1st Edition
The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language
In studying one of the world's oldest and most enduring musical cultures, academics have consistently missed one of the richest forms of Chinese cultural expression: performed narratives. Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson explores the relationships between language and music in the performance of four narrative genres in the city of Tianjin, China, based upon original field research conducted in the People's Republic of China in the mid 1980s and in 1991. The author emphasizes the unique nature of oral performances in China: these genres are both musical and literary and yet are considered to be neither music nor literature. Lawson employs extensive examples of the complex interaction of music and language in each genre, all the while relating those analyses to broader cultural issues and to patterns of social relationships. The narrative arts known as shuochang (speaking-singing) are depicted as genres that constitute a unique communicative discourse”the communication of stories in song. The genres subsumed under the native conception of shuochang include Tianjin Popular Tunes, Beijing Drumsong, Clappertales and Comic Routines. The maximum utilization of shuo (speaking) and chang (singing) in all their varying manifestations constitutes the vitality of the traditional narrative arts in the city of Tianjin”the center for these arts in North China. The variety of narrative forms provides entertainment for audiences representing all social strata of Chinese society. The author argues that Chinese narrative traditions represent a foundation from which certain Chinese literary and operatic traditions have borrowed, such as how the novels from the Ming-Qing period draw on the performed narrative arts both in style and in content. Hence, an understanding of performed narratives is not only useful to scholars in Chinese literature and music, but also to scholars interested in broadening their understanding of China generally.
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
