Asian Music

Reviewed by: Storytime in India: Wedding Songs, Victorian Tales, and the Ethnographic Experience by Helen Priscilla Myers and Umesh Chandra Pandey Max Katz (bio) Storytime in India: Wedding Songs, Victorian Tales, and the Ethnographic Experience. Helen Priscilla Myers and Umesh Chandra Pandey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. vxxxi + 490 pp., list of songs and audio files, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. ISBN: 9780253041623 (hard-cover), $110; ISBN: 9780253041630 (paperback), $48.00; ISBN: 9780253041647 (e- book), $24.99. Companion website: https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/s95643c92t/. In the villages of North India, traditional Hindu weddings span multiple days, require an extensive succession of rituals and ceremonies, and exact a heavy financial and emotional toll on the bride and her family. As Helen Myers and Umesh Pandey illuminate in their new book, Storytime in India, such weddings are propelled from start to finish by women’s songs. The book is structured around 111 of these songs performed by Gangajali, a supremely knowledgeable singer of the Bhojpuri region. Over the course of five sweltering days in July 1989, in the relative quiet and isolation of a hotel room, Gangajali unfolds her repertoire for the authors and their microphones, outlining the complete succession of wedding rituals typical in Ballia, eastern Uttar Pradesh. From these five days of recordings, Helen and Umesh (as we come to know them) produce 4,000 pages of transcriptions and translations; this book is the story of their three decades of work together on the project. Each song, available to stream on a companion website, is presented in the text in English translation and is framed through informal, descriptive musical analyses by Helen and extensive commentary by Gangajali and Umesh. In this manner, Storytime in India leads readers through nearly three dozen successive ritual moments, each with its own activities, meanings, functions, participants, and, of course, songs. Many of these are gālīs, or “funny songs of abuse” (472), with themes ranging from the merely suggestive to the outright obscene. Helen revels in the homosocial comradery cultivated by these “dirty songs” (369), especially when she is named by Gangajali within them, [End Page 147] as in “this pounding pot of Helen is deep” (129). The imagined circle of seated, singing women even includes Helen’s female readers; Helen laughs with them at lyrics that depict “pounding the rice in the mortar with the pestle, which eventually, after lots of pounding, ends up getting blunt. ‘Keep pounding, keep pounding’ is pretty much an insult, isn’t it, sisters? Haha. His ‘pestle got blunt by pounding’ ” (128). Underlying the play, however, is the stark reality that the wedding, culminating with the “donation of the virgin daughter” by her father to the groom (362), constitutes a trauma for the young bride that is only partly assuaged by the singing voices of her female elders. An unconventional ethnography situated largely in a nondescript hotel room, Storytime in India invites readers not only into the fascinating world of the Bhojpuri wedding but also into the scholarly enterprise of knowledge production itself. In particular, Helen explains her intent to attack four persistent problems in the discipline of ethnomusicology: (1) insufficient deference within our publications to our local informants, (2) inadequate consideration of “the violence of colonialism and postcolonialism” that has shaped the scene of our fieldwork, (3) impenetrable prose that alienates all but an “in- group” of readers, and (4) intolerable neglect of sound quality in our field recordings (160–61). Helen addresses these concerns by (a) promoting Umesh—her primary research guide—to the rank of coauthor, (b) including numerous narrative interruptions that redirect readers’ attention to successive installments of a colonial- era British novel, (c) crafting the text as “a lighthearted, reader- friendly storybook” (160), and (d) presenting model recordings of Gangajali’s a cappella singing in which her every syllable rings out. In the last two goals the book succeeds admirably: the artistry of the writing and the clarity of the recordings distinguish Storytime in India as a rare volume in our discipline. Unconstrained by the staid conventions of academic prose, Helen waxes poetic, speculates freely, and indulges frequently in sentence fragments and seemingly irrelevant details of her life with Umesh...

