Ritual and Music of North China: Shawm Bands in Shanxi by Stephen Jones, and: Ritual and Music of North China. Volume 2: Shaanbei by Stephen Jones (review)

Book Reviews 113 Ritual and Music of North China: Shawm Bands in Shanxi STEPHEN JONES. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. xiii, 132 pages, incl. 1 DVD. ISBN 978-07546 -6163-4. £27.50 hardcover. Ritual and Music of North China. Volume 2: Shaanbei STEPHEN JONES. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. xxvii, 243 pages, incl. 1 DVD. ISBN 978-07546 -6590-8. £55.00 hardcover. Ritual and Music of North China is a two-volume monograph focused on the ritual music of the neighboring Shanxi 山西 and Shaanxi 陝西 provinces in north-central China. Published by Ashgate within two years of each other, in the SOAS Musicology Series, the monograph aptly represents the exceptional work of ethnomusicologist Stephen Jones on Chinese ritual music, following an earlier publication on the traditional “music associations” of Hebei 河北 province.1 Grounded in extensive fieldwork and solid knowledge of Chinese musical and ritual traditions, the study considers music making squarely an integral part of religious and social rituals. Life stories, musical performances, and ceremonial practices of rural musicians are carefully documented against the social changes in China through the twentieth century and today. Readers are constantly guided through vivid musical and ritual scenes at temple fairs, weddings, and funerals, accompanied by variegated musical sounds performed by bards, shawm bands, and other forms of traditional and modernized ensembles, entangled in myriad family and personal histories. The absence of complicated musical analyses and technical expressions makes the monograph easily accessible to readers outside the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology. The two volumes are united in the first place by a commitment to finding out the musical happenings in rural China, where, as Jones often reminds us, the vast majority of the Chinese population still lives and pre-Communist musical traditions and ritual practices still survive today. Each of the two volumes deals with the musical and ritual traditions of a small geographical region in impoverished rural China. The first volume, Ritual and Music of North China: Shawm Bands in Shanxi (2007), explores the ritual and music of Yanggao 陽高 County in the Datong 大同 region of northern Shanxi province. The ritual soundscape in the region is dominated by Taoist ensembles and shawm-and-percussion bands that typically comprise, at the core, various sizes of the sheng 笙 mouth organs, the guanzi 管子 doublereed pipes, the suona 嗩吶 shawms, and an indispensable percussion section including various kinds of gongs, cymbals, and drums. Music is performed in the Taoist ritual ensembles by venerated ritual specialists known as yinyang 陰陽, while it is the lowly gujiang 鼓匠 (literally, “drum artisan”) who form the shawm-and-percussion bands that are the focus of the present study. Part I of the book starts with a critical overview of major musical styles 1 Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 2004). 114 Journal of Chinese Religions and genres in the region, followed by a chronology of ritual and music from the preCommunist period (early 20th century to 1949), through the early Communist period (1950s and 1960s) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), to the Reform period (late 1970s and after), reconstructed primarily through meticulously documented oral histories gathered from interviews with musicians. In part II, Jones takes a closer look at the ritual practices and sequences of funerals and temple fairs, shedding light on the role of music and musicians of the shawm bands in the rituals. To readers who are troubled by the lack of sophisticated musical analyses in the text, Jones seems to be arguing that the primary role of music in ritual is to provide a ceremonial soundscape or an aural background for ritual and social activities to take place; melodic contents and other elements of musical performance are often secondary. In many Chinese rural ritual traditions, Jones argues in the concluding section, music (yue 樂) refers not so much to our Western concept of musical sound as to the concept of ceremonial sound, as exemplified in the word yue of liyue 禮樂, an ancient term meaning “ritual and music” (pp. 114-15). In part III, in readily accessible language, Jones unravels the ritual soundscape by examining in detail the musical parts of ritual performances, covering topics such as musical instruments, timbre, pitches and scales, melodic, rhythmic/metrical...