Photo 1: Jin Wenyin, folk singer and folk song collector [p.64]
The book starts with an overview in Chapter 1, 'Folk song studies in China - A general perspective'. In this part the reader will find sections on song collections in and outside China, a brief description of ethnomusicology in China and Western research, and a discussion of the term shan'ge. In the Wu area studied, the word shan'ge covers a wide range of 'songs'. The vast majority of these songs is based on a very limited number of tunes, to which hundreds of different texts are sung (p.21).
The second chapter is called 'Introduction to the Wu folk song culture and fieldwork experiences'. It presents a description of the Wu area and its inhabitants, a review of earlier studies of Wu songs, and a fairly detailed account of the fieldwork methods and techniques applied by Antoinette Schimmelpenninck and her companion Frank Kouwenhoven. They made several trips to the field to collect materials from about one hundred singers. In the very useful Appendices one may find the following overviews:
Interviews and songs were recorded with sound equipment as well as video and photo camera. In most villages the researchers were unable to stay for more than one or two days; local officials were needed to do the research, but Antoinette Schimmelpenninck was not able to pay for their support and co-operation. The solution was to make short and repeated visits to the villages. The quality of the support given by local officials was not always satisfactory. For instance, during interviews with the singers, many officials would give their own answers instead of translating the questions to the singers. There were other restrictions, like infra-structural and communications problems, and severe weather conditions: no heating in the cold winter, very hot weather in summer, and torrential rainfall (p.44-7).
After these two introductory chapters, we come to the three large chapters forming the essence of the book: the singers, the texts, and the music. Chapter 3, 'The singers' , also includes a discussion of the different kinds of songs. It starts with a sketch of the social background of the singers, and presents short life histories of five of them. About seventy-five percent of the singers interviewed were farmers, fishermen, factory workers, or construction workers; the other twenty-five percent included shopkeepers, nurses, and cultural cadres, and beggars. Forty percent of the recorded singers were women. From the life histories of some of the singers it is very clear how much they have suffered from the political climate since the mid-fifties, and especially during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966. During that period the shan'ge love songs were called 'old rubbish' (p.64), and the traditional singers were no longer allowed to sing them, or they had to use propaganda texts set to the traditional tunes. Many folk song books were burnt, and the singers were often maltreated. In this way the singer Jin Wenyin (born 1927), teacher and cultural worker, lost many of the books and song texts, which he had collected. In 1979 he was restored to his former post as cultural worker, and started anew to collect the texts of the songs sung to him.
The political climate between the 1950s and the 1970s goes part of the way towards explaining why there is a gap in the ages of singers. One generation of singers were unable to learn the songs by being exposed to them. Many older singers were still afraid to sing the traditional, often erotic, texts many years after the Cultural Revolution (p.135).
The term shan'ge is discussed in more detail at the end of this third chapter, and the conclusion is that shan'ge in the Wu area can best be translated as 'rural song'; singers in this area use the term for about ninety percent of their songs (p. 129).
The fourth chapter deals with the song texts. The first part focuses on the content of the most popular type, that is, love songs. The different paragraphs include
The best way to make contact with girls is by singing shan'ge it says in one song: 'If you sing shan'ge you'll find it easy to court' (p. 152). About fifty percent of the songs collected by the author deals with one or another aspect of love, usually about private and forbidden love relations, not authorized by the parents or by marital bonds. Longing for love is a prominent theme and usually expressed from the viewpoint of a young woman, but sung mostly by men. Many songs contain erotic metaphors, and sometimes the allusions to sex are fairly direct and coarse. Some song texts are considered 'really dirty', and therefore it is said in a riddle song that the shan'ge singer dies with rotten teeth (p. 169). The author points out that the 'villagers largely accept erotic songs as an inherent - rather than shocking or "immoral" - part of their song culture'. However, collecting erotic songs has often evoked strong resistance among scholars and government officials (p. 142-3).
The second part of this chapter deals with matters of structure and style. Stanza structure, rhyme, and rhythm are discussed, and in particular, the use of formulae and improvised extensions of text (jikou). As well as this, the textual variation of nineteen versions of one particular song is examined. The Wu song is not fixed (p.144).
The fifth and last chapter, 'The Music', is the largest of all, and just over one hundred pages long. It presents general characteristics of the shan'ge and many pages with musical transcriptions of the recorded songs. In most shan'ge the musical unit or 'tune' corresponds to one four-line stanza.
Below the transcriptions of eleven performances of a particular shan'ge 'tune' in Example 3, are reproduced. The last two sections, C and D, are presented here below the sections A and B, instead of on the right-hand side page in the book. In the book each line represents one performance of the shan'ge tune, and the different performances can easily be compared. The first six lines of musical example 3 are transcriptions of six different performances of a shan'ge tune by one singer on different occasions. The sections A to D represent the four lines of the text. Antoinette Schimmelpenninck calls this the 'wu-a-hei-hei' tune, after the high passage on these words in part A.