Max Katz

Storytime in India: Wedding Songs, Victorian Tales, and the Ethnographic Experience by Helen Priscilla Myers and Umesh Chandra Pandey

印度故事时间：婚礼歌曲、维多利亚时代的故事与民族志体验——海伦·普丽西拉·迈尔斯与乌梅什·钱德拉·潘迪

Reviewed by: Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka by Garrett M. Field Eshantha Peiris (bio) Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka. Garrett M. Field. South Asia across the Disciplines. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii + 213 pp., b&w illustrations, music, bibliography, index. ISBN: 9780520294714 (paperback), $34.95. Garrett Field’s monograph Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka is a study of Sinhala- language song and poetry from 1900 to 1964 that examines how male songwriters and poets of Sinhalese ethnicity modernized their creative output in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. This broad focus constitutes an attempt to bridge the artificial compartmentalization in Western academia that relegates the study of South Asian musics to ethnomusicology and the study of texts to South Asian studies. While many Sinhala speakers will be familiar with the examples and narratives discussed in the book—given their inclusion in the Sri Lankan national secondary- school curriculum—Field moves beyond the isolationist tendencies common in Sri Lanka studies to consider the implications of these cultural histories for interpretating the historical rise of nation- states around the world. The arguments made in this book also serve to nuance some of the foundational theories of postcolonial studies and to bring Western academic insights into dialogue with Sinhala scholarly exegeses. Field’s fluency in spoken and written Sinhala makes his textual analyses rich for both specialists and general readers. Prior to the twentieth century, Sinhala poetry in Sri Lanka was presented to the public through sung performance, similar to other poetic/literary traditions found across the premodern world. Memorization of Sinhala verses was enabled by standard poetic meters and rhyme schemes, which in different eras responded to a variety of poetic conventions rooted in the scriptural language traditions of Sanskrit and Pali (Kulatillake 1976). Among the many labels associated with historical Sinhala poetry, the terms gī and sindu are still used today, referring to what we might now call “song.” As noted in Modernizing Composition, practical distinctions between song (as something sung and heard) and poetry (as something written and silently read) can be traced to the global onset of recorded gramophone song at the turn of the twentieth century (2017, 6). [End Page 144] Modernizing Composition progresses chronologically, with part 1 covering the end of the colonial period (1900–1948) and part 2 the years following political independence (1948–64). Although the analyzed texts are contextualized within the broader contexts of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist movements in Sri Lanka, Field is careful not to attribute or reduce the motivations of songwriters and poets to a linear evolution of nationalist discourses, instead considering (in addition to nationalism) the impact of other factors that might have inspired composition—for example, commercialism, cosmopolitan connections within South Asia and the British Empire, the growth of the recording and film industries, and biographical details of social actors. Chapter 1 discusses theater songs, gramophone songs, and moralistic poetry from the early twentieth century, framing them in terms of Partha Chatterjee’s three- stage theory of anticolonial nationalist thought (1986)—departure, maneuver, and arrival—and contextualizing them as part of the Aryan- Sinhalese movement of Buddhist revivalism that had roots in nineteenth- century Orientalist ideologies. Chapter 2 examines radio songs and social commentary poems from the 1940s that were informed by the nationalist movement of Sinhala linguistic purism known as the Hela Havula. This history is framed in terms of Chatterjee’s theory of the “inner domain” (1993), which refers to the cultural reform movements that preceded anticolonial political action. In contrast to Chatterjee, Field tries in chapter 1 to account more for the relationship between cultural nationalism and cultural commodities, and in chapter 2 argues that “inner domains” are not always created in relation to Western hegemony, using the example of how the Hela Havula movement arose in opposition to the cultural dominance of North India. Chatterjee is admittedly a slippery target given how his own ideas have evolved in the decades since his pioneering theories of postcolonialism. But Field’s argument that postcolonial studies needs to account for social phenomena beyond the India- Britain...

