SEPTEMBER 1999
PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
Fifth CHIME Conference
Music in cities, music in villages
In the study of Chinese and East Asian music, urban genres are more widely promoted and more thoroughly studied than their rural counterparts. The fifth annual CHIME conference, which took place in September 1999 at the Academy of Music in Prague, focused on musical contrasts between villages and cities in China and East Asia.
By FRANK KOUWENHOVEN
Judging from the many paper presentations, it is in the very interaction between urban and rural society that Asia's musical culture is and has always been at its most vibrant. A major concern is that rural genres consistently receive too little attention from scholars. One reason is that travelling and research in Asian rural areas can be a rather demanding experience. Another reason is that, for a long time the existence of numerous rural music traditions has simply escaped the attention of most (Western) scholars. Many kinds of music genres in China (notably ritual music) have been revived only in recent years. So far they have barely been described or explored. In this respect, every new CHIME meeting has led to surprises and new discoveries.CHIME, the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research, now in its ninth year of existence, has rapidly established its position as an essential platform for scholars and students of Chinese and East Asian music and musical ritual. The eighty-odd participants who met from 15 to 19 September in Prague for the Fifth CHIME conference came not only from obvious backgrounds like musicology, sinology, and anthropology, but also included art historians, archaeologists, and journalists. Speakers examined a wide range of genres, from Buddhist ritual to forms of Asian local opera, story-telling, folk songs, and pop.
Clearly, the lines between 'rural' and 'urban' cannot and should not be drawn too sharply. Many new hybrid forms of music began life in cities, from Peking Opera to pop and symphonic music, but the ongoing urbanization of rural areas in Asia is anything but a one-way process. There is a continuous interplay between rural and urban music traditions. Pop musicians borrow elements from Buddhist chants or folk music for their commercial songs, but these songs then often find their way back to the countryside, where they are immediately 'recycled' in folk music repertoires, a point raised by Adam Yuet Chau in his paper on folk music in Shaanbei. The interaction is rich and complex and cannot be captured in simple models, as was also clearly illustrated in contributions by Daniel Ferguson (Cantonese opera), Tan-Hwee San and Tian Qing (Buddhist music), Mercedes Dujunco (Vietnamese opera), Nathan Hesselink (Korean percussion music) to mention only some.
In Asia, music is travelling ever more easily thanks to an increased social mobility and because of new modes of communication. The greater mobility does not depend on economic factors alone, but also on such aspects as natural disasters (floods, droughts, famines), which drive thousands of people away from their native areas. The ebb and flow of musical cross-fertilization in Third World regions may well be partly related to the fluctuating water levels of the big rivers. Preconceived ideas about contrasts between urban literacy/education and rural illiteracy were called into question by Kathy Lowry and other presenters. Czech and Polish scholars offered various interesting contributions. Hopefully, contacts with Central European scholarship can be extended at future CHIME meetings. The hosting organization, the CCK International Sinological Center at Charles University, put on a programme of a number of fine concerts to bolster participants' spirits. The Moravian Philharmonic, led by Wang Jin, played new music from China, and there were concerts by the Beijing Buddhists, Han Tang Yuefu (Taiwan), and numerous fine solo players from Mongolia, Korea, Japan and China. Dr Lucie Olivová and her colleagues in Prague are to be congratulated on their wonderful work in making this meeting possible. *
Frank Kouwenhoven, Secretary of the Board of the CHIME Foundation, and independent scholar of Chinese music.
CHIME, European Foundation for Chinese Music Research
P.O. Box 11092,
2301 EB Leiden,
The Netherlands.
Visiting address Chime library:
Gerecht 1, 2311 TC Leiden
Phone: +31-71-5133.974 / 5133.123
Fax: +31-71-5123.183
E-mail: chime@wxs.nl