Week Four

When discussing the music performed for tourists by the native Naxi of Lijiang County in the northern region of China’s Yunnan province, Professor Helen Reese suggests that the Naxi traditional music is not as “ancient” as it is marketed to its foreign audience. Investigating the history behind this popular “authentic” Naxi musical tradition, Professor Reese points out that the Naxi, like many other ethnic minorities throughout China, inherited many of their cultural traditions from the Han Chinese, which included the musical-religious organization known as the Dongjinghui or Dongjing associations. At first these musical imports included poetic and sacred scripture, garb, melodies, tune titles, notation systems, and a heterophonic texture, although over time secular and informal practicing of these traditions evolved them to their truncated modern forms. Even though the Naxi musical ambassador and performer Xuan Ke presents his ensemble to tourists as being all Naxi, two of his players are in fact Han Chinese. And though the Lijiang ensemble points to their plucked lutes, double reed pipes, and heavy vibrato as being entirely Naxi developments, these differences are relatively superficial when compared to the structurally Han background over which they are superimposed.

In regards to an entirely different situation, when students from China’s Central Conservatory of Music led by Fang Kun performed their orchestrated “national music” at Durham England at the Second Oriental Music Festival in 1979, an American scholar criticized their choice of repertoire as reflecting more the traditions of Western classical music than the styles found in Eastern traditional music. In terms of authenticity, the argument raised here was that the Chinese orchestra in perfecting, redefining, and reinterpreting its own traditions, was in fact adopting practices not only foreign to its own culture but also destructive to its maintenance and growth. The argument in response to this went to suggest that this conservative view aims to arrest the development of Chinese music and that Asian music, following Taoist thought and tradition, is best preserved by recreating the moods found in older styles and genres. Although supporters and opponents for both of these arguments can be found on either side of the East-West divide, more accurately this debate boils down to a matter of individual preference. For even though conservative English patrons praise the Naxi for their “authentic” sounding music, the self-conscious musical fodder used at these foreign tourist oriented attractions is by no means authentic when compared to the musical styles played by the informal secular groups of neighboring villages for their own private entertainment.

This authenticity debate though can be interpreted in many different ways that fundamentally point to vagueness of the entire matter. Following the words of the Russian writer Peter Goullart, authentic in this context can mean “credible” or “convincing”, both of which correspond to the responses of the English tourists to the traditional Naxi performances. A different interpretation of authentic could also suggest that it mean “duly authorized, certified, or legally valid”, which has been adopted by the professional Chinese Central Conservatory of Music and the Communist government behind China’s cultural revolutions. Then again, authentic can also be thought of as exactly copying the form of previously inherited traditions, such as those of the Han Chinese. If such is the case confusion then surrounds the nature of what is being copied, from what historical era the original is taken, and whether the judge of this authenticity is a tourist, a Chinese minority, or a Han Chinese. Again, heavily imbued within this topic is the element of individual preference, which through subjectivity corrodes all attempts toward substantially identifying what constitutes being authentic.