Eshantha Peiris

Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka by Garrett M. Field

现代化构图：二十世纪斯里兰卡的僧伽罗歌曲、诗歌与政治 作者：加勒特·M·菲尔德

Reviewed by: Japanese Traditional Music: Songs of People at Work and Play by Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai Justin R. Hunter (bio) Japanese Traditional Music: Songs of People at Work and Play. Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (1941). Text and translation by Naoko Terauchi. World Arbiter, 2016. One CD (77 minutes). 19 pages of notes (English), 16 pages of notes (Japanese). (CD) $15.95. Japanese Traditional Music: Songs of People at Work and Play is a compilation of music not likely heard outside of academic archives for some 80 years. In the pre– and immediate post–World War II era, many Japanese musicologists documented musics from throughout Japan in order to capture sounds thought to be in decline during those changing times. Equally important, these musicologists sought to present the unique qualities of Japanese traditional genres to the outside world. But much of this recorded material was lost or rests in archives, largely inaccessible to the general public. This CD compilation by Naoko Terauchi is a restoration project of recordings made during the 1940s, focusing on regional folk songs. As Terauchi writes, “Each song conveys a rich musical and lyrical expression closely related to local livelihoods and life styles” (7) from all over Japan. This is an extensive project compiling information and audio from the original recordings and from various archives. These recordings allow listeners to hear music of “unique historical importance and culturally valuable as a document of musical practices in traditional Japanese genres during wartime” (5). Indeed, Terauchi’s album highlights the music of commoners, not the elite musics or high art forms of urban centers, which were less at risk of loss. The folk tunes of the countryside reflect a time when the world had particular views about a militaristic nation gearing up for aggression and seeking to solidify a homogeneous and elevated position on the world stage. Terauchi’s compilation draws on the efforts of the Kokusai Bunka Shinkō- kai (KBS, International Organization for the Promotion of Culture), begun in the late 1930s. Forerunner of what is now the Japan Foundation, the KBS was created to promote cultural exchange between Japan and foreign countries. KBS produced Nihon Ongaku- shu (Album of Japanese music) as a compilation of various music genres recorded between 1941–42. Released as a 60- disc (120 sides) sound anthology arranged in five volumes, the set was intended to demonstrate the richness of Japan’s cultural practices. As Terauchi notes, [End Page 158] it is remarkable that this project was completed at all during such a turbulent time. Ethnomusicologists Tanabe Hisao (1883–1984) and Machida Kashō (1888–81)1 were part of the original project and played a major part in selecting the music included in Nihon Ongaku- shu. The original anthology included gagaku, koto, shamisen, and other elite genres as well as folk songs. The present CD, Japanese Traditional Music: Songs of People at Work and Play, includes 24 tracks of folk songs from the original Nihon Ongaku- shu that represent nearly every region of Japan. The original anthology included only Japanese music—I suppose appropriately, albeit unjustly—and omitted music of Okinawans, the Ainu, and other minority groups. Each track is provided with a detailed description in the liner notes, published in English by World Arbiter but available in Japanese on arbiterrecords.org. The notes in both English and Japanese resonate with the KBS original intent to make Japan’s culture more accessible to the world. As sources for the notes, Terauchi draws on the KBS compilation and from a few subsequent collections, including the major project by Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), and from the collections of ethnomusicologists Tanabe and Machida. Terauchi’s rich liner notes are full of regional information and historical accounts. In a few instances she comments on the present. The source material for the liner notes, as Terauchi notes, is a compilation in itself. Track 13, Nishiryō no uta is a group of three songs from Hokkaido. It is related to herring fishing practices in the port town of Otaru and includes the song Okiage ondo, which today is widely known as Sōran- bushi. The interrelations of each track, most containing more than one song, presents a truly...

Justin R. Hunter

Japanese Traditional Music: Songs of People at Work and Play by Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai

日本传统音乐：国际文化振兴会所记录的劳作与娱乐之歌

The Society of the Divine Word (SVD) began the first Catholic mission to Bali in 1935. Several of the first missionaries sent were Dutch and American priests with training in ethnology and linguistics who employed their findings to missionize the Balinese. The resultant missiologies legitimized some aspects of local custom, notably recurring discourses of ancestral belonging that were commonly mapped onto Balinese music, dance, and theater. This article examines rare archival material—including the Bali Mass manuscript—to better understand the role of performing arts in the mutually informing history of Catholic- Hindu relations in Bali before and after Vatican II.

