The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language

The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language PDF Author: Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351885324
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language

The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language PDF Author: Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351885324
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

In the borderland between song and speech

In the borderland between song and speech PDF Author: Håkan Lundström
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9198557785
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a study of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song, based on performances from cultural contexts where oral transmission dominates. Approaches drawn from perspectives belonging to both ethnomusicology and linguistics are integrated in the analysis. As the idea of the performance template is employed as an analytical tool, the focus is on those techniques that make performance possible. The result is an increased understanding of what performers actually do when they employ variation or improvisation, and sometimes composition as well. The transmission of these culture-specific techniques is essential for the continuation of this form of human communication and interaction with the spirit world. By comparative study of other research, the result of the analysis is viewed in relation to ongoing processes in society.

The Women of Quyi

The Women of Quyi PDF Author: Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315307863
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing substantially on original ethnographic fieldwork from the 1980s and 1990s, Lawson demonstrates how the women of quyi - a community of Chinese female singers in Republican Tianjin - successfully negotiated their sexuality and vocality in performance. Owing to their role as third-person narrators, the women of quyi bridged the gender gap in Chinese performance, creating an androgynous persona that allowed them to showcase their voices on public stages; places that had been previously unwelcoming to conventional female performers. This is a story about female storytellers who sang their way to respectability and social change by minimizing their bodies to allow their voices to be heard.

The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora

The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora PDF Author: Distinguished Professor Yu Hui
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190661968
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora, twenty-three scholars advance knowledge and understandings of Chinese music studies. Each contribution develops a theoretical model to illuminate new insights into a key musical genre or context. This handbook is categorized into three parts. In Part One, authors explore the extensive, remarkable, and polyvocal historical legacies of Chinese music. Ranging from archaeological findings to the creation of music history, chapters address enduring historical practices and emerging cultural expressions. Part Two focuses on evolving practice across a spectrum of key instrumental and vocal genres. Each chapter provides a portrait of musical change, tying musical transformations to the social dimensions underpinning that change. Part Three responds to the role that prominent issues, including sexuality, humanism, the amateur, and ethnicity, play in the broad field of Chinese music studies. Scholars present systematic orientations for researchers in the third decade of the twenty-first century. This volume incorporates extensive input from researchers based in China, Taiwan, and among Chinese communities across the world. Using a model of collaborative inquiry, The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora features diverse insider voices alongside authors positioned across the anglophone world.

The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan's Buddhist Monasteries

The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan's Buddhist Monasteries PDF Author: Dr Beth Szczepanski
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140949523X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beth Szczepanski examines how traditional and modern elements interact in the current practice, reception and functions of wind music, or shengguan, at monasteries in Wutaishan, one of China's four holy mountains of Buddhism. The book provides an invaluable insight into the political and economic history of Wutaishan and its music, as well as the instrumentation, notation, repertoires, transmission and ritual function of monastic music at Wutaishan, and how that music has adapted to China's current economic, political and religious climate. The book is based on extensive field research at Wutaishan from 2005 to 2007, including interviews with monks, nuns, pilgrims and tourists. The author learned to play the sheng mouth organ and guanzi double-reed pipe, and recorded dozens of performances of monastic and lay music. The first extensive examination of Wutaishan's music by a Western scholar, the book brings a new perspective to a topic long favored by Chinese musicologists. At the same time, the book provides the non-musical scholar with an engaging exploration of the historical, political, economic and cultural forces that shape musical and religious practices in China.

Renegade Rhymes

Renegade Rhymes PDF Author: Meredith Schweig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226820580
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
A close look at how Taiwanese musicians are using rap music as a creative way to explore and reconcile Taiwanese identity and history. Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes, ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan. ​ Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present.

The Instructional Value of Digital Storytelling

The Instructional Value of Digital Storytelling PDF Author: Patricia McGee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135072736
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although storytelling has been recognized as an effective instructional strategy for some time, most educators are not informed about how to communicate a story that supports learning—particularly when using digital media. The Instructional Value of Digital Storytelling provides a broad overview of the concepts and traditions of storytelling and prepares professors, workplace trainers, and instructional designers to tell stories through 21st century media platforms, providing the skills critical to communication, lifelong learning, and professional success. Using clear and concise language, The Instructional Value of Digital Storytelling explains how and why storytelling can be used as a contemporary instructional method, particularly through social media, mobile technologies, and knowledge-based systems. Examples from different sectors and disciplines illustrate how and why effective digital stories are designed with learning theory in mind. Applications of storytelling in context are provided for diverse settings within higher education as well as both formal and informal adult learning contexts.

Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition

Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition PDF Author: Allen Scott
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253014565
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since it was first published in 1993, the Sourcebook for Research in Music has become an invaluable resource in musical scholarship. The balance between depth of content and brevity of format makes it ideal for use as a textbook for students, a reference work for faculty and professional musicians, and as an aid for librarians. The introductory chapter includes a comprehensive list of bibliographical terms with definitions; bibliographic terms in German, French, and Italian; and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems. Integrating helpful commentary to instruct the reader on the scope and usefulness of specific items, this updated and expanded edition accounts for the rapid growth in new editions of standard works, in fields such as ethnomusicology, performance practice, women in music, popular music, education, business, and music technology. These enhancements to its already extensive bibliographies ensures that the Sourcebook will continue to be an indispensable reference for years to come.

Improvisation and Composition in Balinese Gendér Wayang

Improvisation and Composition in Balinese Gendér Wayang PDF Author: Nicholas Gray
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409418320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Monografie over improvisatie en compositie in 'gendér wayang', een stijl van gamelanmuziek die gespeeld wordt op Bali.

Revolutionary Stagecraft

Revolutionary Stagecraft PDF Author: Tarryn Li-Min Chun
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903969
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China's scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.