Tradition and Divergence in Southwestern China: Kam Big Song Singing in the Village and on Stage

Abstract

Kam big songs, comprising a major musical genre sung for centuries in Kam villages in southwestern China, have now been sung in staged performances for over sixty years. Concurrent performance of big song in both village and staged formats has produced different features and paths of development for each, as well as complex interdependence between the two formats. Kam big song singing thus presents a valuable insight into the way that tradition and divergence from tradition might be understood in the twenty-first century. In this article, I outline some of the most significant aspects of villagers' big song singing over the last sixty years. I demonstrate the difficulties in both locating the concept of ‘tradition’ within contemporary big song singing and analytically situating the divergence of big song singing into different performance formats. I thereby illustrate key concerns, potential elucidations, and the complexity of the analytical task in understanding the contemporary trajectory of ‘tradition’.

Keywords:

• Tradition
• China
• Kam Big Song
• Intangible Cultural Heritage
• Socio-Cultural Change

In the 1950s, Chinese researchers visiting Kam minority villages in southwestern China learnt for the first time of a unique form of choral singing that was to revolutionise broader understandings of the entire nation's musical traditions. Giving this two-part choral singing the Chinese name dage 大歌 (big song), the researchers used it as conclusive proof that Chinese music was not exclusively monophonic (namely, each song or piece of music consisting of a single musical line or melody). This use of big song to overturn Western allegations that Chinese music lacked the polyphonic genres characteristic of Western music of recent centuries has since featured frequently in Chinese-language descriptions of both Kam big song singing and Chinese musical traditions.1

While these actions and events of the 1950s influenced many people's understandings of the diversity of China's musical traditions, they also played a major role in a very different series of momentous changes to the musical activities of Kam villagers that have occurred since that time. In particular, they introduced to Kam people the new concept of such choral singing existing as a big song tradition, and initiated the promotion of a form of that tradition in staged singing performances outside Kam areas. These developments have been major factors underlying the many significant changes within the choral singing of Kam village communities.

The notion of ‘tradition’ is important in relation to understanding both villagers’ big song singing and non-Kam conceptualisations of that singing. Yet, as a result of the complex changes that have occurred in villagers’ big song singing since the beginning of the new millennium, locating the concept of ‘tradition’ within contemporary big song singing is no longer a straightforward endeavour. It is complicated not just because of various factors arising from its divergence into village and staged big song singing formats, but especially because of the lack of clarity in how the divergence of big song singing into different performance formats should be situated within analyses of big song singing. As the creation of a new staged performance tradition—whether for entertainment or to assist in so-called cultural preservation—is not unique to the Kam, the locating of ‘tradition’ and the situating of divergence within analyses of cultural performances are necessarily key concerns in many cultural contexts. In this article, I explore approaches to these issues within the case of villagers’ big song singing in order to illustrate key concerns, potential elucidations and the complexity of the task.

I commence with some background information about Kam people and Kam big song singing within Kam villages. I then describe the emergence of staged big song performances that has occurred over the last sixty-odd years, and establish how staged formats differ from village-based performances. This leads to an exploration of some of the main ways that the emergence of staged big song singing has influenced villagers’ big song singing over recent decades, illustrating key concerns and the complexity of the analytical task. I conclude by exploring approaches to or ‘theoretical cuts’ regarding these issues within the case of villagers’ big song singing, and describe how such approaches potentially elucidate the recognition of tradition and divergence within contemporary cultural practice.

My understanding of Kam big song that permits such analysis has been gained during over twenty-four months’ musical ethnographic fieldwork in rural Kam areas since 2004. In order to carry out this research I learnt to speak Kam and to sing Kam songs, and participated in much of the music-making featured in this study.

Kam People and Kam Village Life

Kam people are known in Chinese as Dongzu (侗族), and are one of China's fifty-five officially recognised ‘minority groups’. Such minorities are primarily identified according to cultural rather than racial criteria. Of China's more than 1.3 billion people, around 8 per cent identify as minorities and approximately 92 per cent as the majority ‘Han’. Today, the Kam population is estimated to be at least three million people, most of whom are resident in southeastern Guizhou Province and the adjoining border regions of Hunan and Guangxi, as illustrated in Figure 1.2 The first language for many Kam people continues to be Kam, a Tai-Kadai family language completely different from Chinese.3 Kam is a tonal language with two major dialect groupings (Southern Kam and Northern Kam), each of which includes numerous lects.4

Figure 1  Left: Map of China, showing the two provinces (Guizhou and Hunan Provinces) and one autonomous region (Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) where most Kam people reside (major cities are also marked). The general area of Kam residence is indicated with an arrow. Map by Wu Jiaping. Right: Map showing Northern and Southern Kam dialect regions (shaded pale grey); the approximate area containing big-song-singing villages is shaded in dark grey and indicated with an arrow (adapted from Edmondson & Solnit 1988b, p. 21).

