Ritual and Music of North China, Volume 2, Shaanbei by Stephen Jones (review)

With this book, Stephen Jones adds a third volume to his valuable series on ritual and music in North China. The first of these, Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (2004), examines ritual music associations in the village of Gaoluo, Hebei Province. The second, Ritual and Music of North China: Shawm Bands in Shanxi (2007), details the history and current state of ritual shawm music in Yanggao County, Shanxi Province. This book continues the pattern of westward shift and geographic expansion established by the first two, focusing on the practices of blind bards and shawm bands in several locations in northern Shaanxi Province, or Shaanbei. In his introduction, Jones mentions several lacunae in scholarly writing about music and China: the shortage of writings that address the continued importance of religious practice and expressive culture in the post-Mao era (xx), the lack of a focus on music in studies of Chinese ritual (xxii), and the emphasis on reinvention of tradition at the expense of exploring the continuity of practices (xxiv). This text, like Jones’s earlier books, addresses these largely neglected areas of inquiry with nuanced and historically contextualized accounts of living musical and ritual practices as preserved and adapted by ritual practitioners in rural and urban North China. The book is divided into four sections: the introduction, an examination of the history and living practice of blind bards in the region, a discussion of chuishou wind and percussion bands, and a brief account of shawm bands and a folk troupe in the city of Yulin.

Part 1 is the brief introduction, “Shaanbei Society and Its Musics,” which describes the physical and human geography of the Shaanbei region—its dry mountains, terraced fields, and cave dwellings carved into hillsides. This section also describes the area’s recent history as an early base for the Chinese Communist Party, a site for the rustication of urban youth during the Cultural Revolution, and as a focus of officially heralded but as yet mainly ineffectual efforts to develop China’s west. Jones mentions the area’s reputation as a home for iconic folk songs and other forms of traditional music, as reflected in the 1984 film Yellow Earth. Throughout the book, Jones illustrates how the mythologized conception of Shaanbei as a heartland for Chinese communism continues to resonate in the interactions between folk musicians and officials.

Part 2, “Turning a Blind Ear: Bards of Shaanbei,” examines the lives of blind bards in Shaanbei. These bards sing stories punctuated with passages played on sanxian lute (or, rarely, pipa) at temple fairs and during rituals for securing good fortune or relief from illness. Jones mentions efforts to replace old story texts with new, politically correct ones and to organize bards into official teams that would provide training in these new stories, but he finds that these have had little effect on the activities of the bards. Instead, the growing popularity of television has eroded the need for bards to provide entertainment, while the continuing need for protection of Shaanbei’s rural children from illness keeps bards active and provides much of their livelihood.

In part 3, “Lives of Shaanbei Blowers,” Jones outlines the activities and social status of chuishou, or shawm band musicians, before, during, and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In Shaanbei, chuishou provide “the main melodic instrumental music . . . for life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies” (92). In the last two chapters of this section, Jones examines the current state of chuishou performance, focusing particularly on the controversial adoption of big bands, or ensembles that include instruments like the trumpet, saxophone, and drum set. The section concludes with ethnographic accounts of chuishou participation in a funeral, a wedding, and a temple fair.

Part 4, “Urban Music in Shaanbei,” briefly discusses musical activities in the city of Yulin. After...