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Presence Through Sound

Presence Through Sound narrates and analyses, through a range of case studies
on selected musics of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Tibet, some of the many
ways in which music and ‘place’ intersect and are interwoven with meaning in
East Asia. It explores how place is significant to the many contexts in which
music is made and experienced, especially in contemporary forms of long-
standing traditions but also in other landscapes such as popular music and in the
design of performance spaces. It shows how music creates and challenges borders,
giving significance to geographical and cartographic spaces at local, national, and
international levels, and illustrates how music is used to interpret relationships
with ecology and environment, spirituality and community, and state and nation.
The volume brings together scholars from Australia, China, Denmark, Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, and the UK, each of whom explores a specific genre or topic in
depth. Each nuanced account finds distinct and at times different aspects to be
significant but, in demonstrating the ability of music to mediate the construction
of place and by showing how those who create and consume music use it to
inhabit the intimate, and to project themselves out into their surroundings, each
points to interconnections across the region and beyond with respect to perception,
conception, expression, and interpretation.
In Presence Through Sound, ethnomusicology meets anthropology, literature,
linguistics, area studies, and – particularly pertinent to East Asia in the twenty-first
century – local musicologies. The volume serves a broad academic readership and
provides an essential resource for all those interested in East Asia.

Keith Howard is Professor Emeritus and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow at SOAS,

University of London. He has written or edited 22 books, 170 academic articles,
and 195 book/music reviews, and founded and managed the SOASIS CD and
DVD series as well as OpenAir Radio.

Catherine Ingram is Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University

of Sydney. Her forthcoming monograph is on Kam big song, and she recently
commenced an ARC Discovery Project on musical resilience.
SOAS Studies in Music

Series Editors:
Rachel Harris, SOAS, University of London, UK
Rowan Pease, SOAS, University of London, UK

Board Members:
Angela Impey (SOAS, University of London)
Noriko Manabe (Temple University)
Suzel Reily (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Martin Stokes (Kings College London)
Richard Widdess (SOAS, University of London)

SOAS Studies in Music is today one of the world’s leading series in the discipline
of ethnomusicology. Our core mission is to produce high-quality, ethnographically
rich studies of music-making in the world’s diverse musical cultures. We publish
monographs and edited volumes that explore musical repertories and performance
practice, critical issues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, and historical and ana-
lytical approaches to music across the globe. We recognize the value of applied,
interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and our authors draw on current
approaches in musicology and anthropology, psychology, and media and gender
studies. We welcome monographs that investigate global contemporary, classical,
and popular musics, the effects of digital mediation and transnational flows.

The Indian Drum of the King-God and the Pakhāwaj of Nathdwara

Paolo Pacciolla

Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana

The Porcupine and the Gold Stool
Kwasi Ampene

Presence Through Sound

Music and Place in East Asia
Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram

Musicians in Crisis
Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry
Ioannis Tsioulakis

Becoming Irish Traditional Musician

Learning and Embodying Musical Culture
Jessica Cawley

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

music/series/SOASMS
Presence Through Sound
Music and Place in East Asia

Edited by Keith Howard and

Catherine Ingram
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-34508-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-32629-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

List of illustrations vii

List of contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii

Introduction: Reflections on the Significance of Place for

East Asian Music 1
CATHERINE INGRAM AND KEITH HOWARD

China

1 The Shifting Strength of Place in Contemporary Big Song

Singing from Southwestern China 12
CATHERINE INGRAM

2 From the Heart of the Lake Booms a Mountain Song: Sense

of Place in the Song-Cycles of Coastal China 27
ANNE E. McLAREN

3 Bringing the Past to Life: Creating and Contesting Place in

Kunqu Singing Practices 43
MIN YEN ONG

4 Beijing in the Contemporary Pipa World 58

LU LIU

Tibet

5 The Alphabetical Order of Things: The Language of Place

and the Place of Language in Tibetan Song 72
GERALD ROCHE
vi Contents
Taiwan

6 Lingering Across the Ocean, Rooted on the Island:

Indigenous Music and the Notions of Mountain and Sea as
Taiwanese Identifiers 87
YANG MING TEOH

Korea

7 The Constructed Soundscapes of Place in Korea,

South and North 102
KEITH HOWARD

8 Place as Brand: The Role of Place in the Construction of

Contemporary Traditional Music in South Korea 118
HEE-SUN KIM

9 The Sonic Habitus of Silk and Wood: Kugak’s

Twenty-First-Century Terrain 132
HILARY FINCHUM-SUNG

10 Not a Habitus for the Have-Nots: The Walker Hill Shows,

1962–2012 148
ROALD MALIANGKAY

Japan

11 Gagaku and the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri Festival of

Nara: From the Sound of Authority to the Sound of Local
Identity 162
NAOKO TERAUCHI

12 Biwa’s Place in Modern Times 177

HUGH DE FERRANTI

13 Place and Locality in Fuke Style Shakuhachi: The Case of

Nezasa-ha Kinpū Ryū 192
KIKU DAY

References 207
Index 235
Illustrations

Figures
1.1 Map of China, showing Guizhou and Hunan Provinces and
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 13
1.2 Singers from Sheeam and Bee (in Chinese, Pilin), sing big
songs in the dare low newly built in Bee, February 2009 15
2.1 Map of the lower Yangzi Delta, China 30
3.1 A row of shops, cafes, and a teahouse on Pingjiang Street 45
3.2 A teahouse with kunqu performances on Pingjiang Street 46
4.1 ‘Xulai’ excerpt (bars 23–25), transcribed by Wendy Guan from
cipher notation 64
6.1 The carriers of the newly built fishing boat in the launching
ritual Manwawai 91
7.1 A contemporary performance of kugak, at the outdoor stage of
the National Gugak Centre, September 2014 104
7.2 A high-school student sings in the Man’gyŏngdae Children’s
Palace, Pyongyang, using the juche voice and expression 112
9.1 Taebaek Lee and Hyeunbin Lim perform in a hanok,
October 2014 139
9.2 The Pungnyu Sarangbang. Photo, image capture of 3D virtual
theatre tour, by Sŭngyŏl Na 142
10.1 The entrance to the Walker Hill resort, 1963 149
10.2 The Honey Bees performing on 17 November 1963 155
11.1 The venue of Kasuga wakamiya onmatsuri 164
12.1 The movement of biwa and its antecedent forms within East
Asia and Japan from ancient to modern times, then from Japan
to other places in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries 178
12.2 A drawing of young Satsuma domain samurai-class men
enjoying biwa together (Yamazaki 1886, frontispiece) 182
13.1 Jin Nyodō 196
13.2 Jin Nyodō 197
viii Illustrations
Tables
1.1 Some examples of ‘old Kam’ words in songs in the Sheeam
repertoire, and a comparison with their modern equivalents in
Kam (Sheeam dialect) and Modern Standard Chinese (MSC) 16
11.1 The Performing Arts of Otabisho-sai 165
Contributors

Kiku Day is an external lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus,