In Southern Kam-speaking villages rice is the main staple food, and rice growing is the major farming activity. Besides farming, there is also a small amount of local paid employment. Since the 1990s this region has undergone major economic, social and cultural changes that have included the mass absence of youth for study or work elsewhere, the spread of Chinese language education, the inception and subsequent popularity of television viewing, and the rapid growth of Kam cultural tourism and state-sponsored promotion of Kam music. Such changes are all clearly evident in Sheeam,5 a well-known big-song-singing area and my main fieldsite. Known in Chinese as Sanlong (三龙), Sheeam has approximately 6000 residents living in twenty villages, and is located in Liping county (黎平县), southeastern Guizhou Province.

Kam Village Music-Making and Big Song Singing

Singing in Sheeam involves at least seventeen different Kam song genres (many comprising various sub-genres or categories, as they are referred to below); one of these genres is big song. These different genres include songs for greeting and farewelling visitors, entertaining important guests during a meal, celebrating the birth of a child, building a new house, weddings and engagements, and major communal village rituals. Big song is sung in a major village ritual for lunar New Year, and occasionally also within other public visiting activities. The great significance of singing within these many different village activities is multifaceted and cannot be fully described here, thus two critical observations must suffice. First, singing is considered to be so integral to the events in which it occurs that many of the activities cannot take place without singing. Second, because the Kam language has no widely used written form, Kam songs—especially big song—have been particularly important for recording and transmitting many aspects of Kam history and culture.6

The songs known in English as ‘big song’—and referred to here as the big song genre—are sung only in villages within one small area of 100,000 Southern Kam speakers (see Figure 1).7 A distinctive feature of Kam big songs are the two different vocal lines that are sung at the same time, with each member of a singing group assigned to sing one of the lines. There are many categories of big song; most are distinguished by their melody, and each regional repertoire contains a unique combination of song categories and songs.8 Big song lyrics mainly use the local variant of the second lect of Southern Kam, but sometimes also draw upon ‘old Kam’ and the local Chinese dialect.9 Most lyrics conform to strict rhyming patterns involving the final sound (in linguistics, the ‘rhyme’) of syllables at particular points within each line and section. In Sheeam, those big songs originally viewed as the most important have lyrics that are considered to have major educational significance and, together with the process of singing these songs, have served as an important medium for transmitting knowledge concerning Kam history, philosophy, ecology, agriculture, social responsibilities, laws and aesthetics. For example, some songs include instruction on how to view death, how particular relationships should be handled, how to care for one's rice fields, the hazards of opium smoking, and the legendary origins of the Kam people. In 2006 big song was recognised as National-Level Intangible Cultural Heritage (Zhou 2006, pp. 101–3), and in 2009 it was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity under the title ‘Grand Song of the Dong Ethnic Group’ (see Grand Song 2009).

For centuries up until the 1950s, these songs were performed only in the dare low (the large, multi-eaved, pagoda-shaped wooden towers found in many Southern Kam-speaking villages) and other public locations in Kam villages. Kam villagers refer to the original context for big song performance as nyao dare low song lao ga—literally, ‘exchanging songs in the dare low’. This performance context relies on villagers forming single-sex singing groups (usually with between four and fifteen or so members), and learning songs privately during the year. At New Year, these songs are performed in a public village building such as the dare low as a song exchange between a female singing group and a male singing group seated in a circle around a large fire (if any non-singers attend, they stand behind the singers and have no significant role). In such contexts greatest emphasis is placed on a singing group's co-ordination, repertoire quantity and repertoire quality, with perceptions of the latter based upon the quality of the lyrics to the songs known by the members of the group.

Although there are no definitive written records of village big song singing during earlier times, the content of the song lyrics, the lyrical and musical structure of the songs, the structure of local repertoires, the features of the big song transmission system, and oral accounts from Kam villagers all attest to big song singing in Kam villages having a lengthy and continuous history.10 Moreover, they indicate that big song singing was primarily conceptualised by Kam villagers as a social rather than purely musical activity—as evident in a number of ways.