Dustin D. Wiebe

“Our Divine Ancestor Jesus Christ”: Performing Arts and Catholic Missiology in Bali

“我们的神圣祖先耶稣基督”：巴厘岛的表演艺术与天主教传教

Reviewed by: Saysay Himig: A Sourcebook on Philippine Music History, 1880–1921 ed. by Arwin Q. Tan, and: Saysay Himig: An Anthology of Transcultural Filipino Music (1880–1941) ed. by Arwin Q. Tan Frederick J. Schenker (bio) Saysay Himig: A Sourcebook on Philippine Music History, 1880–1921. Edited by Arwin Q. Tan. Music and Culture Book Series. Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2018. xxiv + 396 pp., illustrations, index. ISBN:928-971-542-858-3 (paperback), ₱ 850.00 ($16.60). Saysay Himig: An Anthology of Transcultural Filipino Music (1880–1941). Produced, supervised, and edited by Arwin Q. Tan. Quezon City: University of the Philippines College of Music, 2017. Three CDs (71, 51, and 77 minutes). 12 pages of notes. ₱ 1,000.00 ($19.50). What is the place of music and expressive culture amid a struggle for sovereignty and independence from colonial rule? What are the sounds of this struggle? The edited collection Saysay Himig: A Sourcebook on Philippine Music History, 1880–1941, and the three- CD set Saysay Himig: An Anthology of Transcultural Filipino Music, 1880–1941, explore these questions during a tumultuous period in the history of the Philippines when the archipelago was emerging from Spanish governance only to be confronted with a rapidly expanding US imperial state. The stated purpose of these publications is to provide an accessible entry point into the understudied history of the intersections of musical practices and developing nationalist expression in the Philippines between 1880 and 1941. They examine a period when Filipinos attempted to imagine and express themselves as a nation through various media, including musical performance. The Sourcebook and Anthology (as well as a third publication edited by José S. Buenconsejo titled Philippine Modernities: Music, Performing Arts, and Language, 1880 to 1941) came on the heels of the 2016 centennial of the University of the Philippines College of Music. Festivities marking this important date included concerts and research symposia that, among other things, celebrated the significance of music in the making of a Philippine nation. The items reviewed here continue this celebratory project by exploring how Filipino composers engaged with and helped shape the emerging possibilities of Philippine nationalism. They show how composers were able to craft their own aesthetic and national expression despite the oppression of imperialism [End Page 139] and the prevailing and often inescapable sounds of European classical and American popular music. Saysay Himig: A Sourcebook1 introduces a wide range of topics and ideas about music in the Philippines around the turn of the twentieth century. As editor Arwin Tan writes in his preface, the “book is intended to be used in the teaching of Philippine music history” and is meant to “cater to the general public’s interest” (xvi). The result is a volume of 50 chapters averaging six to nine pages from a group of 29 scholars, most of whom have connections of some sort to the University of the Philippines. Authors include faculty members of the University of the Philippines College of Music, esteemed figures in Philippine art and academia such as Ramón Santos and Resil Mojares, recently minted PhDs, and a small number of doctoral students and musician- scholars. The chapters are organized around six general themes. These include (1) transmission of music, (2) musical heritage, (3) politics and music, (4) music economy, (5) popular culture, and (6) music communities. Individual topics include but are not limited to audience reception of and writing about music in Manila in various decades; overviews of particular genres or styles— including folk music traditions, rondalla, zarzuela (sarsuwela), bodabil, and opera—in the Philippines; music pedagogy in the Philippines; systems for printing, publishing, selling, and copyrighting music in Manila; and the intersections of US imperialism with music education and performance. The chapters can broadly be grouped into two general approaches. First, many authors offer an encyclopedic- type entry about a particular topic. For example, Isi Miranda outlines a brief history of the musical- theater form zarzuela, Raul Casantusan Navarro provides a history of the Philippines national anthem, José Buenconsejo (who wrote three chapters) analyzes a medley of Tagalog songs from the 1880s, and Arwin Tan (six chapters) covers topics such as the first Tagalog music...