Denmark. Her research mainly focuses on performance-based methods and, in
particular, the potential use of the jinashi shakuhachi in contemporary music.
She has researched the use of shakuhachi playing as a meditation practice
and her interests also include online dissemination of the shakuhachi, the link
between shakuhachi and Zen Buddhism, and the growing interest in the shaku-
hachi outside of Japan. As a shakuhachi performer, she trained in Japan with
Okuda Atsuya for 11 years, and has an active career. She is a founding member
and chairperson of the European Shakuhachi Society, and served as the chair
of the World Shakuhachi Festival 2018 in London.
Hugh de Ferranti has written on the historical biwa traditions, their practice and
representation in contemporary Japan (The Last Biwa Singer, 2009), and has
also investigated Takemitsu’s modernist compositions for biwa, co-edited a
volume on the composer, and written a book on Japanese traditional instru-
ments. Research on minority music cultures and experiences of modernity
in urban Japan of the interwar decades led to Music, Modernity and Locality
in Prewar Japan: Osaka and Beyond (2013), co-edited with Alison Tokita,
and Colonial Modernity and East Asian Musics, a 2012 special issue of the
world of music journal co-edited with Yamauchi Fumitaka. Hugh has taught
at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), The University of New England
(Armidale), and Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Hilary Finchum-Sung is Executive Director of the Association for Asian Studies.
She was previously Associate Professor in the Department of Korean Music
and Associate Dean of the College of Music at Seoul National University.
Her research interests include traditional music education, identity and sound
design, music performance space and staging, grassroots preservation, world
music marketing, and globalization. She is currently engaged in a research
project on women’s roles in grassroots transmission and cultural promotion on
Chindo Island and is completing a manuscript on twenty-first-century kugak
transitions.
x Contributors
Keith Howard is Professor Emeritus and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow at SOAS,
University of London, where he was formerly Professor and at times Head
of the Department of Music. He has also been Professor and Associate Dean
at the University of Sydney and has held visiting professorships at Monash
University, Ewha Women’s University, the University of Sydney, Hankuk
University of Foreign Studies, and Texas Tech University. He has written or
edited 20 books, 170 academic articles, and 195 book/music reviews, as well
as writing for many newspapers and journals.
Catherine Ingram is Lecturer in Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music,
University of Sydney, and since 2004 has conducted extensive research on
Kam minority music in southwestern China. She is co-author of Environmental
Preservation and Cultural Heritage in China (2013) and co-editor of Taking
Part in Music: Case Studies in Ethnomusicology (2013). Her monograph on
Kam big song is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She has recently
commenced a three-year Australian Research Council-funded Discovery
Project on musical resilience within marginal groups in culturally diverse
societies.
Hee-sun Kim is Director of the Division of Music Research at the National
Gugak Centre, Seoul, Associate Professor at Kookmin University, Seoul,
and Chair of the Music of East Asia Study Group, International Council for
Traditional Music. She is the author of Contemporary Kayagŭm Music in
Korea: Tradition, Modernity and Identity (2008), and has contributed numer-
ous articles and chapters in journals and books. Her research interests include
world music and its cultural translation, Korean music and globalization, inter-
Asian cultural flows, and the modernization processes of traditional music in
Korea and Asia.
Lu Liu is a pipa performer, educator, and researcher. She gained her PhD from
the University of Sydney in 2019 and teaches the Chinese Music Ensemble at
Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. She has presented at
many conferences and symposiums, and has published a growing number of
research articles.
Roald Maliangkay is Associate Professor in Korean studies and Director of
the Korea Institute at the Australian National University. Fascinated by the
mechanics of cultural policy and the convergence of major cultural phenom-
ena, he analyses cultural industries, performance, and consumption in Korea
from the early twentieth century to the present. He is the author of Broken
Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea’s Central
Folksong Traditions (2017), and co-editor with JungBong Choi of K-pop: The
International Rise of the Korean Music Industry (2015).
Anne E. McLaren is Professor at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.
Her major research interest is the popular culture of pre-contemporary China,
including oral and vernacular traditions, women’s ritual performance, traditional
 Contributors xi
novels, and drama. She is the author of Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in
Rural China (2008), Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables (1998),
co-author of Environmental Preservation and Cultural Heritage in China
(2013), and editor of a special issue of Asian Ethnology, ‘Interpreting Sinitic
heritage: ethnography and identity in China and Southeast Asia’ (2017).
Min Yen Ong is a Teaching Associate in the Faculty of Music at the University of
Cambridge. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London. Her regional
expertise includes the musical cultures of China and Hawaiʻi. Her interests
encompass music and politics; intangible cultural heritage policy and practice;
music preservation and sustainability; tourism; and music, memory and place.
She has presented her research in Asia, Europe, North America, Australia, and
the Pacific. Min has also worked in various sectors of the music industry in
London and Hawaiʻi.
Gerald Roche is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at La Trobe
University; he was previously an Australia Research Council Discovery Early
Career Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a postdoctoral
research fellow at Uppsala University’s Hugo Valentin Centre. His research
focuses on the cultural and linguistic diversity of China’s Tibetan regions,
and how this diversity is being transformed in the twenty-first century. He
lived on the northeast Tibetan Plateau for eight years (2005–2013), working
as an applied anthropologist while also undertaking research for his PhD at
Griffith University, Brisbane. He recently co-edited the Routledge Handbook
of Language Revitalization (2018).
Yang-ming Teoh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music of National
Taitung University, Taiwan. He obtained his PhD from SOAS, University of
London. His research concerns the contemporary music practices of Taiwanese
indigenous people, popular music, technology, recording culture, and owner-
ship and control of intellectual property. He is also a performer, composer, and
studio engineer.
Naoko Terauchi is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests focus on
Japanese traditional performing arts, especially imperial court music, gagaku.
She gained her MA from Tokyo National University of the Arts (1987) and
DL from Osaka University (1999), and has taught at the Graduate School of
Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, since 1999. Her recent publications
include Japanese Traditional Music: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai 1941 (2008–
2016), Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (2011), ‘Be a
costume hanger: the aesthetics of imperial bugaku dance of Japan’ (2016), and
What the Doctor Overheard: Dr. Leopold Mueller’s Account of Music in Early
Meiji Japan (2018).
Acknowledgements

Presence Through Sound develops from a Newton International Fellowship

held by Catherine Ingram to work with Keith Howard at SOAS, University of
London, during 2013–14. The British Academy and Royal Society, as funders
of the Newton International Fellowship Scheme, provided ‘follow-up funding’
that enabled the participation of British-based academics at our first symposium
in Sydney in 2016 and Australian-based academics at our second symposium in
London in 2017. The first symposium was organized and hosted by the Sydney
Conservatorium of Music (SCM) at the University of Sydney, with additional
support from the China Studies Centre and the SCM Research Centre for Music
Diversity at the University of Sydney, and from the Korean Cultural Centre, the
Japan Foundation, and the Tianda Music Fund. The second symposium was organ-
ized and hosted by the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, University of London,
with additional support from the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, and the SOAS
China Institute, and was held in collaboration with Club Inégales, London.
Both symposiums included performances. The first featured performances by
both many of those who gave academic papers and a number of distinguished
musicians based in the Sydney area, including the wonderful Chai Changning.
The second decamped to Club Inégales at Euston, where Peter Wiegold com-
posed three new works – Changgo 1, 2, and 3; these were premiered by his band
together with three wonderful Korean musicians, Hyelim Kim on taegŭm flute,
Ji-Young Lee on kayagŭm zither, and Jihye Kim on changgo drum and other per-
cussion. It has sadly not been possible to include recordings of these performances
with this volume. Nor have we been able to include all presentations, and hope
that those we have had to omit will soon appear in other places. We thank those
who have contributed figures (including maps and photographs), tables, and nota-
tions – including, in addition to chapter authors, Wendy Guan, Hsu Ming-cheng,
Wu Jiaping, Jin Rei and Nyodokai, and the National Gugak Centre. We also thank
the anonymous reviewers for Routledge, and all of our colleagues who have been
involved in the two symposiums and in steering this volume as it has evolved.
Introduction
Reflections on the Significance of Place for East
Asian Music
Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard

Understandings of Place
To the celebrated humanist geographer, Yi-fu Tuan, music is valuable to both
geography and humanity for expressing our experience of place, and for ‘making
public our innermost feelings’ (cited in Lack 2015: 8). Tuan considers music as
significant for articulating the experience of place, and for allowing geographers
to better understand how place is felt – thus making a connection between music
and place relevant to the discipline of geography. In contrast, the many studies of
music and place from within ethnomusicology and elsewhere in the humanities
have tended to consider the significance of the connection through investigating
how music gives expression to, or is influenced by, place. They have long demon-
strated the significance of place in relation to specific musical cultures (for exam-
ple, in Levin and Süzükei 2006), and have often explored musical connections
to a rooted homeland or to a concept of home filtered through experience in the
diaspora (Reyes 1999; Marsh 2013). Although acknowledging the significance of
place as a concept, few ethnomusicologists have interrogated place itself in depth.
Considering music’s relation to place can often seem straightforward. This
may be because, as Cresswell notes, ‘place is a word that seems to speak for itself’
(2015: 1). The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in a late-twentieth-cen-
tury ‘Afterword’, even notes the lack of specific analytical attention given to the
concept within his discipline, writing that, in standard anthropological textbooks
and monographs,

Even if a fair amount of attention is given to something called ‘the envi-

ronment’ or ‘the physical setting’ (rainfall, vegetation, fauna, landforms),
‘place’ as an analytical or descriptive concept, explicitly set out and formally
developed, does not appear. Something that is a dimension of everyone’s
existence, the intensity of where we are, passes by anonymous and unre-
marked. It goes without saying.
(Geertz 1996: 259)

Geertz may well be reflecting the situation at the time he was writing. Indeed,
in many ethnomusicological analyses, particularly in the years leading up to the
2 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
new millennium, place was commonly interpreted in a relatively straightforward
and literal sense as a physical location, and as such it was not extensively inter-
rogated. Such attention to place nevertheless allowed it to have correspondence
with the first two of three features of place that political geographer John Agnew
(1987) identified within a relatively static formulation: location, locale, and sense
of place. However, for many geographers, the various meanings associated with
location have long been regarded as also important in defining place. Hence, Tuan
notes in his seminal Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience:

What begins as undifferentiated space becomes places as we get to know it

better and endow it with value … The ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each
other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware
of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore,
if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause;
each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into
place.
(Tuan 1977: 6)