For instance, big song singing was an essential component of many villagers’ lives during their youth, giving them a set of relations both with others in their singing group (through song learning on many occasions during the year and through performances at New Year) and with singers of the opposite sex in other groups with whom they exchanged songs in performances. A refusal to join a singing group was seen as a rejection of social contact rather than a lack of confidence in one's musical abilities. This is clear from the first lines to the most well-known big song from Sheeam:

Hai gay dor ga, ban bao juuee / Soy dee dor ga, ban bao sang

(If you don't sing, friends will say you are proud / Sit down and sing, friends will say you are good and honest)11

The action of ‘exchanging songs in the dare low’ at New Year was not simply a musical performance, but rather an important social activity that was an integral part of and defined New Year celebrations. Even the structure of the singing exchange functioned socially as a form of dialogue between the different singing groups. For each singer and onlooker, their social positioning within the process of the exchange was a sonic representation and physically embodied experience of their position within particular social networks.

Big Song Singing on Stage

In the 1950s, as a result of big song being identified by researchers from outside Kam communities, versions of a small number of big songs began to be performed in different staged contexts. Not only were performances of big song of national interest due to the genre's influence upon understandings of China's musical traditions, but staged big song performances were also useful to the Chinese state in new projects of ethnic identity construction (in this case, the identification of ‘Kam’ as a distinct ethnic group) and in the promotion of knowledge about the new government and its policies.12 The choral nature of big song singing may also have played a part in big song being favoured in staged performances, as the songs could easily be adapted for the massed performances widely supported by the new Communist government. In broad terms, there are many parallels between the emergence of this staged performance format and developments in performing arts and the staging of musical traditions in other communist contexts—such as in Kazakh (Kendirbaeva 1994) and Bulgarian (Rice 2004, pp. 56–73) communities during the period they were under Soviet control.

Staged big song performances assumed a different form from 1966 until at least the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, being restricted to arranged big songs with pro-Communist lyrics. The more usual format of staged big song performances only resumed with the political and social reforms of the 1980s, when such performances returned to the earlier and somewhat less politically-focused style of the 1950s and early 1960s. However, as a result of the social and political restrictions in Kam villages during the Cultural Revolution (as outlined below), the singers involved in staged big song performances from the 1980s onwards began to include many Kam people with no experience in village big song singing. The 1980s also marked the beginning of Kam song classes in tertiary institutes specifically for training Kam professional performers. In the 1990s, staged performances increased in popularity and began to feature in televised broadcasts.

Recent contexts for staged big song performance have included village performances and county-level competitions, ‘Ten thousand people singing Kam big song’ (Liping county, Guizhou, 2005)13 and performances in major cities both within and beyond China—including New York (Carnegie Hall, 2009) and several Australasian cities (2012). Other staged performances have been and are given for the express purpose of making VCDs or DVDs of Kam singing, and these discs are widely popular in rural Kam areas. In these staged performances a singing group's co-ordination is still considered important, but various purely musical features of the performance are usually emphasised over repertoire quantity and quality.

Kam people refer to the staged performance of Kam songs, including big song, as cha tai dor ga—literally, ‘going onstage to sing songs’. The various features of staged big song singing that allow Kam people to distinguish it from big song singing occurring in the village context have remained virtually static over the last sixty years. While there has been a gradual increase in the scale of staged performances, they have continued to involve a relatively unchanged repertoire of big songs that are sung for a silent, listening and usually non-Kam audience. The formation of singing groups and the learning of songs occur according to criteria other than the socially-based criteria of village big song singing groups, and decisions about the groups’ singing are usually made by just one person—often a person in authority who is non-Kam or Kam from outside the local community. Staged big song performances also incorporate certain musical, lyrical and aesthetic features that differ from those typical within the village context. Although it is considered acceptable for the same villagers to perform in both village and staged contexts, because the differences between these two big song singing formats encompass almost every major aspect of big song, preparations for performances in the two different contexts are quite different.14 Table 1 gives examples of these major aspects that differ between the two traditions, illustrating the extent of these differences.

Table 1  An overview of the major aspects that differ between village and staged big song singing. The left column lists the aspects that differ between the two performance formats; the centre and right columns give one example of this difference in relation to each of these aspects.

