Lives in Chinese Music ed. by Helen Rees (review)

Editor Helen Rees places this volume within a recent upsurge of individual-focused studies of Chinese musicians by non-Chinese scholars, a trend she attributes to the loosening of restrictions on scholarly activities in the People’s Republic of China. She also situates this book as part of a recent shift in ethnomusicology away from representations of “musical phenomena as typical products of the larger social organism” (1) toward ethnography that takes into account “the vital importance of individual experience, utterance, and interpretation as musicians interact with, accept, or defy their world” (3). This volume is not among the first ethnomusicological texts to take a biography as its basis or even the first such text to discuss the music of China. Rees mentions writings by Lam (1995, 2001), Rees (2001), Picard (2002), Stock (1996), Chinnery (2001), Xia (2001), and Pian (1985), and we might also mention recent research by Stephen Jones (2010), as good examples of music ethnography that focus on the experiences of musicians. Lives in Chinese Music, though, is particularly valuable for the great diversity of subject matter and the wide variety of approaches to biographical ethnomusicology it contains.

The first of the book’s three parts, “Regional Focus: The Yangtze River Delta,” focuses on two very different musical lives centered in that geographic area. In chapter 1, “Zhao Yongming: Portrait of a Mountain Song Cicada,” Frank Kouwenhoven and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck provide an account of their interactions with shange singer Zhao in rural southern Jiangsu Province from 1988 to 1997, just prior to Zhao’s death in 2000. This engaging chapter focuses on the singer’s life and music and the impact of twentieth- century political and economic upheavals thereon. The story is fascinating, and the reader gains a sense of the authors’ deep respect for Zhao. Nonetheless, the information is presented quite firmly through the eyes of the ethnographers. In several instances the authors report on Zhao’s and others’ mental states and attitudes, seemingly based solely on their observation of their posture and facial expression, and the quoted passages presenting Zhao’s spoken and sung words at times seem to fit too neatly into the authors’ narrative arc.

In chapter 2, “Shao Binsun and Huju Traditional Opera in Shanghai,” written by Jonathan Stock and Shao Binsun, the reader finds the life story of the artist presented largely in his own words and bolstered with meticulously cited historical data. Stock concludes that “Shao told his story not in terms of events and reactions but (largely) in terms of continuities and developments” (60). This point of view provides a valuable counterbalance to a tendency among Western scholars to link all musical practices in China to the nation’s political upheavals.

Part 2, “The Literati,” features two chapters exploring the significance of two influential members of China’s musical literati. Bell Yung’s chapter, “Tsar Teh-yun at Age 100: A Life of Qin Music, Poetry, and Calligraphy,” reads as an homage to Bell’s fascinating qin teacher. Yung examines Tsar’s integrated approach to the arts of music, calligraphy, and poetry, as well as efforts by Tsar and her students to preserve these artistic practices of China’s traditional literatus culture in Hong Kong. Chapter 4, Peter Micic’s “Gathering a Nation’s Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu,” describes the life history of the founder of musicology and, therefore, the founder of a new form of musical literatus culture in China. This chapter is unique in that Micic has only secondhand accounts on which to base his description of Yang and his work. Still, the chapter presents a broad picture of Yang’s significance to the field. Micic weaves together published biographical data with information about the formative influence of the musical and cultural contexts in which Yang grew up and made his career.

The book wraps up with three chapters on...