Or, as Cresswell (2014: 4) puts it, Tuan’s classic definition of place can be sum-
marized as ‘a portion of space that has accumulated particular meanings at both
the level of the individual and the social’.
Over time, understandings of place have become more nuanced. By the 1990s,
one of the major analytical trajectories was a consideration of the sensory aspects
of the nature of place; the sensory dimension is one of the two major strands
of geographic inquiry that Hubbard (2005: 41) identifies within recent work on
place. Work in this dimension proved particularly significant for music, and was
conveyed and explored vividly through Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s rich col-
lection, Senses of Place (1996) – for which Geertz wrote the afterword. There,
Geertz notes that ‘the anthropology of place … can fairly be said to have been
launched as a sustained and self-conscious enterprise in these pages (as a dif-
fuse, unthematized concern, a sort of background continuo, it has, of course, been
around much longer)’ (1996: 262). Feld’s innovative analysis of music-place sen-
suousness in Bosavi within this same volume demonstrates just how important the
senses are to establishing and understanding music and place connections. And,
Feld notes in his conclusion, ‘Places make sense in good part because of how they
are made sensual and how they are sensually voiced’ (Feld 1996: 134).
Today, the significance of meaning and feeling associated with place is very
widely accepted. However, place itself, in the sense of ‘location’ or ‘locale’, is
not always conceptualized as a physical entity; indeed, Heise (2008) critiques the
localist emphasis of much environmentalism. A spiritual sense of place may be
indicated, or place may be expressed and experienced through musical memory
and nostalgia, while virtual dimensions of place may be discussed, such as its
function as an internet bridgespace (after Adams and Ghose 2003; Tettey 2009)
where home and diaspora, or the local and the global, intersect and interweave.
Cresswell (2008: 138), again, notes that the introduction of both fixed and mobile
 Introduction 3
technologies has led geographers to recast notions of place, and to consider links
between mediated and ‘real’ places. We can also note that there is an increasing
acknowledgement of the blurriness of boundaries of cultural expression and how
these make studies that approach music-place connections on a wider level increas-
ingly important, while also complicating how place is considered to exist or to be
relevant. Timothy Rice, in ‘Time, Place, and Metaphor in Musical Experience and
Ethnomusicology’, observes how there is a growing understanding in ethnomu-
sicology that ‘our and our subjects’ experiences are no longer contained within
local, isolated cultures, or even within nation-states, but are and have been shaped
by regional, area, colonial and global economics, politics, social relations and
images’ (2003: 160). Yet despite such complexities, it remains clear that,

Place is how we make the world meaningful and how we experience the
world. Place, at a basic level, is space invested with meaning in the context
of power. This process of investing space with meaning happens across the
globe at all scales, and has done throughout human history.
(Cresswell 2015: 19)

Syncretic Approaches to Place

The various explorations of place and its relationship with musical traditions in
East Asia contained within this volume confirm that place has, indeed, invested
space with meaning for a long period, but that area-focussed approaches find dis-
tinct and at times different aspects relevant to each case study. This would seem
to be consistent with the difficulties – and impracticalities – faced by human geog-
raphers in precisely defining ‘place’, particularly following the range of recent
analytical trends touched upon briefly here. These difficulties have led some geog-
raphers to advocate syncretic approaches. In his chapter for the SAGE Handbook
of Geography, Cresswell offers what he himself describes as a ‘syncretic theoreti-
cal framework for the analysis and interpretation of place’ (2014: 4), and inten-
tionally leaves his thoughts open-ended, encouraging readers to ‘draw a diverse
array of possible readings that may inform their own approaches to place’ (2014:
4). Nicole M. Ardoin, in ‘Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Place:
Lessons for Environmental Education’, presents a similarly syncretic framework
where a multidimensional sense of place is achieved through the interaction of
specific elements within a particularly biophysical setting that provides context
for all interactions (2006: 114). She represents these interactions through a helpful
diagram of three overlapping circles within a single larger circle. The larger circle
represents the biophysical setting; the three small circles represent psychological
(individual), sociocultural, and political and economic elements; and the centre of
the diagram where the three inside circles overlap represents a multidimensional
sense of place.
Cresswell (2014: 6–9) notes that the notion of gathering and interweaving has
a powerful presence within the study of place in human geography whilst also
having particular appeal in area studies. His explanation of this understanding of
4 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
place ‘as a gathering of materialities, meanings and practices’ (2014: 6) offers a
useful framework for thinking about the connections between music and place
outlined by the contributors to the current volume. It is reflected also in Beverley
Diamond’s masterful ‘Afterword’ to the influential anthology Performing Gender,
Place and Emotion in Music: Global Perspectives, where she likewise notes that
‘the framing of place is necessarily varied in different contexts’ (Diamond 2013:
188), going on to describe the many different ways in which ‘place’ interrelates
with gender and emotion in the case studies contained in the volume. As Edward
Casey explains,

places gather things in their midst – where ‘things’ connote various animate
and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even lan-
guages and thoughts … the power belongs to place itself, and it is a power
of gathering.
(1996: 24)

The notion of gathering and the resultant dynamism can provide helpful ways of
thinking about how place interweaves with the many cultural flows of East Asia,
pulling in certain directions at certain times, and emphasizing certain aspects in
particular contexts. The notion of weaving also allows us to consider textured
aspects of place in a manner that recognizes that its ‘distinctive qualities may be
profound’ (Adams, Hoelscher and Till 2001: xiii).
Many of the studies featured in this volume illustrate the value of considering
place as being textured, or as a gathering or interweaving of experiences, histo-
ries, and other entities, in understanding connections between music and place.
For instance, Terauchi’s exploration of gagaku in a Shinto festival in Nara, de
Ferranti’s study of biwa, and Ong’s discussion of kunqu in Suzhou, show how
memories and historical records of place interweave with the present through the
lens of music, pulling together certain elements in different webs of intercon-
nection. Within several chapters that consider issues of repertoire and canoniza-
tion – including for the pipa (by Liu), for the shakuhachi (by Day), and for North
and South Korean musical soundworlds broadly considered (by Howard) – we
can observe that place is shaped by and interrelates with music through various
interwoven factors including the actions of individuals and communities; identi-
fication with region or nation; and movement of music between different social
contexts or strata.
In other chapters that follow, textured qualities of place gather more strongly
through connections to the natural landscape, language, and associated cultural
memory – as, for example, in the studies on Yangzi delta shan’ge (by McLaren)
and on music in Tibet (Roche). Much research where place is heavily influenced
by ideas of the local environment touches also on the associated field of ecomusi-
cology (see, for example, Allen 2011; Titon 2013; Allen and Dawe 2015; Edwards
2018). Teoh contextualizes the experience of place in a geographical sense as this
intersects with ethnicity among Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, while for several
other contributors, it is a gathering of elements of place around physical aspects
 Introduction 5
of the built environment and its historical significance – for instance, performance
spaces for Korean kugak (Finchum-Sung) and for performances of musical moder-
nity in early and mid-late twentieth-century South Korea (Kim, Maliangkay).

Place as a Way of Seeing, Hearing, Researching, and Writing

In understanding place as something which has texture, consists of interwoven
elements, and is a locus of gathering, we implicitly acknowledge the importance
of context and, by extension, the subjectivity inherent in understanding the con-
textual features of this concept. As Cresswell notes, ‘In other words, place is not
simply something to be observed, researched and written about but is itself part of
the way we see, research and write’ (Cresswell 2015: 24). In this, understandings
of place within human geography have certain parallels with the reflexive turn in
anthropology and ethnomusicology since the 1990s. But rather than it being the
researcher’s identity or subjective positioning that can impact upon the study, it is
their being at a particular locus of elements that form ‘place’ which brings to bear
upon how we understand and express ideas about all places.
Some of the following studies involve more explicit handling of this issue than
others. One example is Roche’s study of the intersection between music, the mul-
tiple languages of Tibet, and place, wherein his perspective is necessarily located
outside the mainstream of both Tibetan and mainstream Chinese understandings,
and how such an intersection permeates his discussion. Ingram similarly presents
a view of place and music connections in Kam minority music from southwestern
China that concords more with two dimensions of place that are both located out-
side the Han Chinese cultural centre: first, that of Kam people themselves, who
have for centuries been viewed in China as primarily being geographically distant
from China’s sociopolitical centre; and, second, of a researcher looking outwards
to understand how place is felt and experienced. Of course, it would be errone-
ous to suggest that geographical or cultural location beyond the mainstream of
each of these cases necessarily produces a more ‘objective’ analysis. However, it
could certainly be said that each researcher’s location promotes a particular way
of viewing the world and listening to the music of the world. Turning to Cresswell
again, ‘Place then is both a (real) thing in the (real) world and a way of thinking
about the world that foregrounds the geographical rather than the social, natural
or cultural’ (Cresswell 2014: 7).

The Presence of Place

The historian, philosopher, and theorist Ethan Kleinberg offers a useful summa-
tion of thinking around the concept of ‘presence’, a notion which we use in the
title of this book to indicate the dimensions related to place that are conveyed
through sound. Kleinberg points out that ‘there are differing ideas at play as to
how the past presses into the present and the scope of the “presence effect”: that
is, the non-proximate presence of persons, of moods, of environment’ (Kleinberg
2013: 1). For geographers, too, place is linked to presence in an evocative way;
6 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
as Cresswell explains, ‘Places have a material presence … but places have more
of a material presence than just their landscape’ (2014: 9). The non-materiality of
music allows it to convey a presence that permeates strongly the places through
which it is associated, or to convey those places in other ways, providing space for
their interrelated aspects to emerge, take shape, and exist with a degree of power
that belies music’s intangible nature.

