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Chordophones and Culture: Fine-tuning Ethnic, National and Global Meanings of Three Asian Lutes
Organizer: James Millward, Georgetown University
Chair: Caroline Reeves, Emmanuel College
While analyses of textual / visual sources are commonplace at the AAS, the annual meetings have featured few papers on music. Yet music too can reflect historical change and be a vehicle for cultural meaning. This panel combines approaches of history, anthropology, ethnomusicology and material culture to examine the processes whereby long-necked lutes from South Asia, Central Asia, and China became generally acknowledged exemplars of their respective ethno-national traditions. The sitar, the rewap, and the pipa each in its own way now serves as the musical avatar of their respective nations—so much so that one or two plucked notes can instantly evoke the place in question, and are frequently used for just that purpose in film, advertising and other media. Yet these instruments come to their "traditional" homes as a result of past pan-Eurasian exchanges, and in their present forms are in fact thoroughly worked-over, modern things: their morphology, sonic quality, pedagogy, repertoire and performance context, as well as the non-musical associations that cling to each, have all undergone extensive transformations in the twentieth century. These transformations owe something to state cultural policies and centralized academic projects, but also reflect popular agency and the efforts of individual musicians and lutiers. Most striking is the influence of the global context in which each lute and its music now exists, be it through UNESCO recognition of the Uyghur muqam, the influence of Indian music upon international pop and "world" music, or the way in which international rather than domestic acclaim often elevates performers of sitar or pipa to "master" status. Note:
Because of its interdisciplinary and comparative approach, this panel is proposed as a Border-crossing / Inter-area panel. We have contacted an ethnomusicologist and performer of Arabic music to serve as a discussant; uncertainty about his schedule next March precludes us from listing him definitively here as participant. He will know soon, however, and his participation will bring an additional valuable perspective to our papers: each of our lutes are connected to the instruments and music of the Mediterranean basin, which have themselves undergone processes similar to those we discuss in our papers.
From Camelback to Carnegie Hall: the Global Journey and Modern Makeover of the Pipa
James Millward, Georgetown University
The headline of a 2004 cultural item on www.people.com (Renminwang) announces, "Erhu and Pipa Both 'Foreign' (yang) Instruments." That this revelation could be news to Chinese readers is the result of some 2000 years of Chinese domestication of these west Asian musical instruments. In the case of the pipa, however, it is still more the outcome of a modern process, the creation of a national music to represent China on the global stage. Categorized as "silk" in the ancient bayin system and comprising the si in the traditional sizhu (silk and bamboo) musical ensemble, the modern pipa has no silk in it. Today's steel and metal-wound nylon strings are played with plastic or tortoiseshell picks fastened to the performers' fingers with medical tape. The instrument has over 20 frets, as opposed to 5 or 6 in the Tang period, and can produce an equal-tempered chromatic scale in standard A = 440 tuning and even change keys mid-song. The pipa's sounds, of raindrops or intimate whispers as in Bai Juyi's simile, are now audible even from the high concert stage.
This paper reviews the probable derivation of the pipa from the Persian barbat and outlines its history and cultural associations in China through the twentieth century. It then focuses on the 20th century work to render the pipa and its repertoire fit for solo performance before mass audiences, and for large Chinese or even symphonic ensembles. I note the irony of this transformation: the modernization of the pipa as a Chinese national instrument entailed reworking it to fit the musical standards and contexts of polyphonic Western music. Originally arriving in China via silkroad cultural contacts, the pipa's nationalization was simultaneously an act of globalization.
The Sitar as a Musical Icon: Structural, Stylistic, and Cultural Evolution from the 19th into the 21st century
Brian Silver, Voice of America
This paper will examine the current status of the sitar as the most widely recognized instrument of Indian classical music. It will begin with a brief examination of its mythic and actual origins, and proceed through the documentable structural and stylistic evolution of the traditional instrument based on pictorial and recorded sources. Its introduction to the world concert stage and recorded repertoire in the mid-twentieth century will be a central focus, with particular attention to the two main traditions of sitar playing that have emerged—that of the late Ustad Vilayat Khan and his gharana (school), and that of Ravi Shankar. Looking in a broader cultural context, the paper will explore the emergence of the sitar as a global symbol—even to the point of caricature—of Indian music, addressing adaptations, both successful and unsuccessful, of the sitar in western music, along with a more general examination of the emergence of Indian melody and rhythm as a source of inspiration for new music.
Towards a Uyghur Musical Instrument: Reinventing the Central Asian Rawap in Northwest China
Chuen-Fung Wong, Macalester College
Minority musical cultures in China have offered wide-ranging examples for studying issues of domestic orientalism and peripheral subjectivity. Following this line of inquiry, this paper looks at minority traditional music as a process of interplay between state control and ethno-national resistance. It concerns the rich musical traditions of the Uyghur, a Central Asian Turkic Muslim group of around nine million residing in the northwest outpost of the People's Republic, of which they have become often reluctant citizens. I focus primarily on the rawap, a seven-string Uyghur plucked lute that is well-known to non-Uyghurs in China through representations in state-produced films and by the tourist industry. Through interpreting the representation of the rawap in several musically informed films and disentangling the trajectory of reforms made to the instrument, I illustrate how this high-profile minority musical instrument is emblematic of the dual processes of cultural modernization and ethno-nationalism in interaction with the state's cultural policy over the last fifty years. I argue that state-sponsored cultural modernization projects since the 1950s have reinvented the rawap from a regional accompanying instrument of southern Xinjiang to a modern pan-Uyghur solo instrument. In this process, the rawap is portrayed as indigenous instrument that is not only historical and traditional, but also transformable in compliance with the progressive revolutionary ideal, to fulfill the incessant demands for reform and development. I further suggest that, far from seeing such modernized musical forms as impositions of much-detested socialist reform, Uyghur nationalists prefer to view and use them as powerful emblems for the assertion of political identity and as vehicles to express nationalistic sentiments.