Musical Transcriptions page 234 (section A, Ex.3):
Musical Transcriptions page 234 (section B, Ex.3):
Musical Transcriptions page 235 (section C, Ex.3):
Musical Transcriptions page 235 (section D, Ex.3):
In Audio Example 1 sections A and B of the 'wu-a-hei-hei' tune can be heard, as sung by Jiang Liansheng, and transcribed in line 7 above.
 Audio 1 |
Sections A and B of the 'wu-a-hei-hei' tune, as sung by Jiang Liansheng.
951 KB, filetype: au |
The 'wu-a-hei-hei' tune serves as an initial example of the 'monothematism': one singer uses only one or two of such tunes to sing all shan'ge texts, and other singers may use 'the same tune', with variations. The musical characteristics of the common 'wu-a-hei-hei' tune are described, touching upon such matters as the parallelism in sections B and D, and parallel elements in A and C (p. 237-8), the use of glissandi, 'bridge', motifs between A-B and between C-D, cadential phrases, etc. Other tunes are similarly described, and in section 5.7 the Wu area is depicted as a network of closely related tunes.
The last part of this chapter is devoted to some aspects of the relationship between music and words (there is 'dominance of poetry over music', p.302), and the musical characteristics of shan'ge are compared to other song types, like xiaodiao. See for an Audio Example of such xiaodiao song and another example of a shan'ge my 'Ethnomusicology in the Netherlands since 1960, section 5, Audio Examples 3 and 4' , in Oideion; Performing arts online, Issue 1.
This study is a very welcome addition to the study of music. The documentation of texts, in combination with CD and the transcription of the music, affords excellent information. Despite its excellence, I still do have some critical comments. It is a pity that now and then value statements, which could easily have been avoided, crop up. For instance, Chapter 5 starts with 'One's first experience with the sounds of Wu folk songs may come as a pleasant surprise'. The author goes on to say that Western listeners might be expecting to hear something like Chinese opera, or a music 'reminiscent of the arranged "folk songs" sung by popular Chinese radio and television stars' (p.223). It is irrelevant to know that the author does not like Chinese opera and 'arranged folk songs' very much. Omitting the word 'pleasant' in the first sentence would have been much better.
A wealth of data may also have a negative side, if not enough attention is given to theoretical reflections and analysis. I would have preferred the balance to be more in favour of theoretical reflections and analyses, and less on data. I shall explain this with two examples: the use of the term 'folk', and the method used in transcribing the music.
These days the use of the term 'folk' is very problematic. Many (ethno)musicologists no longer know what a 'folk song' is. Antoinette Schimmelpenninck is aware of this problem and mentions in footnote 1, page x, that in her study: '... the word "folk" should be understood in a very general sense, without any depreciatory connotations: "folk song" denotes songs which are sung in the countryside, in a domestic context or in the fields, and which belong to a local, historical tradition of (mainly unaccompanied) oral poetry; "folk" refers to villagers, regardless of their economic, professional or educational status.' I think that the term 'folk' could have been avoided altogether in this study by just using 'song', but if used, I would have appreciated a more thorough discussion of this problematic term. For instance, are the work-songs and xiaodiao of the urban areas no 'folk songs'?
I am not satisfied with the music notation. On page 227 it is mentioned that in the transcriptions an attempt was made 'to show as much detail as could be discerned by ear at normal playing speed.' While trying to be as precise as possible, we should avoid nonsensical exactness. For instance, on page 251, Example 14, line 4, the sixteenth notes are punctuated. On page 264, Example 27, first line, instead of 4 sixteenth notes, we see two subdivisions into three, with one note lasting two-thirds of an eighth note, and the other one-third of an eighth note. This precise notation is of no use to the reader, as the variation between the singers, or the variation between different performances of one singer, is of much larger compass than such subtleties. Maybe such precise transcription has some function in an earlier stage of analysis, but not in the final version of the book. Such detailed notation makes the transcriptions difficult to read, and, even more importantly, it clouds the discussion on the difficult distinction between melody line ('structure', 'tune'), and ornament ('detail', 'variation'). For instance, do the shan'ge as transcribed in Example 3 (see above) all have the note 'a' as the last 'structural' note, in which case the last notes g are not 'structural', or are the last notes 'g' all 'structural'? The answer to this question is important if we want to discuss the musical modes used in shan'ge. In this case the author's notation seems pretty clear to me.
Nevertheless, the crucial concept of musical modes is not addressed. When the sound source itself, the CD, is available to the reader, the explanation of structural aspects and classification of ornaments are far more important than a (too) detailed notation of the music.
I do not hesitate to add these critical notes to this book, because it has so many excellent qualities. Undoubtedly, this book and the accompanying CD will be an important source for the study of Wu songs for many years to come. I whole-heartedly recommend it.