultural heritage.

Chapter 1
Introduction: East Asian Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage

Keith Howard

This volume examines the agendas for preserving music as intangible cultural heritage in China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan.1 East Asia has a long history of legislating and setting up a mixture of preservation and promotion strategies to counter the loss of indigenous musical and other cultural forms. The pertinent Japanese legislation, the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties (bunkazai hogohō), dates back to 1950, and the Korean legislation, the Cultural Properties Preservation Law (Munhwajae pohobŏp), to 1962; Taiwan followed in 1982 with the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act (Wenhua zichan baocun fa), although China has only in the last decade joined the preservation movement.

It was only in the years before and after the turn of the millennium that the global agenda shifted. There had to that point been a widespread distrust of attempts to preserve the intangible heritage, but this gave way to an awareness that, with the ever more rapid pace of change brought by globalization, much would be lost if there was no intervention. East Asia was well placed to provide models for action. The agenda shift, however, had much to do with UNESCO, notably with its appointment of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001, 2003 and 2005, and with the adoption in 2003 of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

In each of the three Masterpiece rounds, China, Korea and Japan were all successful in promoting genres of performance arts. In 2001, among the 19 Masterpieces appointed were Chinese kunqu opera, Korean Chongmyo cheryeak (Music for the Rite to Royal Ancestors; see Howard, this volume) and Japanese nogaku theatre. In 2003, among the 28 were Chinese guqin zither music (see Rees, this volume), Korean p’ansori (epic storytelling through song) and the Japanese bunraku puppet theatre (see Arisawa, this volume); in 2005, among the final 43 Masterpieces were the Korean Gangreung Danoje ([Kangnŭng tanoje], a spring rite and festival from the East Coast), Japanese kabuki theatre and, from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, the Uyghur muqam melodic and modal system. All nine of these genres incorporate music, indicative of the fact that East Asian music, as intangible cultural heritage, is ripe for investigation. In the following pages, we take specific genres of music from the East Asian musical canon to explore how preservation and promotion strategies have played out.

Preservation Agendas

In the last few decades, we have become accustomed to the concept of cultural heritage. We visit museums, where mausoleums of our shared social history reside.2 If in the past museums were full of the monumental, they increasingly admit the vernacular (Hall 2009: 24), indicative of a shifting polemic and an ongoing reinterpretation of purpose. Museums have become highly contested sites, not least as they struggle to attract visitors against the spread of mass media and the rise of the Internet. Today, they must also keep at bay those who argue the imperative of repatriating ‘looted’ artefacts.

Today, we search out World Heritage Sites, which by 2011 had become the 936 ‘places to visit before you die’ (Jansen-Verbeke 2009: 58),3 where the legacy of human brilliance and natural design is written out in capital letters. However, as we travel the world on Boeing 747s and Airbus 380s, we do not just expect to find buildings and artefacts. The tourist gaze also falls on music and dance shows, and on souvenir shops that sell audio or video recordings of performances and local trinkets such as instruments (whether imitation or real). These have become vital parts of the economic imperative of tourism4 and tourist brochures, accordingly, concentrate not just on the tangible cultural heritage, but on the intangible cultural heritage – local customs, costumes and cuisines, and local performance arts and crafts. The intangible heritage is placed centre stage, in settings, displays, and imagined, recreated or restructured presentations that seek to remind us of the way we once were.

Everywhere, it would appear, efforts are made to preserve and promote local cultural difference. We have conveniently forgotten how scholars once warned that preserving the intangible heritage in performance and creation without change was not an option as society evolved (Blacking 1978; 1987: 112; Nettl 1985: 124–7; Nas 2002;5 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004; see also Bohlman 2002: 63). Today, we tend to ignore the polemic against preservation, in which cultural traditions become ‘frozen in time and space like a museum display’ (Hesselink 2004: 407). So, despite the past being a foreign country where things were done differently (Hartley 1971: 7, as prominently echoed in Lowenthal 1985), and as scepticism towards government intervention wanes,6 our contemporary zeitgeist has shifted to an acceptance of a past that is both alive and venerated (Bharucha 1993: 21). To square this particular circle, conservation – rather than merely preservation – movements for the intangible cultural heritage increasingly recognize the importance of creativity and development in order to ‘revalorize … through new dimensions’ (Jansen-Verbeke 2009: 57–8), to attempt to stimulate efforts towards sustainability (and, by referring to sustainability, the difficult word ‘preservation’ can be avoided),7 or, at least according to UNESCO, to generate ‘ownership … and constant recreation’.8 Conservation, then, is increasingly held to require a mix of preservation and presentation.

