Karin Mei Li Inouye and Dr. Dana Bourgerie, Asian Languages
In the village of Taicang, a small dirt road community tucked between a Ming dynasty capitol and a famous silk city, nationally acclaimed composer Gao Xuefeng combs the countryside rich in rice and fish for century old folk tunes around which he weaves a tapestry of music based on simple, yet haunting melodies. Along the Silk Road where Central Asia meets China, professor Zhou Jie leaves his local home in Kashgar to trek into the harsh mountain climes and the vast reaches of shifting desert to record ancient mukamus—folk tunes—found also in Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa. With strokes of luck and fortune, I ran across the tracks of both these sixty and seventy year old men during my own investigation on how physical, political, and social environments affect the content, style, transmission, and performance aspects of folk music, and through their efforts learned more about the preservation of folk music than I could have learned on my own.
Equipped with a digital video recorder, digital camera, and mp3 recording device, I left Nanjing, where I’d been interning at Dongfang magazine as a travel writer and at Yangtze Evening Paper as a cultural correspondent for the past year as a BYU Flagship fellow, to record, compare, and contrast environmental, political, and social effects on folk music in Jiangsu and Xinjiang. From Nanjing, my erhu—Chinese two-stringed instrument—professor, Dong Jinming, drove me three hours along Jiangsu highways to the bumpy dirt roads of Taicang where the Taicang Office of Cultural Affairs assigned the head of the Office of Commercial Affairs to accommodate our visit. With letters of introduction from Nanjing University, I was allowed to record methods of folk music transmission from a near ninety-year-old peasant to middle-aged farmers, schoolteachers and elementary school children. I was impressed to see these groups gathered in concrete walled rooms practicing local folk tunes under the direction of this frail man who played the erhu and pipa with simple ornamentation differing from the heavily stylized techniques of my professionally trained erhu teacher. I was also granted interviews with composer Gao Xuefeng and folk music researcher Zhang Xiaofeng who answered my questions on the origins, developments, and evolution of Jiangnan Sizhu folk music in its social, economic, political and environmental contexts. These men presented me with various recordings and collections of Jiangnan Sizhu folk tunes for further study on how the rich, elaborate ornamentation of their music reflects the wealth, comfort level, and prosperity of Jiangsu’s fertile region and temperate climate.
Traveling next to the northwest reaches of China to Xinjiang province, an autonomous region of China populated by the Uighur ethnic minority group, Kazakh descendents with a Muslim faith, I found lively, colorful, simple folk music reflecting the lonely life of nomads and the joy of oasis gathering. Through hit and miss attempts to locate Uighur folk music specialists and local musicians at universities, in villages, at art venues, I was led to Uighur students at Urumqi Performing Arts University who explained their instruments’ origins, function, and styles to me and their personal history with their instruments as well as their choice to study folk music professionally. I also met with various folk music professors at Xinjiang University who directed me to other specialists, books, and recordings that would assist me in my studies of origins, developments, transmissions, and preservation of Uighur folk music. Disembarking from trains stopping in the remote but culturally significant Turpan and Kashgar, I booked private music and dance performances, stumbled upon local peasants playing folk tune, or wandered into instrument shops, and was allowed to interview the musicians and record their survival songs, dancing, costumes, and culture.
While the effect of environment was evident in the instruments, styles, and lyrics of the folk music I encountered in fertile Jiangsu and harsh Xinjiang, I wasn’t able to satisfy my original questions of tracking political changes and the shift of values in folk music. Professors told me that the ancient nature of folk tunes transcended social and political changes, but locals told me that the tunes and lyrics had been changed during Chairman Mao’s Communist regime where the peasant proletariat was used to exemplify the ideal. Contrary and incomplete information has convinced me to do further research into the lyrics of the songs collected with the intent of picking out musical and lyrical patterns that match the social, economic, and political changes of the regions. This would involve a return to Jiangsu and Xinjiang, possibly on a Fulbright, to do more in depth research on the evolution of one of these two locales’ folk music.
Overall, I am satisfied with the recordings and materials gathered as well as the contacts established. I am currently using the details of my experience in poems, memoir essays, creative non-fiction, and short stories while pursuing my creative writing MFA degree at Hollins University. Also, still in contact with Dongfang Magazine in Nanjing, China, I am writing a travel piece constructed around a musical journey into Xinjiang. Finally, I am working on a documentary about Xinjiang mukamus to submit to Utah’s annual folklore conference. This documentary will require a time extension in order to write the script, arrange the footage, and apply subtitles.