Lives in Chinese Music

Helen Rees

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252033797
• eBook ISBN: 9780252092251
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Chinesische Geschichte

Until recently, most scholarly work on Chinese music in both Chinese and Western languages has focused on genres, musical structure, and general history and concepts, rather than on the musicians themselves. This volume breaks new ground by focusing on individual musicians active in different amateur and professional music scenes in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Chinese communities in Europe.

Using biography to deepen understanding of Chinese music, contributors present richly contextualized portraits of rural folk singers, urban opera singers, literati, and musicians on both geographic and cultural frontiers. The topics investigated by these authors provide fresh insights into issues such as the urban-rural divide, the position of ethnic minorities within the People's Republic of China, the adaptation of performing arts to modernizing trends of the twentieth century, and the use of the arts for propaganda and commercial purposes.

The social and political history of China serves as a backdrop to these discussions of music and culture, as the lives chronicled here illuminate experiences from the pre-Communist period through the Cultural Revolution to the present. Showcasing multiple facets of Chinese musical life, this collection is especially effective in taking advantage of the liberalization of mainland China that has permitted researchers to work closely with artists and to discuss the interactions of life and local and national histories in musicians' experiences.

Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Rachel Harris, Frank Kouwenhoven, Tong Soon Lee, Peter Micic, Helen Rees, Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Shao Binsun, Jonathan P. J. Stock, and Bell Yung.

PART I

Regional Focus: The Yangtze River Delta

1. Zhao Yongming

Portrait of a Mountain Song Cicada

FRANK KOUWENHOVEN AND ANTOINET SCHIMMELPENNINCK

The bus trip from Shanghai to the heart of Wujiang county took us two and a half hours. Under a gray winter sky we drove along concrete roads past rice paddies, ponds and lakes, and scattered farmhouses and villages. The area was flat, but at certain points cone-shaped hills arose like solitary lumps on the horizon. We crossed rivers and canals, where Chinese junks and cargo boats made of concrete progressed slowly. Some of the motor boats on the water emitted a thick black smoke.

Up to the 1950s—as one bus passenger told us—many towns in this area could be reached only by water. Even today, one would need a small boat to reach the more outlying places. The entire landscape—a patchwork of ponds, rivers, canalized streams, a realm of fishing and small farming—had been shaped by centuries of floods, erosion, and human intervention.

It was said that Wujiang county was rich in folksingers, and that quite a few of them lived near Luxu. This was a core area of the celebrated “Wu songs,” named after the ancient kingdom of Wu. One famous singer, the “mountain song tiger” Jiang Liansheng, sang long narrative texts and was reputed to have the best voice of all. Then there were Li Asan and Yu Baoxiang, who had croaky voices but always kept their audiences spellbound. And there was the prolific but slightly notorious Lu Amei, who—it was whispered—once performed a song about lesbian love.

How many of these people were actually still alive we didn’t know. The folk-song tradition in southern Jiangsu was on the wane, and if any of these singers—listed in local booklets and articles—were still around, they had to be old and withered. At least we knew one contact person, and we had a place to start.

Mr. Yu Wei—a plump and evidently convivial man—waited for us at the bus stop in Luxu. He had received our telegrams and had agreed to receive us in his cultural office, a local government institution.¹

We crossed the high stone bridge over the canal and entered the old town. Most of the houses in the town center were nineteenth-century wooden structures on top of stone foundations, beautiful in design but in bad repair. If someone cared to restore and repaint these buildings, Luxu might possibly rise to fame as a new tourist target. But the fate of the place looked sealed. There was apparently not enough money or incentive to restore the town, and the new Luxu was taking on a very different appearance. Drab concrete buildings arose on construction sites. It might take a few years for the face of the old town to disappear completely.

We expressed our admiration for the old architecture, but Mr. Yu had nothing much to say about it. He had spent most of his life in this place, sharing a house with his mother. Perhaps it all looked overfamiliar and boring to him. His colleague, Mr. Xu Wenchu from Wujiang’s county seat, whom we met at the government office, showed a more keen interest in Luxu: with its population of seven thousand,² the old town center served as an industrial and market center for the entire region. “You see,” said Mr. Xu, “we live close to Lake Fenhu, an important fishing resort. We are a kind of gateway between Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and the Shanghai district, and we link up many major industrial towns.”