Place and the Music of East Asia

Our topic is clearly broad and, we argue, has been somewhat neglected in the
literature. Here, each chapter explores a specific genre or topic rather than pre-
senting an overview, and we group chapters together geographically. In the main,
our considerations address longer-standing musical traditions although the con-
tributions by Howard, Roche, and Teoh all include explorations of contemporary
popular genres. Given the many and diverse links between music, sound, and
place, we can find no reason to impose an overarching theory, hence we traverse
wide and divergent spaces, utilizing ethnographic data and narratives. Our hetero-
geneous approaches illustrate the richness of understandings of place, and offer a
corrective against attempts to generalize.
We open with considerations of the People’s Republic of China. Catherine
Ingram explores how Kam (in Chinese, Dong) minority big song singing in
China’s southwest has long had an important role in presenting and transmitting
culture and identity, and consequently exhibits intimate connections to localized
conceptions of place. Following the so-called ‘discovery’ of Kam big song sing-
ing in the mid-twentieth century, big song began to be used to in discussions of
long-challenged evolutionary theories to demonstrate that Chinese music was not
all monophonic, and thereby came to be identified with the entire Chinese nation.
However, huge social change, the recognition of big song as intangible cultural
heritage, and more, has expanded and shifted connections between music and
place, both within and beyond Kam communities. Likewise, Anne E. McLaren
takes us to song-cycles sung on Lake Tai and along its waterways in the lower
Yangzi delta region. These are rich in the sense of natural habitat and, conse-
quently, entextualize place as the site of cultural memory. McLaren shows how
narrative song traditions, stemming from songs known as shan’ge (mountain
songs) once sung by illiterate populations in rice paddies or while journeying by
boat around the lakes and waterways, articulate indelible senses of place and iden-
tity that encapsulate how communities construct and interpret the environment in
which they live.
Third, Min Yen Ong explores the southeastern kunqu genre, part of China’s
widespread and very diverse opera traditions. She explores how sustaining herit-
age balances and manages competing values in performance and promotion, facil-
itated through takes on history and aesthetics that underpin productions, tourism
events, and learning methodologies. She analyses how Kunqu is associated with
Suzhou as a region and a place, and how music provides important, emotive, but
 Introduction 7
different narratives for tourists and a local population. She contrasts the creation
of place through top-down preservation efforts with the sense of place and col-
lectivity felt among elderly amateur practitioners. Places are shown to be sites of
contestation, involving memories to evoke and memories to forget. The pillars
of local and national, though, have been joined by institutional training, and this
leads to our fourth chapter, in which Lu Liu explores how place has impacted on
the development of a single instrument, the pipa lute. While in previous centuries
the pipa was taught within different regional schools it is now part of conserva-
toire training and is performed on urban stages. The cosmopolitan influence of
Beijing on the pipa is reflected in educational, social, and historical factors, and
Liu explores four key pipa figures – Liu Tianhua, Lin Shicheng, Liu Dehai, and
Zhang Qiang – none of whom were born in Beijing, but for all of whom Beijing
plays or played a central role in their careers.
We resist the politics of place. However, Chapters 5 and 6 move westwards
and eastwards, respectively. First, Gerald Roche looks at links between place,
song, and language in Tibet, examining how music is represented in the construc-
tions of popular forms, and how this impacts on the maintenance of social diver-
sity – specifically, linguistic diversity. Tibet is linguistically diverse but culturally
integrated, and song has played a crucial role in this integration, to the extent
that many speakers of non-Tibetic minority languages across the plateau have
traditionally sung in Tibetan, making Tibetan a common sung – rather than spo-
ken – language. Roche shows how pop songs imagine place and space in terms of a
national geobody – a bounded, internally homogenous unit – but how this has been
refracted as linguistic minorities, rather than singing themselves into a place, sing
their own alienation from that geobody, and use song not as a medium of exchange
between diverse peoples but as a shibboleth for national belonging and boundary
marking. Contrasting Roche, Yang-Ming Teoh discusses how diverse Taiwanese
indigenous music has and is used to create a multicultural, localized identity shared
across Taiwan. The main essences of the indigenous character, based on place and
space and referred to as a culture of mountain and sea (or island and ocean), is
harnessed in a continuum running from an open attitude which endorses interna-
tionalism, universalism, and globalization, to an appeal to seclusion in which local
and traditional values rooted in Austronesian, Formosan, and Taiwanese forms
are promoted. Policy and practice, and people’s attitudes, fluctuate from one to
the other, and are seen in pop culture’s transcultural engagements, in local and
national celebrations, and through efforts to revive and reinvigorate indigenous
traditions without resorting to the fossilization inherent in much preservation.
Four chapters consider Korea. First, Howard challenges assumptions about
‘Korean music’, reconciling the sense of tradition inherent in kugak – Korean tra-
ditional music as it has become the internationally iconic soundworld of South
Korea – with the internally representative ‘popular’ songs of North Korea, where
socialist realism meets the local monolithic ideology of juche through ideologi-
cally sound lyrics. Today, the sonic representation of a country has much to do
with a mediatized iconicity fashioned both by temporality and by the politics of
8 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
representation, and Howard argues the two competing soundworlds in the two
competing Korean states constitute different resolutions to shared experiences
of colonialism, war, and subsequent rebuilding. Second, Hee-sun Kim zooms in
on how music within the ‘folk’ category came to mark kugak during the twenti-
eth century. She delineates how connections between place and genre have been
understood and constructed differently over time, reflecting the performance,
broadcasting, and musicological contexts in which they were framed. Regional
identity became embedded in the formation of kugak as a category, but within
this the (South) Korean capital, Seoul, played a central role, since that was where
Westernized concert stages, broadcasting, recording industries, and tertiary-level
education grew. From Seoul, regional genres were projected nationwide, fixing
the relationships between music and place.
Third, Hilary Finchum-Sung considers the role of physical space in fram-
ing performances of kugak. Occupying an underdog position within the domes-
tic music market but contributing to a core Korean aesthetic, kugak has been
deemed to require spaces distinct from those of Western theatres and concert
halls. Acoustic spaces have thus become meaningful, and ongoing debates
about amplification (or its absence), and about ideal stage materials and design,
reveal (and revere) ideas about authenticity. As Finchum-Sung explores acous-
tic designs for kugak, she notes how the act of performance draws performers
and audiences alike into an interpretive space, thereby contributing to a Korean
socio-historic sonic experience that reveals ontologies which connect to kugak’s
struggle for sustainability in the modern world. From here, fourth, Roald
Maliangkay returns us to an earlier space, the Walker Hill Resort, which opened
its doors in 1962 and aimed, with government support, to persuade wealthy
foreigners to holiday in Korea. The resort, built on a mountainside in Seoul’s
eastern suburbs, became known for its risqué live shows that broke with Korea’s
conservative morality. Despite existing at a distance from the mainstream of
cultural production for Koreans, Walker Hill shows had profound influences
on Korean music, launching the careers of many stars and developing choreo-
graphed staged versions of traditional repertoires.
Next, we travel across the contested waters of Korea’s East Sea (or, Sea of
Japan). Historically, the court music of Japan, gagaku, was transmitted from
China (but incorporating repertoires considered Korean and Vietnamese), with
Korea acting as both a nurturing ground and as the bridge from continental East
Asia to the Japanese archipelago. The links, themselves profoundly influencing
notions of place, have long been studied, notably by the ‘Picken school’ – by
Laurence Picken (1909–2007) and his students and associates (Howard 2014:
337–60) – and also by many Asian scholars (see, e.g. Zhao 2012). In Chapter
11, Naoko Terauchi offers an analysis of a Shinto festival in Nara, a city listed
by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, and its showcasing of gagaku and other
performing arts from ancient and mediaeval times (including dengaku, miko-
kagura, sarugaku (noh), and seinoo). The festival, Kasuga wakamiya onmat-
suri, hosted by the Kasuga-Taisha Shrine, has been held annually since the early
 Introduction 9
twelfth century, but struggled to survive social changes brought by the 1868 Meiji
Restoration. As its sponsoring temple lost power, volunteer priests and common
people were allowed to execute its parts. Its parade, the Owatari-shiki, was re-
routed to take in the commercial downtown and the new railway stations, and to
satisfy the tourist gaze, but each place continues to inseparably connect to specific
performances, while the arrangements of performances convey social – and at
times political – meanings.
In Chapter 12, Hugh de Ferranti considers the biwa, a short-necked lute related
to the Chinese pipa with a history in Japan of more than 1000 years. Although
associations with ancient court culture and blind narrative singers remain impor-
tant, repertoires commonly heard today derive from musical recitation traditions
developed in regions of Kyushu from the eighteenth century onwards. Ties to the
former Satsuma domain were important in Tokyo by the 1880s, and continued to
be so for old-school players. Although one style, the chikuzenbiwa, was devel-
oped at the end of the nineteenth century in northern Kyushu, Kyushu practice
had little relevance after it was brought to Tokyo, as is clear in the Kinshinryū,
a new Tokyo school that then gained nationwide popularity. When biwa music
was first carried abroad, it signified Imperial Japan, the heartland of an empire,
home to what ended in calamity in 1945. De Ferranti tracks back and forward,
exploring how the 1960s Tokyo avant-garde gave the biwa a new aesthetic pres-
ence in instrumental, vocal, and multi-media works, and how some contemporary
musicians are innovatively exploring new narrative spaces. Finally, Kiku Day
turns to a second iconic Japanese instrument, the shakuhachi, looking at a specific
example, the Nezasa-ha kinpūryū. This originated at a Fuke sect temple far from
the centre: during the Edo period, as the honkyoku (often translated as ‘original
pieces’) were created and became a classical repertoire, up to 77 Fuke sect tem-
ples were scattered around Japan. Identifications with place may relate to a temple
location, to natural features of a region, or even to the bamboo from which instru-
ments are fashioned, but modern life takes players who represent and transmit a
certain style away from a given locality while leaving many lineage holders in
rural areas struggling. Again, pieces from a specific locality travel as they are
incorporated into the repertoires of mainstream groups in urban settings. Using
the idea of collective memory, and the Japanese concept of furusato, Day explores
how identification with place is constructed and reconstructed when repertoire is
performed far from its origins.
Taken together, our contributors show how place is embedded in songs and
in instrumental repertoires, in rituals and festivals, and is part of historical and
political legacies. Place is interpreted at specific points in time. Economic activ-
ity, urbanization, commodification and commercialization, as well as national and
international migration, both remove and reinforce perceptions pertaining to the
relationships between music and place. And, while identifications within music
with place often reflect issues that have contemporary resonance, they may also
be used, implicitly or explicitly, to establish or maintain a musician’s – or an
audience’s – place in the world. With this, we return to Cresswell, who states that
10 Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
it makes no sense to dissolve place entirely into a set of flows and connections
(2014: 20). What, he asks, does this leave for geographers (and others) to do? One
answer would be a renewed practice of place-writing, and as Cresswell critiques
how the tradition of regional geography from the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury became moribund and parochial in its flat descriptiveness, he asks whether it
is possible to start again, offering more than description, resisting the reification
of places to roots or routes, to materiality or practice, to presentation or the non-
representational, and providing detailed interweavings of theory and empirics in
order to better understand the ongoing process of becoming place. This, in respect
to East Asian music, is what we attempt to provide here.

