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Katie Dimmery - Review of Beth Szczepanski, The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan’s Buddhist Monasteries: Social and Ritual Contexts

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In The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan’s Buddhist Monasteries: Social and Ritual Contexts, ethnomusicologist Beth Szczepanski offers an account of shengguan, a form of instrumental wind music performed in Buddhist monastic rituals at Wutaishan, one of China’s four Buddhist holy mountains. Szczepanski’s analysis draws on eleven months of fieldwork, during which she lived at Wutaishan, studied two different shengguan instruments (the mouth organ and double-reed pipe), attended ceremonies at different monasteries, and spoke with and interviewed monks and other Wutaishan residents.

Though primarily an ethnography of contemporary shengguan practice, the book traces this music back to its legendary origins in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) and follows it through more recent travails in the last two centuries. Weakened by modernizing campaigns and the Japanese invasion of the early 1900s, shengguan suffered again in the 1950s as new government policies redistributed monastic land and restricted Buddhist rituals (16). Later, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), shengguan practice “came to a complete halt” but recovered gradually starting in the late 1970s (18). Most recently, it has become a tourist attraction, and in 2006 gained recognition as an item of national intangible cultural heritage (147). Taken as a whole, the book offers an intriguing portrait of shengguan’s role in monastic life, its shifting relations with the Chinese state, and its growing involvement in transnational dialogues, primarily through heritage tourism.

Of course, as Szczepanski makes clear, shengguan is not now, nor was it ever, a coherent object. In Wutaishan, there are two separate musical traditions, corresponding to the two versions of Buddhism—Tibeto-Mongolian and Chinese--practiced at different monasteries. But most significant to Szczepanski’s analysis is a crisis of memory: because shengguan practice lapsed for several decades beginning in the 1950s, its revival involved a great deal of brain-wracking and creativity, and the musical reconstruction process followed different paths at each monastery.

Szczepanski’s exploration of musical transmission is one of the most thought-provoking sections of the book. During her time at Wutaishan, Szczepanski learned an old system of musical notation known as gongchepu, which uses Chinese characters to record pitches (87). Though gongchepu was once used across China, it was displaced by European cipher notation (jianpu) starting in the late-nineteenth century, and is used now in only a few scattered places.

Gongchepu’s displacement is linked, perhaps, to its ambiguously textual character. “Reading” it is not a matter of one-to-one translation between written symbols and sounds, but rather of structured innovation: part of a monk’s musical education involves learning how, in performance, to “flesh out” sparse gongchepu scores by improvising “ornamental” pitches, tones, and turns (95-96). Similarly, only some conventions of shengguan music are recorded in gongchepu; others relating to octave and rhythm must be learned “by ear” (93). This section thus offers a great deal of insight into transmission processes occurring simultaneously in oral and written modes, but it is most provocative for the perspective it offers on preservation.

Though gongchepu is increasingly valued as a form of heritage, practitioners have begun to subject it to the norms of Western music. Specifically, shengguan teachers “downplay traditional octave designations” (still recorded in many gongchepu scores) in order to make gongchepu more compatible with the Western major scale (97). Thus the move to teach musical octaves by ear is likely a recent development, aimed at “preserving” the written notation while making the learning process more amenable to Western norms. In this case, the drive for preservation plays a powerful, if unacknowledged, role in transmission, and may obscure other forms of change, such as gongchepu’s increasing alignment in practice with Western music.

Underlying these politics of performance and transmission is an intricate economic web with a long history of its own. Donor-sponsored rituals, which “secure blessings for the state and for lay believers” (37), are one of the ways that Buddhist temples have raised money throughout Chinese history. Because Communist land reform policies stripped monasteries of the bulk of their land-holdings (another key source of income), today’s monasteries rely even more heavily on rituals for their income. And while many such rituals are still sponsored by government officials, they have become increasingly involved in tourism, as visitors from other parts of China sponsor them as well.

Szczepanski makes it clear that shengguan is a rich, complex practice; however, her analysis points to several larger questions that it never puts fully into words. Implicated in notions of “tradition,” audiences at different degrees of remove, and local understandings of the aforesaid, are tricky questions that lurk at the edges of more analyses than Szczepanski’s. But it may be helpful to try to pin them down more firmly.

A key question concerns the ideological weight of revival in modern China. In many ways, Szczepanski tells a familiar tale, of an artistic form with deep religious roots that was abandoned for decades starting in the 1950s, then gradually revived/reconstructed, but in a secular mode, after the Cultural Revolution. In ensuing years, the revived object gained tourist appeal, and eventually “heritage” status. This schematic history describes many cultural forms in modern China, and invites comparison across cases. More fundamentally, it demands some consideration of the relationship between the formation of the modern Chinese state, which proceeded along explicitly anti-traditional lines, and the increasing importance of heritage revival in local and national Chinese contexts.

So what is the value of heritage in these cases? There is no simple answer to this question, either, but it is hard to imagine any scenario in which that value resides solely in cultural continuity—or profit. Certainly, the possession of heritage leads to expanded participation in a variety of new, far-flung conversations, and often, I suspect, is pursued with these ends in mind.

Another question concerns the nature of awareness of these “marginal” informants, the practitioners of shengguan music. Though it seems clear that their visions of revival and heritage draw on national and international sources, their knowledge of these contexts must be formed in Wutaishan, and shaped by local circumstances. How exactly do such interchanges work? Finally, these monks’ visions of heritage must include notions of audience, which, regardless of their objective truth, will inform shengguan practice (and seem involved in gongchepu’s recent transformations). It therefore seems reasonable to ask how these monks conceive of their relationships to a variety of publics, whether real, imaginary, or some combination of both.[1]

Such questions fall under the rubric of a variety of terms—“commodification,” “globalization,” and “modernization” come to mind--but the terms seem blunt in the face of such nuanced, internationally-informed but highly localized, calculation. And they feel a bit cold, too, in view of the emotional stake that these monks seem to attach to the achievement—through heritage—of something: recognition, “voice,” or perhaps a simpler thing, conversation? How one ought to speak of these phenomena seems to me the central ethnographic problem of the book, but throughout the text, it remains unresolved and largely unstated.

I would sum up my fascination and frustration with Instrumental Music through reference to two images. In an introductory vignette, Szczepanski describes “the Buddha with a new face,” a Wutaishan sculpture whose face was “chiselled away” during the Cultural Revolution and repaired years later, but poorly: the new visage has lips like “clay snakes” and a topknot “reminiscent of the American televangelist’s bouffant” (2). Then in ensuing chapters, Szczepanski recalls a monk who sought her help in advertising on an American dating website, but met with limited success, perhaps because of his “opening chat line”: “Hi! I’m a monk in China!” (125). In this way, readers encounter two scenarios: of artistic revival in China, and of an increasingly far-flung, but deeply fractured, dialogue. Though it seems clear that this dialogue has in many ways given shape to the revival, the implications of each circumstance, as well as the nature of their connection, remain unclear.

[1] Thanks to Chad Buterbaugh for several excellent conversations on these topics, and especially for his thoughts on the “performative intentions” of marginal folk.

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[Review length: 1323 words • Review posted on October 8, 2014]