Two Chinese Pieces on Pipa

Title:  “A Moonlit Night On The Spring River” and “Ambush from 10 Sides”

Performers:  Vivian Ge

Culture:  Chinese

Orchestration:  Pipa

            Here’s another video that includes performance as well as some verbal explanation of the tradition from which come the music and the performer.  According to miss Ge, the Pipa has a history of over two thousand years.  That’s coming from a musical history—Chinese musical history—of upwards of 7000 years!  It’s awesome that these traditions have been preserved for so long…

            Or have they?  One of the most important bits of cultural context I’ve gotten from my reading about China has involved political and musical reform implemented since 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established and a new movement to unite the peoples of China through music began.  New musical genres, especially involving large, westernized ensembles (like traditional European classical orchestras, but with Chinese instruments), were created for the purpose of popularizing guoyue, or literally “music of the nation.”  Since then, much appreciation has been shown for folk genres, instruments, and musicians, and conservatories have been established for the purpose of producing highly skilled musicians.

This brings me to the topic of authenticity.  How do we know that the music performed in this video is authentic?  Vivian Ge doesn’t actually say that she’s playing folk music, although she does mention that the Pipa “has always had the title of being the king of folk music.”  I don’t know how much formal training, if any, miss Ge has received, but I guess it’s possible that this performance is pretty close to authentic or way off.

Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha - Tabla Solo in Jhaptal

Title:  Tabla Solo in Jhaptal

Performers:  Ustad Allah Rakha Khan (co-hosted by Ravi Shankar)

Culture:  Hindustani classical music, often referred to as North Indian classical music or Shāstriya Sangīt

Orchestration:  Tabla (includes right-hand drum “tabla” and left-hand drum “baya”)

Indian classical music fascinates me, and it is really cool to see a segment of a performance dedicated to some explanation of the tabla.  Something that continues to impress me about this music is the thoroughness with which the system within it has been organized and categorized.  For instance, that each of the sounds produced on the table and baya has a corresponding syllable, as demonstrated by the two musicians in the video, is really awesome because this probably allows well-practiced Indian classical musicians to communicate about the denoted sounds and rhythms much more effectively than if they were all just sort of using their own idiosyncratic sets of onomatopoeia to discuss them.  I wonder how long the use of these syllables has been a part of the North Indian classical music tradition and how helpful they have been in transmitting teachings of the music to later generations.

Song of the Grass-Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma)

Title:  Song of the Grass-Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma)

Composer/Performer(s):  Protesters of Chinese censorship of free speech (2^nd video: plus Ai Weiwei, influential Chinese artist and political activist)

Culture:  Chinese

Orchestration:  Voices (either children or altered (pitch-raised) adults.  I’m not sure.); some typical western traditional orchestral instruments (synthesized, I think) including flute, xylophone, and percussion.

This piece seems, on the surface very benign—nothing more than some children’s song (at least if you can’t speak Chinese and have only read a very literal translation of the lyrics).  However, the song is filled with phrases that sound much like Chinese profanity.  Censorship and barring of free speech are currently huge issues in China, and this song is a means of protest; real profanity would be censored by the Chinese government, but something that sounds like profanity but isn’t, makes it through.  This is a great example of the people of a culture making music meaningful and useful for them.  The song is useful for protest and venting frustration, and it means, to those who understand spoken Chinese, something very different than what it says.

The second video is of artist and political activist Ai Weiwei singing along with the song as repayment to numerous supporters who helped to pay a fine slapped on him by the Chinese government.  At one point in 2011 Weiwei “disappeared” and was interrogated in secrecy by Chinese officers concerning his protest of the government…for 81 days.  To find out more about Ai Weiwei and issues in China, see the website for the documentary recently done on him, Never Sorry, or, if you have the option, the documentary itself on Netflix (DVD also available?).

Here’s the YouTube description of the first video:

“According to the New York Times, "The Grass-Mud Horse" is a mythical creature whose name in Chinese sounds like "fuck your mother". These horses face a “problem: invading river crabs that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, river crab sounds very much like harmony, which in Chinas cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been harmonized — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintaos regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.

“While grass-mud horse sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus, the beast has dodged the Chinese governments efforts to censor information over the Internet that is seditious or inflammatory.

“Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the grass-mud horse is an icon of resistance to censorship.
童声合唱：草泥马之歌”

Good Horses

Title:  Eki A’ttar (Good Horses)

Performers: Paul Pena (composer of "Jet Airliner") and Kongar-ool Ondar (see "chanzy" and "xöömei" below)

Culture:  Mix of American and Tuvan

Orchestration: resonator guitar played using bottleneck slide; chanzy; singers using xöömei (Khoomei) or throat-singing techniques

I really like throat singing.  A lot.

I also think that this style of singing is a great example of how “people make music meaningful and useful in their lives.”  The people of Tuva are, or at least were once, very nomadic and dependent on horses and other animals, as well as very connected with nature in general.  The many styles of xöömei reflect this, as they are all meant to “mimic and interact with the sounds of the natural world.”  With enough chances, I might have eventually guessed that the sounds of xöömei imitate those in nature and were not just meant to be ridiculously cool—although of course they are—but it was the people of Tuva that gave the music that meaning for them.  The connection between the music and the lifestyle of the people who made it shows that this music had a lot of meaning for them.

Also, the juxtaposition of the musics of two “cowboy cultures,” on top of being a snapshot of the evolutions of those cultures, is just awesome.

Digital Buddha

Title:  Digital Buddha

Performer/Composer:  Jin Hi Kim

Culture:  Korean/eclectic

Orchestration:  The world's first electric komungo used in combination with electronic effect pedals


I was lucky enough to see and hear Jin Hi Kim perform on her own as part of the International Arts and Ideas festival in New Haven and with the New Haven Symphony, both on previously-performed works and ones being premiered.  She briefly explained her "living tones" compositional method in which each tone played is treated with utmost respect and as if it has its "own life."  She also talked about her passion for composing and intertwining the worlds of Korean komungo music with other musics of the world.

I definitely consider this music--although it involves effect pedals, with which I am somewhat experienced--to be at least mostly outside my own culture.  After all the reading I did about the importance, varying definitions, and debate surrounding authenticity and cultural context, I have to wonder, would this music be counted as "authentic?"  If authenticity is a concept that implies a static, unchanging tradition, then my guess is that this would not be considered very authentic, obviously because of its inclusion of electronics used to alter the sound of the instrument (similarly to how this video uses a lot of trippy visual effects and filters, in live performance it is accompanied by projections on a screen and so is an even more multi-media-oriented experience); that doesn't seem very "folky" or idiomatic.  But if authenticity is a concept that, other than by bringing attention to the need for attention to cultural context in the classroom, only serves to perpetuate an unattainable ideal "one" right way to perform a given style of music and distracts us from the fact that music is always evolving, then how important is it to classify it as being or not being authentic?