Conventions
The romanizations used in this volume are as follows: pinyin for Chinese terms
and names, for both Republic of China and People’s Republic of China discus-
sions (with romanizations for the Republic of China based on Mandarin pronun-
ciation); Hepburn for Japanese; McCune-Reischauer for Korean, using the 1988
modifications of the Korean Ministry of Education (including ‘shi’ rather than
‘si’ to reflect pronunciation). An exception applies to personal names: names
given in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean in published sources are rendered using
the above romanization systems, with family name first and, with the exception
of Taiwanese names, without hyphenation; but, we respect preferred spellings
of personal names where the publication is in English or another European lan-
guage, where an author (or musician) is well known beyond East Asia, or where
an author has communicated a clear preference. For the chapters featuring
less widely spoken languages – Kam and various Tibetan languages – Ingram
and Roche briefly comment within their chapters on the romanization systems
employed.
Where appropriate, we adjust the grammar of interview quotations in the belief
that everyone we converse with has the right for their words to be rendered ade-
quately. Titles of musical works, pieces, or recordings are given in parentheses,
with the romanized Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Tibetan preceding an English
translation or transliteration where appropriate or needed. English translations of
East Asian works are given only where these are provided in the original. A note
about the East Asian concept of ‘folk’ and ‘court’: ‘folk’, as the Little Tradition,
is in East Asian usage separated from the court, aristocratic/gentry and literati
‘high’ or ‘classical’ Great Tradition (Bauman 1992: xiii–xxi; see also Redfield
1956). This usage, which will be regularly encountered in this volume, reflects its
relative prevalence in East Asia. Such usage can perpetuate a definition in which
‘folk music’ is (or was) the product of an orally transmitted tradition that has been
selected and utilized by an identifiable community but which is likely to have
local or individual variations and be presented by amateur rather than professional
musicians. Just as this presents myriad problems, so there are many problems with
the term ‘tradition’, a term which continues to have widespread – but regionally
 Introduction 11
distinct – utility in East Asia, due not least to the region’s long and distinguished
historical legacy. ‘Traditional’ may also apply to court and literati musics, but in
respect to the frequent correlation between ‘folk’ and ‘traditional’, it is perhaps
no accident to recall that the International Folk Music Council changed its name
to the International Council for Traditional Music at its first ever meeting in East
Asia – in Seoul – in 1981.
1 The Shifting Strength of Place in
Contemporary Big Song Singing
from Southwestern China
Catherine Ingram

Kam (in Chinese, Dong) minority choral singing has long had an important role
within Kam communities in the presentation and transmission of Kam culture
and identity, and has consequently had a long-standing and intimate connection
to localized Kam conceptions of place. This connection is also expressed through
the language and content of Kam big song lyrics, and is explicit in the distinctive
use of vocal imitation of regionally specific environmental sounds that character-
ize the songs in one of the many big song categories.
However, the so-called ‘discovery’ of Kam minority choral singing in the early
1950s ushered in a new phase of big song singing in which aspects of place began
to impact upon Kam big song singing in many unprecedented ways. This chap-
ter draws on my extensive musical ethnographic fieldwork in rural Kam areas
since 2004, including participation in many big song performances with Kam
friends and teachers, to outline some of the most significant ways that the con-
nection between big song singing and various ideas of place has developed over
the past six decades, and to suggest how changes to the form of this connection
are impacting upon the decisions and actions of big song singers today. I explore
how and why Kam cultural custodians seek to leverage the significance of both
recent and long-standing music-and-place connections in their efforts to promote
big song singing within today’s remarkably altered social context, thereby aiming
to better understand both the strength of place and the significance of singing in
relation to Kam musical culture and Kam society.
In the analysis of big song singing that follows, place features in several differ-
ent interwoven ways. For example, aspects of the Kam big song repertoire reveal
a connection to the physical location of Kam villages through the use of particular
lyrical and musical content that reflects elements of and knowledge about the
local environment. Place, in its connection with the cultural and historical loca-
tion of these areas, is also present through the forms of local language used in
big song lyrics. Socio-politically, the physical location of the home of Kam big
song singers impacts on place for big song singing in other ways as well, in the
sense of place being part of the way people see, hear, and understand their world
(after Cresswell 2015: 24). Over many centuries, Kam culture and people were
viewed from the Chinese centre as existing at the periphery of the Chinese cul-
tural landscape – thus shaping how a sense of place is conceptualized both inside
 Big Song Singing from Southwestern China 13
and outside these regions. Recent changes to the perceived positioning of Kam
culture within the Chinese cultural landscape have been influential in many of
the processes of shifting in the sense of place for Kam big song that are discussed
towards the end of this chapter. As I suggest in the conclusion, place is also part
of my own position as a non-Chinese researcher writing about Kam culture, and
thus has also unavoidably impacted on my analysis and writing about place and
Kam big song singing.

Kam People and Culture

Kam people, one of China’s 55 officially recognized minorities (in Chinese,
shaoshu minzu), are mainly resident in eastern and southeastern Guizhou, as well
as adjoining border regions of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to the
south and Hunan Province to the east (Figure 1.1). In 2010, the Kam population
was estimated at 2.88 million people (Guowuyuan renkou 2012). The Kam lan-
guage is a tonal, Tai-Kadai family language with no widely used written form,

Figure 1.1 Map of China, showing Guizhou and Hunan Provinces and Guangxi Zhuang
Autonomous Region. The area shaded grey indicates the precise location of
Kam villages, and is where most Kam people reside. The inset diagram shows
the approximate distribution of the Kam population in 2010 (based upon data
from Guowuyuan renkou (2012)). Map and diagram by Wu Jiaping, used with
permission.
14 Catherine Ingram
and its various dialects are still spoken by many Kam people as a first language.
The past few decades have seen a huge Kam youth migration to urban centres,
growing school attendance rates, and a marked rise in television viewing, all of
which have been major factors contributing to a decline in Kam singing amongst
younger generations. Nevertheless, it is clear that a vibrant musical heritage is still
maintained within many Kam communities, and contemporary forms of distinc-
tive Kam cultural and spiritual/religious traditions continue to be practised in my
main field-site of Sheeam1 and some other rural Kam areas.