Performance arts and crafts have become supporting actors in our exercises of collective memory and our efforts to retain memory as something alive. Alan Lomax, the late ethnomusicologist, recording engineer and archivist, in 1972 quipped that ‘the world is an agreeable and stimulating place to live in because of its cultural diversity’. David Lowenthal’s remark that loss and ‘modernist amnesia’, attenuated by the pace of change, threatens our identity and wellbeing (1985: xxiv) is often repeated.9 Some would agree with Bert Feintuch, who notes how contemporary societies ‘spark’ their people to remember local life, to ‘think about matters close at hand and close at heart’ (1988: 1), or with the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who wistfully laments that ‘the struggle of power is the struggle of memory over forgetting’. Promoting a national culture can, we are told, balance the impact of globalization (Tomlinson 1999); or, according to UNESCO’s eighth Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura: ‘[p]aradoxically, it is precisely in the context of increasing globalization that more and more peoples and communities of the world have begun to recognize the importance of their cultural heritage’ (Matsuura 2005: 17).10 Generations of scholars, musicologists and ethnomusicologists included, and other concerned individuals and groups, have sought ways, like Lomax (1972), to counter the perceived cultural grey-out, and to avoid the threatened loss of art and craft traditions. Erich von Hornbostel cited loss as a key reason for setting up the Berlin Phonogramm Archive at the beginning of the twentieth century; he argued the need to capture and compare traditional musics before they disappeared. However, although loss remains a common theme within conservationist interventions (Cleere 2001; Meskell 2002; Holtorf 2006; Rowlands 2007), performance arts and crafts have only been belatedly recognized as fully integral to local and global cultural landscapes; they were brought to the party of museumification rather late.

Myriad discussions of intangible cultural heritage now exist.11 These record that efforts to preserve performance arts and crafts initially tended to mirror strategies already in place for the tangible heritage, notably with attention being placed on documentation and archiving. Some groundwork for this was done within the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and by similar bodies. Much as with the changing identity of museums, such efforts recognized to a greater or lesser extent that material culture becomes more meaningful when an understanding of the production and use of objects can be communicated (Vergo 1989; Woodhead and Stansfield 1994; Dean 1996; Hall 2009). This understanding emerged not least with UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites in 1979, when the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was added to the list – memorializing what had happened there more than the site itself. The list later inscribed the atomic bomb site at Hiroshima (in 1996) and the bridge at Mostar (in 2005). As this perspective bedded in, so the still contested definitions of heritage came to be interpreted in terms of the values and attitudes of those who produced or used objects (Goulding 1999; Dicks 2000; Jewell and Crotts 2001; Breathnach 2003). However, while documenting and archiving the intangible cultural heritage has fed the preservationist ethos (Alivizatou 2009: 173), it has all too easily evaded questions about sustainability, about maintaining the activities of performance and creation that define artistic practice. It has done so by keeping the focus on artefacts emerging from the production of the intangible heritage. And, this has fed back into tourism and marketing, as objects have been reproduced for distribution and sale, and as festivals have been promoted at home and abroad (Jansen-Verbeke 2009: 61–5).

Archiving and documentation can also shift ownership, thereby devaluing the economic and social stakes of the people who create or produce the intangible heritage (Skounti 2009). Such activities impose measures of control or validation that tend to be enshrined in sets of guidelines, rules and regulations, and these, in turn, are policed by agencies of bureaucrats and scholars. Issues of rights and ownership emerge, issues that have long been associated with, for example, biomedical and mining companies, but can also be seen in terms of cultural appropriation (Ziff and Rao 1997). Such issues have the potential to harm a local community, to lead to negative effects on the integrity and identity of a group, and to situations where benefits may accrue to some to the detriment of others (Howard 2006a: 99–133; George 2009: 76). Economic interests arising from the reproduction of an intangible cultural commodity may then raise further issues about traditional knowledge and ownership that conflict with legislation in place at the state or international level for trademark regulation and copyright assignment (see Alaszewska and Kraef, this volume12).

Just as many museums have embraced the vernacular as well as classical, court, or literati/gentry arts, attempts have been made for performance arts and crafts that were formerly categorized within the often pejorative box of ‘folklore’ – a box associated with political and ideological agendas – to be recast as intangible cultural heritage (Seitel 2001, Nas 2002, De Jong 2007). Folklore has for a number of decades recognized the basic challenge in conservation as being the balancing of top-down and bottom-up activities. While the top-down approach is seen in the development of measures of control or validation,13 harnessing local ownership and the enthusiasm of local consumers is to many folklorists considered an unassailable democratic principle (see Abrahams 1968; Bauman 1971; Ben-Amos 1971; Hymes 1975). As a result, to many, cultural conservation needs to be dynamic and hence centred on those who create or perform (see, for example, Hufford 1994: 3). It can be conceived, then, as a way to organize ‘the profusion of public and private efforts’ that deal with ‘traditional community cultural life’ (Loomis 1983: iv) and which ‘we together with our constituents, share in the act of making’ (Hufford 1994: 5).14 This has affinity with the critiques of Nettl and Blacking about preservation systems for the intangible cultural heritage, but has the potential to challenge an old paradigm of ethnomusicology, in which traditional music genres were conceived of in static ways, and analysed atomistically in terms of discrete elements.

