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2. Shao Binsun and Huju Traditional Opera in Shanghai jonathan p. j. stock, with shao binsun This is a life story of a singer and actor in the traditional opera genre of Shanghai, a music-theatrical style with a history of some two hundred years and nowadays named huju (see further Stock 2003). In a paper published in 1980, Jeff Titon pointed out that the involvement of a researcher and research agenda means that no biography can be treated as uninflected factual record. Instead, the life story is a “self-contained fiction” invented as the fieldworker and musical subject explore positions and perspectives together. Since biographical writing is inherently fictive, Titon goes on, we can overtly exploit that aspect to deliberately tailor the narratives we and our subjects originate, toward particular communicative ends. Titon’s proposal effectively places the research subject in the stance of a co-researcher, which is to reinforce the forging of reciprocal bonds that ideally constitute ethnomusicological fieldwork, even when it is complicated, as this time, by the dual challenges of researcher and research subject living in different continents and the writing of the account in a language not read by the subject.1 Such an approach seems especially apt when the subject is a performer whose professional role was exactly to breathe life into characters whom he himself invented and personified onstage. The aims in this chapter, then, can be explicitly identified as follows: through employing as many of Shao Binsun’s words as possible, framed in a small amount of my own contextualization, I hope to share some of Shao’s explanations of his career as a leading performer in a professional Chinese entertainment genre from the 1930s to the 1980s. Apart from supplementing in a small way our collective knowledge of Chinese music and providing information that can be compared with that contained in other chapters here 46 jonathan p. j. stock, with shao binsun or in other biographies elsewhere, I wish to steer the reader new to this topic around some of the suppositions that might otherwise arise with regard to a genre that the Chinese themselves refer to as a form of local opera (difangxi). For instance, we might assume such genres to be relatively simple artistically, to be slow to accept change, and to carry strong rural overtones. We might also tend to perceive both the Communist victory in the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949 and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 as probable breakpoints in the historical pathway of this genre. In fact, none of these presumptions turns out to be entirely true. As we shall see, Shao’s life story reveals instead some of the broader continuities of the period in question. Huju was already a complex, fast-moving, and modernizing urbanbased genre at the time of his youth, and it offered an artistic environment of great potential for a resourceful and innovative musician. First Encounters Shao Binsun was born in 1919 in Taichang, one of Shanghai’s suburbs. His father was a tailor. In common with many in the environs of this rapidly expanding city, the family experienced poverty, mobility, and tragedy. Shao’s mother died when he was three years old, and the family moved several times across the region. Shao himself completed primary school in Shanghai, but then money for school fees ran out and he became his father’s assistant in the tailoring stall. His father enjoyed traditional opera, particularly jingju (then named jingxi and now known outside China as Beijing or Peking opera), and it was with this genre that Shao Binsun gained his first serious introduction to the dramatic arts. This choice is a significant one in early twentieth-century Shanghai . Several forms of local opera were very widely popular in this city, along with narrative styles such as the musical storytelling form called Suzhou tanci, but jingju was also a marker of a certain level of cultural sophistication. Of course, many viewers enjoyed the striking costumes and acrobatics of jingju, but accustomed listeners needed a familiarity with the dialect in which it is sung, which is not native to the Shanghai region, and an appreciation for its literary aesthetic and historical themes. Shao Binsun takes up the account: At that time, drama was just an interest. The performances I saw were of jingju and wenmingxi [Western-style spoken plays]. Wenmingxi used to be very popular in Shanghai. It was from these two genres that I started to...

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