Kam Big Song

Big song is the usual English name for a genre of choral songs originating within
a very small group of Kam communities that are now home to about 4 per cent of
the whole Kam population.2 The songs are also known by the Chinese name dage,
which is one of many possible translations of the Kam name for one choral song
category (ga lao) and also the source for the genre’s name in its English transla-
tion.3 Like most other Kam song genres, big songs are sung in the Kam dialect of
the region where the songs are transmitted and performed – for big song, which
originates from a small region on the border of Liping, Rongjiang, and Congjiang
counties, this is always a variant of the second lect of southern Kam.
Big songs are always sung by groups of at least three singers, allowing for the
performance of the two different vocal lines that are a feature of all songs in the
genre. The many different categories of big songs are generally distinguished by
their distinctive sor (a kind of melodic framework), and also by particular lyrical
themes and rhyming structures. Until recently the songs were most often per-
formed in the village dare low (wooden pagoda) during the lunar new year period,
originally as a kind of sung exchange between a group of unmarried women and
a group of unmarried or recently married men. They have long had an important
role within Kam communities for recording and maintaining a wide range of cul-
tural knowledge, and their performance within Kam villages is intimately linked
to important place-dependent aspects of Kam society – including local dialect
variants, local social structures, localized notions of cultural and social capital,
and the surrounding natural environment.

Repertoire Naming, and Cultural and Symbolic Capital

Big song repertoires differ from region to region, and even from village to village.
During the traditional big song singing in Kam villages at the lunar new year,
when singing groups from two or more different regions meet and take turns to
sing big songs (as pictured in Figure 1.2), regionally based musical and linguistic
differences between the groups are invariably quite evident, and thus the impor-
tance of place – in the sense of ‘location’ – to these repertoires is clear. The impor-
tance of place is also clear when songs are shared from one region to another, as
the shared big song (or even shared big song category) retains its place of origin
in the name it is known by within the new community. Thus, the big song known
 Big Song Singing from Southwestern China 15

Figure 1.2 Singers from Sheeam and Bee (in Chinese, Pilin), sing big songs in the dare
low newly built in Bee, February 2009. Photograph by Catherine Ingram.

as Ban bao juuee (‘Friends say you are proud’), the most well-known ga sheeang4
category big song from the Sheeam region, is known as ga Sheeam (‘Sheeam
song’) when it is sung within other regional repertoires (albeit, often sung with a
very different melody and rhythm).
Emphasis upon the regional origin of a big song or song category also high-
lights the connection between big song singing and cultural and symbolic capi-
tal – a long-standing feature of big song and several other Kam singing traditions.
For example, when I first heard the song Ban bao juuee sung as ga Sheeam in
the village of See Wang, more than a day’s walk from Sheeam, I was told sto-
ries about how the Sheeam song came to be part of the See Wang repertoire.
According to both See Wang and Sheeam singers, more than 25 years ago some
Sheeam people went to See Wang after many of the houses and rice stores in
Sheeam burnt down during a huge fire. The Sheeam singers were able to teach this
big song in exchange for gifts of rice from the See Wang villagers.

Language of Song Lyrics

The language used in the lyrics to all Kam songs, including big song, also has
interesting and significant connections to place. Big song lyrics most frequently
16 Catherine Ingram
use words from the local variant of the second lect of Southern Kam, thus rein-
forcing the highly located nature of the songs. However, three other sources are
also occasionally utilized in the same set of lyrics (often to fulfil complex rhym-
ing requirements): the lexicon of a variant of Southern Kam spoken in another
big-song-singing region; the local Chinese dialect (Liping hua (‘Liping speech’)
or kehua (Hakka; ‘guest speech’), classified by Campbell (2008) as belonging to
the Cenjiang dialect group of Southwest Mandarin); and an apparently archaic
language referred to by singers as Kam gao (‘old Kam’). The use of words from
other Kam dialects and from Chinese is interesting, since it indicates a cultural
context in which Kam people have maintained a distinctive local linguistic iden-
tity whilst also having interacted with other nearby groups for many generations.
Kam singers could not always understand the meanings of these non-local Kam
words, leading sometimes to conflicts in interpretation or comments about the
great skill of the original creators of the songs.
The use of words described as ‘old Kam’ has not been documented or ana-
lysed by linguists or other music researchers; although some singers could iden-
tify these words in song lyrics, only sang ga (song experts) and other experienced
singers could explain their meaning.5 While my research in Sheeam has revealed
that these words have no obvious relationship to their contemporary equivalents
within the Sheeam dialect, they do occasionally resemble Chinese words. It is
possible that some may be derived from or influenced by Chinese dialect forms
previously spoken in the big-song singing area; some examples of this are marked
in grey in Table 1.1. Their designation as ‘old Kam’ might therefore be indicative

Table 1.1 Some examples of ‘old Kam’ words in songs in the Sheeam repertoire, and a
comparison with their modern equivalents in Kam (Sheeam dialect) and Modern
Standard Chinese (MSC)

Word in ‘Old Kam’ Modern Equivalent in Modern Equivalent English

in the Sheeam the Sheeam Dialect in Modern Standard Gloss
Dialect Chinese (MSC)
baet wen go mi 米, mifan 米饭 rice
chit men ook ngan chu men 出门 go out
jing min nu, sop jianmian 见面 meet, see
ngwar nak shuijiao 睡觉 sleep
nyair men nan rou 肉 flesh
nyin lin lee (…) goong nyin nianling 年龄 age
(literally, ‘have (…)
many years’)
sam deng dang ook ngan fangzi 房子, jia 家 house
soong lee hua 话 words
wa mee go mi 米, mifan 米饭 rice

Note: None of these examples of ‘old Kam’ obviously correspond with their modern Kam equivalents,
though features of those shaded in grey seem to have a possible correspondence with MSC.
Another random document with
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this season is five, which is a respectable number. As Bolton pointed out—
if we each got five to-day, and there were six extras, we should win. I
suppose if one plays chess a good deal one thinks of these things.

Harold, I mean George, refused to field, so I nobly put myself in last

and substituted for him. This was owing to an argument as to the exact
wording of my bet with Gerald.

"You said you'd get him out," said Gerald.

"I mean 'out of the way,' 'out of the field,' 'out of——'"

"I meant 'out' according to the laws of cricket. There are nine ways.
Which was yours, I should like to know?"

"Obstructing the ball."

"There you are."

I shifted my ground.

"I didn't say I'd get him out," I explained. "I said I'd get him. Those
were my very words. 'I will get George.' Can you deny that I got him?"

"Even if you said that, which you didn't, the common construction that
one puts upon the phrase is——"

"If you are going to use long words like that," I said, "I must refer you
to my solicitor Bolton."

Whereupon Bolton took counsel's opinion, and reported that he could

not advise me to proceed in the matter. So Gerald took second wicket, and I
fielded.

However, one advantage of fielding was that I saw the editor's innings
from start to finish at the closest quarters. He came in at the end of the first
over, and took guard for "left hand round the wicket."
 "Would you give it me?" he said to Bolton. "These country umpires....
Thanks. And what's that over the wicket? Thanks."

He marked two places with the bail.

"How about having it from here?" I suggested at mid-on. "It's quite a

good place and we're in a straight line with the church."

The editor returned the bail, and held up his bat again.

"That 'one-leg' all right? Thanks."

He was proceeding to look round the field when a gentle voice from
behind him said: "If you wouldn't mind moving a bit, sir, I could bowl."

"Oh, is it over?" said the editor airily, trying to hide his confusion. "I
beg your pardon, I beg your pardon."

Still he had certainly impressed the sister of their captain, and it was
dreadful to think of the disillusionment that might follow at any moment.
However, as it happened, he had yet another trick up his sleeve. Bolton hit a
ball to cover, and the editor, in the words of the local paper, "most
sportingly sacrificed his wicket when he saw that his partner had not time to
get back. It was a question, however, whether there was ever a run
possible."

Which shows that the reporter did not know of the existence of their
captain's sister.

When I came in, the score was fifty-one for nine, and Henry was still in.
I had only one ball to play, so I feel that I should describe it in full. I have
four good scoring strokes—the cut, the drive, the hook and the glance. As
the bowler ran up to the crease I decided to cut the ball to the ropes.
Directly, however, it left his hand, I saw that it was a ball to hook, and
accordingly I changed my attitude to the one usually adopted for that stroke.
But the ball came up farther than I expected, so at the last moment I drove it
hard past the bowler. That at least was the idea. Actually, it turned out to be
a beautiful glance shot to the leg boundary. Seldom, if ever, has Beldam had
such an opportunity for four action photographs on one plate.

Henry took a sixer next ball, and so we won. And the rest of the story of
my team, is it not written in the journals of The Sportsman and The
Chartleigh Watchman, and in the hearts of all who were privileged to
compose it? But how the editor took two jokes I told him in the train, and
put them in his paper (as his own), and how Carey challenged the engine-
driver to an eighteen-hole solitaire match, and how ... these things indeed
shall never be divulged.
 EX NIHILO FIT MULTUM

I should like to explain just what happened to the ball. In the first place
it was of an irreproachable length, and broke very sharply and cleverly from
the leg. (The bowler, I am sure, will bear me out in this.) Also it rose with
great suddenness ... and, before I had time to perfect any adequate system of
defence, took me on the knee, and from there rolled on to the off-stump.
There was a considerable amount of applause on the part of the field, due,
no doubt, to the feeling that a dangerous batsman had been dismissed
without scoring. I need hardly add that I did not resent this appreciation.

