1st Edition
The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language
Biography
Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson received an undergraduate degree in harp performance from BYU, an MA degree in ethnomusicology from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. She conducted research on the inter-relationships of language and music in the narrative arts of Tianjin, China as a Fulbright-Hays and National Academy of Sciences Research Fellow. She also worked as a President's Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and taught interdisciplinary courses in the Asian humanities and in gender-music relationships at Columbia University in New York City. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, USA.
"The book provides a strong outline of the structure of four shuochang genres as they were performed in the mid-to-late 1980s and demonstrates how the musical and textual elements are integral, as a unit, to the messages communicated in performance. This part of the book will be of good use to those interested in narrative arts in general and Chinese narrative arts in a transitional period in particular. The work of contextualizing this tradition more rigorously in the evolving cultural politics of Chinese society, however, remains to be done."
Lauren Meeker, SUNY New Paltz, Asian Ethnology 75/1 2016 pp.240