That sounded reassuring—a place that was important first and foremost for being close to some other places. In other words, a relative backwater. But no, Mr. Xu was genuinely passionate about Luxu and its environment. Raising his extraordinary long eyebrows, he explained that no fewer than four different dialects were spoken in the Luxu region and that many different traditions of local opera and story singing had flourished in this area until recently.

We sat down and took out our notebooks. Our hosts introduced us to a gnomelike figure seated on a leather chair in a corner of the room. The man was so small that his feet barely touched the ground. He had a hunchback, wore a cap and a faded blue suit, and glinted at us with small eyes.

“Please meet Zhao Yongming, the best of our local singers.” We shook hands with him, and Mr. Yu turned to him, saying: “These are the two foreigners I told you about. They have come all the way from Europe to record your songs, and to take them abroad.”

Zhao continued to look at us, with the faintest indication of a smile. He didn’t look happy.

It was the winter of 1988. We had started collecting folk songs in China in 1986.³ Much of our time had been spent in contacting the cultural offices and tracing local singers. Sometimes a folk-song specialist from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music accompanied us to act as an interpreter. We were not able to communicate with most singers directly, because they did not understand our Mandarin Chinese, and we could not understand them, the regional Wu dialect—really more a group of dialects, or a language—posing many problems. Consequently, our work progressed very slowly. Eventually, we replayed and worked out nearly all our tapes with the help of friends in Shanghai, but it could take months to find out what any singer had been saying to us in a particular conversation. In the field we often depended entirely on local people who did speak Mandarin Chinese and were willing to translate. The situation was not ideal, but there was no alternative. We were learning the local language, but progress was painfully slow.

Not surprisingly, our first impressions of Zhao Yongming were superficial. Mr. Xu and Mr. Yu did most of the talking. They were openly apologetic about the quality of Zhao’s singing. “He doesn’t sound good now. He has a weak voice. You should have heard him in former times! People used to call him the ‘Mountain Song Cicada’! He has grown old now; he’s seventy. Luckily, he still remembers a lot of songs—that’s why we’ve asked him to come. He can also improvise a little. Not much.”⁴

The shy and frail-looking Mr. Zhao just sat there in silence and stared at us. We tried to address him directly, but the cultural officials did not encourage this. They passed on our questions but often ignored Zhao Yongming’s answers. They seemed to think that—as a plain villager—Mr. Zhao could have only a superficial understanding of local culture. What would a fellow like him, an ordinary peasant, an odd-job man, know about such things as Buddhism, or local temple gods, or funeral rites, or Wujiang dialects, all these interesting topics that we appeared eager to learn more about?

Zhao Yongming’s head gradually sank deeper between his shoulders. After a while he began to mutter to himself, or to some invisible person in the room. We went to a local restaurant to have lunch, and he still hadn’t sung a single song. When Mr. Xu began to describe, in flowery language, the lofty vocal qualities of the local folksingers, their high piercing sounds and relaxed voice control, Zhao Yongming could no longer restrain himself. He looked at the food on the table, cleared his throat, and burst out singing:

At noon, the sun rises to its zenith—time for tea and food!

The black-backed carp is fried in a thin layer of oil.

The girl says: “You can’t buy this fish in Suzhou—not for a million!

Better eat it now, lad, while it’s still hot and fresh!”

He had a light, pleasant, and sensitive voice. He switched to falsetto in the first line, which didn’t sound very loud or imposing, but we could imagine what impression he must have made on others while he was still at the height of his vocal powers. As Zhao Yongming said, much later: “My voice? Oh, you should have heard me twenty years ago. Then it all sounded much better…. At present, I am probably the only one left who can sing Wu songs…. I had a friend, Zhang Amu, who sang more beautifully than I did. He was the king. But he is dead. It’s all over now.”

Most of the table talk was dominated by Mr. Xu and Mr. Yu. They clearly enjoyed showing off their knowledge, especially Mr. Xu, with his magnificent brows, a scholarly type. With some embarrassment, he touched on the topic of folk-song censorship during the Cultural Revolution:

Most of our mountain songs are about love, about feelings between men and women. In the Cultural Revolution love was regarded as unhealthy, so love songs were forbidden. When we began to collect folk songs again in the 1980s, we noticed that many people no longer wanted to sing these texts. You see, the singers are now aged seventy or eighty; they already have sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons. So they’re facing three or more new generations and probably think that it’s no longer fitting to sing about “I love you, you love me.” Such is our Chinese culture. Our thoughts and habits are deeply influenced by Confucianism and by backward feudal trends. Many a singer will think: I’m too old for this, what will my children think of me? Shameful!

