In her book, The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language, Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson has made an exhaustive analysis of this narrative art on the basis of long-term, deep fieldwork in Tianjin, with a detailed description of its background, appendices, many vivid photos, and an attached CD.
Lawson has had full and strict training in ethnomusicology. Compared to similar studies by scholars such as Mark Bender and Vibeke Bordahl, the special contribution of this book is the deep discussion of the interesting relationship between shuo and chang, speaking and singing, literature and music. The writer selects four typical genres of shuochang arts of Tianjin—Tianjin popular tunes, Beijing drumsong, fast clapper tales, and comic routines—as her objects of study, and based upon long-term fieldwork and first-hand experiences, she elaborates on the features of each genre accurately. With a creative application of Fredric Lieberman’s view on the relationship of speech and music as the analytical frame to investigate the relationship between shuo and chang, literature and music, Lawson discovers that shuochang arts are a group of genres that “constitute a unique communicative discourse—the communication of stories in song.”
Paying close attention to social relationships, the writer’s exposition goes beyond static analysis of the structure of shuochang into the lively presentation of many significant elements such as social hierarchies, relationships of equality, and gender. The direct citation of some local words and phrases such as “face” and guanxi provides a good visual angle for the readers to understand the community traditions that dominate performances. For instance, the thick description of the events happening during the “final banquet” faithfully and carefully shows the complex interpersonal relationships and guild regulations in this particular cultural context.
The writer does not simply dissect the aesthetic characteristics, the structural elements, and the performing skills of each genre, but she also attempts to reveal connections between the social background and the performers, through tracing the history of shuochang arts and observing performers’ daily lives closely. With a view to the connection of structural aesthetics to the genres’ cultural background and social expectations, the research isn’t limited to internal structural analysis but steps forth into external social, cultural, and political studies, which make the analysis in the book not only structural but also dynamic.
Still, it cannot be denied that there are some unsatisfying moments in the book. Although the writer emphasizes that her work doesn’t follow the classical research paradigm of Albert B. Lord, most of her analysis in fact still focuses on texts; even in her attention to specific performances, her analysis still comes down to the kind of conclusions found in The Singer of Tales. While scholars such as Mark Bender are searching for approaches to the skills needed to transverse between shuo and chang in multiple performance contexts, Lawson’s book merely pays attention to the patterns of the interaction between shuo and chang. Yet the context and background described in detail earlier are ignored in her later analysis of certain genres.
In my view, Part I (on background) and Part II (on performances) give us an elaborate and vivid picture of the narrative arts, which helps readers to learn about Tianjin shuochang, but the writer does not succeed in establishing a strong connection between these two parts. The description of the background should serve the performance section that follows, but these don’t seem to have any necessary ties.
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[Review length: 563 words • Review posted on December 14, 2011]