What I really wished to say to the wicket-keeper was (1) that it was the
first fast wicket I had played on this summer; (2) that it was my first nought
this season, and, hang it, even Fry made noughts sometimes; and (3) that
personally I always felt that it didn't matter what one made oneself so long
as one's side was victorious. What I actually said was shorter; but I expect
the wicket-keeper understood just as well. He seemed an intelligent fellow.

After that, I walked nine miles back to the pavilion.

The next man was brushing his hair in the dressing-room.

"What's happened?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said truthfully.

"But you're out, aren't you?"

"I mean that nothing has eventuated—accrued, as it were."

"Blob? Bad luck. Is my parting straight?"

"It curls a bit from leg up at the top, but it will do. Mind you make
some. I always feel that so long as one's side is victorious——"

But he was gone. I brushed my own hair very carefully, lit a cigarette,
and went outside to the others. I always think that a nought itself is nothing
—the way one carries it off is everything. A disaster, not only to himself but
also to his side, should not make a man indifferent to his personal
appearance.

"Bad luck," said somebody. "Did it come back?"

"Very quickly. We both did."

"He wasn't breaking much when I was in," said some tactless idiot.

"Then why did you get out?" I retorted.

"L.b.w."

I moved quickly away from him, and sat next to a man who had yet to
go in.

"Bad luck," he said. "Second ball, wasn't it? I expect I shall do the
same."

I thought for a moment.

"What makes you think you will have a second?" I asked.

"To judge from the easy way in which those two are knocking the
bowling about, I sha'n't even have a first," he smiled.

I moved on again.

"Hallo," said a voice. "I saw you get out. How many did you make?"

"None," I said wearily.

"How many?"

I went and sat down next to him.

"Guess," I said.
 "Oh, I can't."

"Well, think of a number."

"Yes."

"Double it. Divide by two. Take away the number you first thought of.
What does that make?"

"A hundred."

"You must have done it wrong," I said suspiciously.

"No, I am sure I didn't.... No, it still comes to a hundred."

"Well, then, I must have made a hundred," I said excitedly. "Are you
sure you haven't made a mistake?"

"Quite."

"Then I'd better go and tell the scorer. He put me down a blob—silly
ass."

"He's a bad scorer, I know."

"By the way," I said, as I got up, "what number did you think of?"

"Well, it's like this. When you asked me to guess what you had made I
instinctively thought of blob, only I didn't like to say so. Then when you
began that number game I started with a hundred—it's such an easy number.
Double—two hundred. Divided by two—one hundred. Take away the
number you first thought of—that's blob, and you have a hundred left.
Wasn't that right?"

"You idiot," I said angrily. "Of course it wasn't."

"Well, don't get sick about it. We all make mistakes."

 "Sick, I'm not sick. Only just for the moment.... I really thought.... Well,
I shall never be so near a century again."

At lunch I sat next to one of their side.

"How many did you make?" he asked.

"Not very many," I said.

"How many?"

"Oh, hardly any. None at all, practically."

"How many actually?"

"And actually," I said. ("Fool.")

After lunch a strange man happened to be talking to me.

"And why did you get out?" he asked.

It was a silly question and deserved a silly answer. Besides, I was sick
of it all by this time.

"Point's moustache put me off," I said.

"What was wrong with Point's moustache?"

"It swerved the wrong way."

"I was fielding point," he said.

"I'm very sorry. But if you had recognised me, you wouldn't have asked
why I got out, and if I had recognised you I shouldn't have told you. So let's
forgive and forget."

I hoped that the subject was really closed this time. Of course, I knew
that kind friends and relations would ask me on the morrow how many I
had made, but for that day I wanted no more of it. Yet, as it happened, I
reopened the subject myself.

For with five minutes to play their ninth wicket fell. Mid-off sauntered
over towards me.

"Just as well we didn't stay in any longer."

"That's just what I thought," I said triumphantly, "all along."

AN AVERAGE MAN

Of Tomkins as a natural cricketer

It frequently has been remarked—that IF
He'd had more opportunities of bowling,
And rather more encouragement in batting,
And IF his averages, so disclosed,
Batting and bowling, had been interchanged;
And IF the field as usually set
Contained some post (at the pavilion end)
Whose presence rather than a pair of hands
Was called for; then, before the season finished,
Tomkins would certainly have played for Kent.

All this, however, is beside the mark.

Just now I wish to hymn the glorious day
(Ignored by those who write the almanacs,
Unnoticed by the calendar compilers),
That Wednesday afternoon, twelve months ago
When Tomkins raised his average to two.

Thanks to an interval of accidents

(As "Tomkins did not bat"—and "not out 0,"
But this more rarely) Tomkins' average
Had long remained at 1.3.
(Though Tomkins, sacrificing truth to pride,
Or both to euphony, left out the dot—

Left out the little dot upon the three,

Only employing it to justify
A second three to follow on the first.
Thus, if a stranger asked his average
Tomkins would answer "One point thirty-three"—
Nor lay the stress unduly on the "one" ...).

A curious thing is custom! There are men—

Plum Warner is, of course, a case in point—
Who cannot bat unless they go in first.
Others, as Hayes and Denton, have their place
First wicket down; while Number Six or so
Is suited best to Jessop. As for Tomkins
His place was always one above the Byes,
And three above the Wides. So Custom willed.

Upon this famous Wednesday afternoon

Wickets had fallen fast before the onslaught
Of one who had, as Euclid might have put it,
No length, or break, but only pace; and pace
Had been too much for nine of them already.
Then entered Tomkins the invincible.
Took guard as usual, "just outside the leg,"
Looked round the field, and mentally decided
To die—or raise his average to two.
Whereon—for now the bowler was approaching,
He struck a scientific attitude,
Advanced the left leg firmly down the pitch,
And swung his bat along the line AB
(See Ranjitsinhji's famous book of cricket).

And when the bat and leg were both at B

(Having arrived there more or less together),
Then Tomkins, with his usual self-effacement,
Modestly closed his eyes, and left the rest
To Providence and Ranjy and the bowler
(Forming a quorum); two at least of whom
Resolved that he should neatly glide the ball
Somewhere between the first and second slips.
So Tomkins did compile a chanceless two.

Once more the bowler rushed upon the crease,

While Tomkins made a hasty calculation
(Necessitating use of decimals)
And found his average was 1.5.
So lustily he smote and drove the ball
Loftily over long stop's head for one;
Which brought the decimal to seventy-five,
And Tomkins, puffing, to the other end.
Then, feeling that the time for risks was come,
He rolled his sleeves up, blew upon his hands,
And played back to a yorker, and was bowled.

Every position has its special charm.

You go in first and find as a reward
The wicket at its best; you go in later
And find the fielders slack, the bowling loose.
Tomkins, who went in just above the Byes,
Found one of them had slipped into his score.
'Tis wise to take the good the gods provide you—
And Tomkins has an average of two.

SMALL GAMES
 PHYSICAL CULTURE

"Why don't you sit up?" said Adela at dinner, suddenly prodding me in
the back. Adela is old enough to take a motherly interest in my figure, and
young enough to look extremely pretty while doing so.

"I always stoop at meals," I explained; "it helps the circulation. My own
idea."

"But it looks so bad. You ought——"

"Don't improve me," I begged,

"No wonder you have——"

"Hush! I haven't. I got a bullet on the liver in the campaign of '03, due
to over-smoking, and sometimes it hurts me a little in the cold weather.
That's all."

"Why don't you try the Hyperion?"

"I will. Where is it?"

"It isn't anywhere; you buy it."

"Oh, I thought you dined at it. What do you buy it for?"

"It's one of those developers with elastics and pulleys and so on. Every
morning early, for half-an-hour before breakfast——"

"You are trying to improve me," I said suspiciously.

"But they are such good things," went on Adela earnestly. "They really
do help to make you beautiful——"

"I am beautiful."

"Well, much more beautiful. And strong——"

 "Are you being simply as tactful as you can be?"

"—and graceful."

"It isn't as though you were actually a relation," I protested.

Adela continued, full of her ideas:

"It would do you so much good, you know. Would you promise me to
use it every day if I sent you mine?"

"Why don't you want yours any more now? Are you perfect now?"

"You can easily hook it to the wall——"

"I suppose," I reflected, "there is a limit of beauty beyond which it is

dangerous to go. After that, either the thing would come off the hook, or
——"

"Well," said Adela suddenly, "aren't I looking well?"

"You're looking radiant," I said appreciatively; "but it may only be

because you're going to marry Billy next month."

She smiled and blushed. "Well, I'll send it to you," she said. "And you
try it for a week, and then tell me if you don't feel better. Oh, and don't do
all the exercises to begin with; start with three or four of the easy ones."

"Of course," I said.

