East Asian Voices

By Frank Kouwenhoven

More than 90 participants met in De Doelen in Rotterdam from 11 to 14 September 1995 for "East Asian Voices", a series of workshops and papers sessions on vocal folk music and vocal rituals in East Asia. The overall theme was covered in panel discussions, which were illustrated by recitals and practical demonstrations. Nearly every hour of the four days of the meeting, live music could be heard wafting from one of the rooms parallel to that in which the conference was being held. This ran the gamut from Chinese shawm to Vietnamese percussion, from Korean lyrical chant to Chinese folk songs, from Japanese epic ballads, to qin (Chinese zither) music.
In an informal atmosphere, people representing a wide variety of disciplines - scholars of folk literature, musicology, anthropology, sinology, but also professional musicians, ritual specialists, and theatre performers - shared their experiences and exchanged views on su- themes like Narrative Singing, Local Opera, Ritual Music, Folk Song, and Recent Traditions. The principal organizers of the meeting - the European Foundation for Chinese Music "CHIME" - had aimed to introduce as much contrast as possible into every sub-theme. In the session on "Narrative Singing", there was room for presentations and workshops on music from China, India, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. In the session on Folk Song, the focus varied from Kazakhstan and Mongolia to China and Laos.
Many presentations during the "East Asian Voices" contained an element of surprise. The singing style of Mongolian singer Urna Chahartugchi - who was present in Rotterdam for a demonstration - was a revelation not only to her unsuspecting listeners but also to experts on Mongolian music, who found her performance very different from the styles with which they were familiar from their own fieldwork. Urna Chahartugchi comes from the little explored region of Ordos in Inner Mongolia.
The group songs which the musicologist Zhang Xingrong (Yunnan Art Institute) recorded in villages in southern China was greeted with similar amazement. The fact that China has a rich tradition of polyphonic singing in minority areas is no longer a secret, but the very complex, eight-part singing which Zhang discovered in his native province of Yunnan, with tonal patterns surprisingly close to Japanese music, was hailed as a novelty by everyone who was present at the meeting.
The obvious conclusion of "East Asian Voices" was that much more fieldwork is need to chart the numerous local traditions, and that the relationships between vocal repertoires in different countries in East Asia deserve much more joint study. A number of people pleaded for an increase in interdisciplinary fieldwork, preferably on an international basis. Collective research can bring to light many unexpected links between musical genres, no matter whether they be geographically remote or part of one of and the same local culture. One concrete proposal for such a joint project was discussed during the meeting: a combined field study of vocal and instrumental folk music genres in Northern Hunan (China). Potential participants include Professor Helen Rees (University of Florida, USA), Stephen Jones (SOAS London), Frank Kouwenhoven (CHIME Foundation), and Professor Tian Qing (Music Research Institute, Beijing). Professor Tian is a specialist of Buddhist music and was guest of honour at the East Asian Voices Meeting. They are now discussing a detailed blueprint for this project. In his keynote speech, Professor David Holm (Sydney) had already pleaded for combined research into the various musical genres and rituals within a given region.

Music for Gods or for Mortals?
The "Gods or Mortals" theme ran like a thread through the entire meeting and was the subject of several panel discussions. Some conclusions drawn during the meeting would probably apply to any part of East Asia. Professor David Holm signalled a gradual shift in ritual genres like nuozi (masked theatre in China) and other forms of religious theatre from "amusement for the gods" to "amusement for mortals", but he added that there was no question of a complete secularization of these genres.
The key element in all musical rituals remains the need to strike some sort of "deal" with the (spirits of) dead ancestors to secure prosperity and safety for their offspring. Professor Kristofer Schipper (of the Sinology Institute of Leiden University) supported this idea, but he expressed reservations about the terminology used in the discussion. Schipper regards the dichotomy "secular/religious" as a typical Western perspective, which cannot do full justice to the reality of Asian ritual traditions. Schipper believes that the word "gods" is misleading, too, because - in the Far East - it is blended completely with the concept of "ancestors".
He propose a new term - borrowed from New Age jargon - to address the problem of ritual in Asia from a more objective angle: "empowerment". In his view, the key question is how "divine" human participants are in rituals, and what kind of special powers do they allot themselves in ritual performances.
The relationship between religious notions and musical sounds was only touched upon very briefly in the discussions. Dr François Picard (Paris) observed that, contrary to what is often assumed, there are actually clear criteria to distinguish between ritual and non-ritual music, religious and secular repertoires, at least for a vast part of East Asian culture. He illustrated this with examples from China.
In general, participants in the meeting expressed their concern about the fact that musical rituals in countries like China and Vietnam are under a growing pressure from political censorship. The organized secularization of traditional culture in China, instigated by the Chinese government, is viewed especially as a matter of grave concern. In some speakers' views, it is part of a general trend to dissociate folk music from its original context and to manipulate it for propaganda purposes. In practice this often leads to Westernization.

New Styles and Westernization
The appearance of new musical styles and the element of Westernization was the theme of yet another session during "East Asian Voices". Valuable contributions came from Joanne Lee (New York), who surprised the audience with recordings of Christians psalms in Northern China (introduced by Western missionaries in previous centuries), and from Andreas Steen (Berlin) who drew attention to an even more unlikely mixture of cultural influences: Buddhist rock music. People who participated in "East Asian Voices" were able to acquaint themselves with many unfamiliar musical styles and did not mind stepping outside the boundaries of their own discipline. The practical workshops especially offered welcome opportunities to do this. Among the events noted as "highlights" were a player shômo singing (Japanese Buddhist chant) by Junko Ueda (Wereldmuziekschool Amsterdam), and a guqin workshop by Dai Xiaolian, a zither player from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The CHIME Foundation hopes to set up regular guqin courses in Holland in future.
Some activities during "East Asian Voices" were open to the public. This included a concert featuring a Nanguan ensemble from Taiwan (with classical love ballads) and other performers from China, Japan, and USA.
After the Rotterdam meeting there was a one-day, post-conference session in Leiden organized by the Research School CNWS, with contributions from participants in the CHIME meeting. A Chinese dinner in which everyone sang folk songs from his or her own native country formed an appropriate conclusion to the whole event.
There are plans for a follow-up meeting on East Asian instrumental music. possibly in Germany in 1997.

Proceedings of "East Asian Voices" will be published in vols. 10 and 11 of the CHIME Journal, which can be ordered from:

The CHIME Foundation
P.O.Box 11092
2301 EB Leiden
The Netherlands
Tel. +31-71-5133 123
Fax: +31-71-5123 183