Mr. Xu viewed the gap in the continuation of the performance tradition as one reason for the decline of local folk song. Of course, there were other factors, as well: the overall changes in lifestyle, the mechanization of the work in the fields, industrialization, the arrival of radio and television, youngsters’ growing interest in pop music …

“Our folk songs tend to be somewhat monotonous,” Mr. Xu said. “Yes, yes, you are right, they have many small delicate variations in the melody. But the masses require bigger and more variations. Young people ask for bright colors and so on; they cannot bear those small variations!”

Zhao Yongming commented, out of the blue: “If you don’t have children, you are as free as a bird.”

We went back to the cultural office and recorded some more songs. Zhao sat down in an armchair, his feet dangling in the air. He was really getting into the right gear now. The singing exhausted him physically, but he was very eager to perform. His songs were frequently interrupted by Xu and Yu, much to Zhao’s irritation. He also seemed upset by the fact that his breath was insufficient to carry his songs to the end. Mr. Yu joined Zhao as a singer in a few lovely duets, but then he fell asleep, drowsy after drinking too much wine. Zhao resumed his quiet muttering.

It was many months later, deciphering the recorded interview tapes, that we managed to piece together what Zhao had been saying. The gist of it was that he had come all the way to the cultural office for nothing: “Because you foreigners cannot understand my songs. You cannot understand my words. What’s the use of you recording them, or writing them down, if you don’t know what it is all about?”

The message made perfect sense, and it shocked us to the bone. We realized that we would need to go back with better interpreters to communicate with him more directly. In the next four years, we visited Luxu many times. We learned to understand Zhao’s language, superficially but still well enough to be able to converse with him. We developed a good relationship with Zhao, who became our gateway to other singers in the area. From the singer as a man we acquired an impression of what life had been like for people in Luxu during decades of hardship. Zhao Yongming had experienced many of China’s ups and downs in the twentieth century: famines, civil war, forced migrations, political violence, which had affected local people and the song culture in all sorts of ways. From the singer as a man we also learned something about the limitations of fieldwork, about the sadness of forming friendships that cannot last.

Zhao Yongming was born in June 1919 in Tanli village, east of Luxu, not far from the Zhejiang province border. He was the youngest in a family of five children. His parents worked the land and were very poor. They had no money to send him to school or to keep him at home. He learned to write his name and to read a few characters, but this was all the formal education he ever acquired.⁵ He was much better at remembering songs, as he soon discovered: “When I was young I learned to sing all kinds of melodies and songs…. For example, I remember how Subei people [i.e., people from northern Jiangsu] came to beg during the New Year celebrations. They sang songs for money. Life was bitter for them. When I was ten years old I heard these songs, but later I heard them no more.”

Nobody in his parents’ home could sing. Zhao began to sing the outdoor repertoire of shan’ge (“mountain songs”) at the age of thirteen, when he was hired as a cowherd in Jiashan, in northern Zhejiang. His parents could no longer sustain him.

In traditional China, the economic value of children was high. Children would start contributing very early to family welfare, often before the age of ten, in tasks such as collecting grass to feed sheep, or herding cattle. If there were many children, some “mouths” might have to be sent away, because they could not be fed.

In his new environment in Jiashan, miles away from his parental home, Zhao began to pick up songs in the fields at random—a few lines from one singer, some more lines from another one. It helped him to alleviate feelings of loneliness. He grew especially fond of singing dialogue songs while herding cattle. He and the other boys would sing to each other over large distances in high and piercing voices. Tunes and texts would come to them naturally, without much conscious effort, in imitation of what others sang, including grown-ups. Cursing was considered big fun among the cowherds, especially in sung form. As one colleague of Zhao Yongming remembered: “You sang something rude, and someone else replied. Everyone knew these songs. We formed groups and started swearing. Everyone participated in the quarrels and tried to outdo the others. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Writing Lives in Chinese Music
• Part I. Regional Focus: The Yangtze River Delta
• Part II. The Literati
• Part III. Music on the Cultural Frontiers
• Contributors
• Index