* * * * * * *

I undid the wrappings eagerly, took off the lid of the box, and was
confronted with (apparently) six pairs of braces. I shook them out of the
box and saw I had made a mistake. It was one pair of braces for Magog. I
picked it up, and I knew that I was in the presence of the Hyperion. In five
minutes I had screwed a hook into the bedroom wall and attached the
beautifier. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it.
 There was a tin plate, fastened to the top, with the word "LADIES" on
it. I got up, removed it with a knife, and sat down again. Everything was
very dusty, and I wondered when Adela had last developed herself.

By-and-by I went into the other room to see if I had overlooked

anything. I found on the floor a chart of exercises, and returned
triumphantly with it.

There were thirty exercises altogether, and the chart gave

(1) A detailed explanation of how to do each particular exercise;

(2) A photograph of a lady doing it.

"After all," I reassured myself, after the first bashful glance, "it is Adela
who has thrust this upon me; and she must have known." So I studied it.

Nos. 10, 15 and 28 seemed the easiest; I decided to confine myself to

them. For the first of these you strap yourself in at the waist, grasp the
handles, and fall slowly backwards until your head touches the floor—all
the elastic cords being then at full stretch. When I had got very slowly
halfway down, an extra piece of elastic which had got hitched somewhere
came suddenly into play, and I did the rest of the journey without a stop,
finishing up sharply against the towel horse. The chart had said, "Inhale
going down," and I was inhaling hard at the moment that the towel horse
and two damp towels spread themselves over my face.

"So much for Exercise 10," I thought, as I got up. "I'll just get the idea
to-night, and then start properly to-morrow. Now for No. 15."

Somehow I felt instinctively that No. 15 would cause trouble. For No.
15 you stand on the right foot, fasten the left foot to one of the cords, and
stretch it out as far as you can....

What—officially—you do then, I cannot say....

Some people can stand easily upon the right foot, when the left is
fastened to the wall ... others cannot ... it is a gift....
 Having recovered from my spontaneous rendering of No. 15 I turned to
No. 28. This one, I realised, was extremely important; I would do it twelve
times.

You begin by lying flat on the floor, roped in at the waist, and with your
hands (grasping the elastic cords) held straight up in the air. The tension on
your waist is then extreme, but on your hands only moderate. Then, taking a
deep breath, you pull your arms slowly out until they lie along the floor.
The tension becomes terrific, the strain on every part of you is immense.
While I lay there, taking a deep breath before relaxing, I said to myself,
"The strain will be too much for me."

I was wrong. It was too much for the hook. The hook whizzed out,
everything flew at me at once, and I remembered no more....

As I limped into bed, I trod heavily upon something sharp. I shrieked

and bent down to see what had bitten me. It was a tin plate bearing the
words "LADIES."

* * * * * * *

"Well?" said Adela, a week later.

I looked at her for a long time.

"When did you last use the Hyperion?" I asked.

"About a year ago."

"Ah! ... You don't remember the chart that went with it?"

"Not well. Except, of course, that each exercise was arranged for a
particular object according to what you wanted."

"Exactly. So I discovered yesterday. It was in very small type, and I

missed it at first."

"Well, how many did you do?"

 "I limited myself to Exercises 10, 15, and 28. Do you happen to
remember what those were for?"

"Not particularly."

"No. Well, I started with No. 10. No. 10, you may recall, is one of the
most perilous. I nearly died over No. 10. And when I had been doing it for a
week, I discovered what its particular object was."

"What?"

"'To round the forearm!' Yes, madam," I said bitterly, "I have spent a
week of agony ... and I have rounded one forearm."

"Why didn't you try another?"

"I did. I tried No. 15. Six times in the pursuit of No. 15 have I been shot
up to the ceiling by the left foot ... and what for, Adela? 'To arch the instep!'
Look at my instep! Why should I want to arch it?"

"I wish I could remember which chart I sent you," said Adela, wrinkling
her brow.

"It was the wrong one," I said....

There was a long silence.

"Oh," said Adela suddenly, "you never told me about No. 28."

"Pardon me," I said, "I cannot bear to speak of 28."

"Why, was it even more unsuitable than the other two?"

"I found, when I had done it six times, that its object was stated to be,
'To remove double chin.' That, however, was not the real effect. And so I
crossed out the false comment and wrote the true one in its place."

"And what is that?" asked Adela.

 "'To remove the hook,'" I said gloomily.

CROQUET

PROLOGUE

"I hear you're very good at croquet," said my hostess.

"Oh, well," I said modestly. (The fact is I can beat them all at home.)

"We have the North Rutland champion staying with us. He's very keen
on a game. Now then, how can we manage?"

This was terrible. I must put it off somehow.

"Is there a north to Rutland," I began argumentatively. "I always thought

——"

"Yes, I see. He shall play with Jane against you and Miss Middleton. By
the way, let me introduce you all."

We bowed to each other for a bit, and then I had another shock. The
N.R. champion's mallet was bound with brass at each end (in case he
wanted to hit backwards suddenly) and had a silver plate on it. Jane's had
the brass only. It was absurd that they should play together.

I drew Miss Middleton on one side.

"I say," I began nervously, "I'm frightfully sorry, but I quite forgot to
bring my mallet. Will it matter very much?"

"I haven't one either."

 "You know, when my man was packing my bag, I particularly said to
him, 'Now, don't forget to put in a mallet.' He said, 'Shall I put the spare one
in too, sir, because the best one's sprung a bit?'"

"Oh, I've never had one of my own. I suppose when one is really good
——"

"Well, to tell you the truth, I've never had one either. We're fairly in for
it now."

"Never mind, we'll amuse ourselves somehow, I expect."

"Oh, I'm quite looking forward to it."

CHAPTER I

They kicked off from the summer-house end, and, after jockeying for
the start a bit, the N.R. champion got going. He went very slowly but very
surely. I watched anxiously for ten minutes, expecting my turn every
moment. After a quarter of an hour I raised my hat and moved away.

"Shall we sit down?" I said to Miss Middleton.

"We shall be in the way if we sit down here, sha'n't we?"

"Outside that chalk line we're safe?"

"I—I suppose so."

We moved outside and sat down on the grass.

"I never even had a chalk line," I said mournfully.

"It's much more fun without."

 "You know," I went on, "I can beat them all at home. Why even Wilfrid
——"

"It's just the same with me," said Miss Middleton. "Hilda did win once
by a frightful fluke, but——"

"But this is quite different. At home it would be considered jolly bad

form to go on all this time."

"One would simply go in and leave them," said Miss Middleton.

"You know, it's awful fun at home. The lawn goes down in terraces, and
if you hit the other person's ball hard enough you can get it right down to
the bottom; and it takes at least six to get back on the green again."

Miss Middleton gurgled to herself.

"We've got a stream ... round our lawn," she said, in gasps. "It's such a
joke ... and once ... when Hilda..."

CHAPTER II

"May I call you 'Mary?'" I said; "we're still here."

"Well, we have known each other a long time, certainly," said Miss
Middleton. "I think you might."

"Thanks very much."

"What hoop is he at?"

"He's just half-way."

"I suppose, when he's finished, then, Jane does it all?"

 "It practically comes to that. I believe, as a matter of form, I am allowed
a shot in between."

"That won't make any difference, will it?"

"No...."

"It's awfully hot, isn't it?"

"Yes.... Do you bicycle much?"

"No.... Do you?"

"No. I generally sleep in the afternoons."

"Much the best thing to do. Good-night."

"Good-night."

CHAPTER III

"Wake up," I said. "You've been asleep for hours. Jane is playing now."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Mary, still with her eyes closed. "Then I missed
your turn. Was it a good one?"

"Absolutely splendid. I had a very long shot, and hit the champion.
Then I took my mallet in both hands, brought it well over the shoulder—are
you allowed to do that, by the way?"

"Yes, it's hockey where you mustn't."

"And croqueted him right down to the house—over beds, through

bushes, across paths—the longest ball I've ever driven."
 "I hope you didn't make him very cross. You see, he may not be used to
our game."

"Cross? My dear girl, he was fairly chuckling with delight. Told me I'd
missed the rest of my turn. It seems that if you go over two beds, and across
more than one path, you miss the rest of your turn. Did you know that?"

"I suppose I did really, but I'd forgotten."

"And here I am again. Jane will be even longer. He's lying on the grass,
and taking sights for her just now.... Why didn't you answer my last letter?"

CHAPTER IV

"It's this passion for games," I said, waking up suddenly, "which has
made us Englishmen what we are. Here we have a hot July afternoon, when
all Nature is at peace, and the foreigner is taking his siesta. And what do we
do? How do we English men and women spend this hot afternoon? Why,
immediately after lunch, in one case even before the meal has been
digested, we rush off to take part in some violent game like croquet. Hour
after hour the play goes on relentlessly; there is no backing out on our part,
no pleading for just five minutes in which to get our wind. No, we bear our
part manfully, and—— Are you awake by any chance, or am I wasting all
this?"

"Of course I'm awake," said Mary, opening her eyes.

"What years I have known you! Do you remember those days when we
used to paddle together—the mixed paddling at Brighton?"

"Ah, yes. And your first paint-box."

"And your doll——"

"And the pony——"