Frederick J. Schenker

Saysay Himig: A Sourcebook on Philippine Music History, 1880–1921 ed. by Arwin Q. Tan, and: Saysay Himig: An Anthology of Transcultural Filipino Music (1880–1941) ed. by Arwin Q. Tan

《Saysay Himig：菲律宾音乐史资料集，1880-1921》，Arwin Q. Tan 编，以及《Saysay Himig：跨文化菲律宾音乐选集（1880-1941）》，Arwin Q. Tan 编

Deborah Wong

Finding Her Beat ed. by Dawn Mikkelson and Keri Pickett (review)

《寻找她的节奏》，由Dawn Mikkelson和Keri Pickett编辑（书评）

Andrew McGraw

Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java: Bamboo Murmurs by Henry Spiller (review)

现代西爪哇的古代乐器：亨利·斯皮勒的《竹语》（书评）

Abstract: This article discusses the influence of African American blues and jazz on the Hakka Taiwanese musical revitalization movement since the late 1990s. Case studies examine the discourse and materialization of two types of musical fusion, namely Hakka blues and Hakka jazz, by Sanguetai (1997–2007) and Sanguetaihousheng (2008– present). Their performances express appreciation for Black music and advance diversity and inclusion in Taiwan; furthermore, they allow the musicians to articulate their resistance against the status quo and elevate the social status of sango . Black music has a decisive position in the development of neotraditional Hakka Taiwanese music .

Mark Hsiang-Yu Feng

Hakka Blues and Jazz: The Inspiration of Black Music in the Hakka Taiwanese Musical Revitalization Movement in Postdictatorial Taiwan

客家蓝调与爵士：后威权台湾客家音乐复兴运动中黑人音乐的灵感

Abstracts: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of musical media, this article focuses on the archival record of Chinese-Javanese jazz producer Harry Lim maintained in the collections of Arsip Jazz Indonesia (Indonesia Jazz Archive). I examine Lim’s history as a transnational migrant in the 1940s American music business and connect his history to social values shaped by the grassroots archivists. I use archival care, the idea that archiving should be practiced with more attention to the people and communities that produced and value materials, to interpret these practices as a form of reparative cultural work. Berdasarkan penelitian etnografis dan analisis media musik, artikel ini berfokus pada berbagai arsip dan dokumentasi mengenai Harry Lim, seorang produser jazz Tionghoa-Jawa, yang tersimpan dalam koleksi Arsip Jazz Indonesia atau Indonesia Jazz Archive. Saya mengkaji sejarah Lim sebagai seorang migran transnasional dalam bisnis musik Amerika dekade 1940-an, serta menghubungkan sejarahnya dengan nilai-nilai sosial yang dibentuk oleh para pengarsip akar rumput. Saya menggunakan konsep mengurus arsip para (archival care), gagasan bahwa pengarsipan harus dilakukan dengan lebih memperhatikan orang-orang dan komunitas yang menghasilkan dan menilai materi dalam perwalian kearsipan, untuk menafsirkan temuan saya sebagai bentuk karya budaya reparatif.

Otto Stuparitz

Archival Care at Arsip Jazz Indonesia

印度尼西亚爵士档案馆的档案管理

Abstract: The history and development of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music is still viewed today as the result of a process of synthesis, syncretism, and hybridity between Indian and Persian systems of music. Central to this narrative is the Indo-Persian poet and courtier Amīr Ḳhusraw (1253–1325), often seen as the father of Sufi qawwālī and the classical ḳhayāl genre. This article both offers a reconsideration of the traditional historiography surrounding Ḳhusraw and his role in the development of Hindu-stani music tradition through his own writings on music and locates our modern-day understanding of his musical innovations in the Mughal reception of his legacy.

William Rees Hofmann

Listening to Amīr Ḳhusraw in the Mughal Court: Indian Sultanate Epistemologies of Persian Music and the Construction of Hindustani Music History in the Mughal Imaginary

Abbreviation	Asian Music
Journal Impact	0.25

Publication Information	Publisher: Society for Asian Music，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2002，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

Asian Music

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