Ethnomusicologists increasingly promote a dynamic approach, as in the following comment from the Geneva-based scholar, archivist and music promoter Laurent Aubert: ‘The nature of tradition is not to preserve intact a heritage from the past, but to enrich it according to present circumstances and transmit the result to future generations’ (Aubert 2007: 10).15 This raises the challenge of authenticity (and associated concepts, such as the wŏnhyŏng archetype in Korea and yuanshengtai ‘original ecology’ in China; Rees, Gorfinkel, Howard, Maliangkay, this volume), and hence encourages top-down approaches to preservation and promotion, as decisions are taken as to what is deemed necessary to retain affinity with an inherited tradition of performance or creation. Top-down approaches also arise because of an increasing concern with cultural rights, where the cultural life of a community (and ownership by a community) may be deemed at least as important as an individual’s right to artistic production and participation (Weintraub 2009: 2–516). Top-down approaches have dominated the intangible cultural heritage discourse in East Asia.

To this, we need to add recognition that many approach cultural difference and the perceived loss of it with something of a Janus face. Not least, this reflects an acceptance – sometimes reluctantly – that most people appear to be satisfied with what was once called ‘airport art’ (Kaeppler 1977, 1979; for discussions of ‘airport art’ see also De Kadt 1979; O’Grady 1981; Moeran 1984; Hitchcock, King and Parnwell 1993). ‘Airport art’ can be found in the staged shows and souvenir trinkets for tourists, or in recordings made as ‘tourist trinkets slapped together to make a quick buck’ (Miller and Shahriari 2008: 56) – products and practices that, when repackaged for those from outside a given culture, have been usefully brought together by Guillermo Gómez-Pena (2001) under the term ‘lite difference’. World music, as a genre, for instance, is expected to be ‘sophisticated but not obtrusive, easy to take but not at all bland, unfamiliar without being patronizing’ (Spencer 1992); its consumers engage in ‘audio tourism’ (Howard 2010, after Kassabian 2004), stripping sound from any meaningful socio-cultural contextualization, and thereby redefining aesthetic criteria in a way that potentially loses traditional knowledge (Weintraub 2009: 4). MTV creates its own ‘world music’ charts, feeding a shrinking recorded music industry and its stable of largely white, often middle-aged, pop icons, but thereby legitimizing Western music styles as universal in a manner that further downgrades local and regional variety.17 Hollywood sucks in cultural difference to create flashy, shallow filmic displays that disperse cultural divides (Moretti 2001) and ‘ventriloquize the world’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 191). Our hyper-real consumerism demands ‘shoppertainments’ and ‘eatertainments’ – giant shopping malls and food courts. All of these spin out from a pervasive Eurocentric capitalism that takes cultures from everywhere and recycles them around the world (Outhwaite 2008).18 ‘Lite difference’ sits uncomfortably alongside appeals for localized identities and against disquiet over appropriation (as explored, for example, by Root (1995) and by the contributors to Ziff and Rao (1997)). But, it also reveals an uncomfortable zone, as the dynamics of preservation clash with the needs of promotion when a performance art or craft is taken from its locale and placed before national and international aud...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Maps
• List of Music
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: East Asian Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage
• 2 Intangible Cultural Heritage in China Today: Policy and Practice in the Early Twenty-First Century
• 3 Ee, mang gay dor ga ey (Hey, Why Don’t You Sing)? Imagining the Future for Kam Big Song
• 4 Strumming the ‘Lost Mouth Chord’: Discourses of Preserving the Nuosu-Yi Mouth Harp
• 5 From Transformation to Preservation: Music and Multi-Ethnic Unity on Television in China
• 6 Authenticity and Authority: Conflicting Agendas in the Preservation of Music and Dance at Korea’s State Sacrificial Rituals
• 7 A Tradition of Adaptation: Preserving the Ritual for Paebaengi
• 8 Lessons from the Past: Nanguan/Nanyin and the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Taiwan
• 9 Dichotomies between ‘Classical’ and ‘Folk’ in the Intangible Cultural Properties of Japan
• 10 Promoting and Preserving the Chichibu Night Festival: The Impact of Cultural Policy on the Transmission of Japanese Folk Performing Arts
• 11 Whose Heritage? Cultural Properties Legislation and Regional Identity in Okinawa
• References
• Index