Aspect	Village big song singing	Staged big song singing
Repertoire	Only local repertoire performed.	Songs performed mainly drawn from a recognised ‘staged’ repertoire which always features songs from various areas; local repertoire only occasionally performed.
Transmission format	Single-sex groups learn together during the year, and form important social bonds.	Groups (single-sex or mixed) learn together in the lead-up to specific performances, social bonds may not always be established and group membership often differs with each performance.
Performance format	Usually sung in the dare low or other important public space, and can take place even if only singers are present (i.e. no non-singing audience attends).	Usually performed on a stage and towards an audience, the members of which only listen and do not sing.
Musical structure	Each group uses a unique melody (in Kam, sor (‘melodic habitus’)) for singing all the songs in each category of big song.*	Songs often sung with standardised melodies that have often undergone ‘artistic processing’ and are similar to the versions performed by local professional performance troupes.
Lyrical structure	In Sheeam, songs with meaningful lyrics considered most important in performance.	Meaningfulness of lyrics almost never considered important.
Aesthetics	Usually sung at a relatively low pitch.	Sung at a relatively high pitch.
Criteria for group membership	Group formed amongst people sharing clan or friendship ties, or amongst people resident in one area of a village. Participation in the group indicates respect for others and community-mindedness.	Singers selected according to the requirements of the particular performance situation, but selection invariably based on singers’ ages and physical appearance.
Decision-making and direction within group	Consensual amongst group members.	Depends on location for performance, but even staged performances within the village may be wholly directed by outsiders.
Intended audience for performance	Kam villagers; in exchange of big song, the main audience is the group of singers seated opposite.	Both Kam and non-Kam. However, decisions made concerning many aspects of performance indicate that main audience is expected to be non-Kam.
*The big song category known as ga sor is one exception to this rule: each of the songs in this category has a unique melody which only occasionally resembles the melody of other ga sor.

Kam villagers further distinguish staged big song singing from village big song singing because of new big song categories that are only performed as part of the staged repertoire. Amongst village singers in Sheeam and many nearby areas, these newly emergent big song categories include those referred to as ga Yuanlong (songs by Yuanlong), referring to songs arranged by the composer Wu Yuanlong 吴远隆; ga shor-shyao (school songs), the repertoire of mostly non-local songs usually taught and sung only within the school context; and ga yishu tuan (arts troupe songs), most of which are ga Yuanlong. During my fieldwork, many villagers commented that these songs were not classified as ga dao (our songs); they were identified as songs from outside the Sheeam repertoire and were almost never sung during village big song singing.

Most of the songs in these new categories consist of songs that have undergone a process referred to in Chinese as yishu jiagong 艺术加工 (artistic processing). This process is employed by people outside Kam villages (mainly composers and other Cultural Bureau employees) to prepare many big songs for staged performances by more closely aligning the songs with non-Kam aesthetic preferences through altering aspects such as lyrics, melody and musical structure. The songs are almost never sung within village big song singing since they are seen as lacking important features (such as high-quality lyrics) that would make them valuable within the village context. If a singing group chose to sing any of these songs in village big song singing, the singing group would immediately be considered to lack a sufficiently large repertoire of local songs and would lose face (and cultural and symbolic capital).

In recent years, the nationwide trend involving the identification of yuanshengtai 原生态 (authentic) musical performance has also emerged within staged big song singing (see Ingram 2010a, 2012a). Despite its name, yuanshengtai big song performance differs significantly from that occurring in the village context.15 This was clearly illustrated in 2008, when Sheeam singers entered the yuanshengtai division of the province-wide ‘Colourful Guizhou’ song competition. The members of the Sheeam singing group who joined in this competition chose sections from several different big songs for their performance, singing them linked together in a medley to form one song. This ‘song’ thus lacked the lyrical continuity, lexical logic and rhyming patterns that are all considered so important in Kam singing. The singers had never sung this way in any village tradition context; their decision to perform in this way was based on the knowledge that previous winning entries had used this approach.16 Since 2008, this practice of creating a ‘medley’ big song has been promoted through ‘authentic’ staged big song performances and has become more firmly established. It has been used in numerous successive staged performances, and the Kam names dor ga don and dor may don (singing song sections)17 have been coined to refer to this performance practice.

Village Big Song Singing following the Emergence of Staged Performances

Village big song singing of the early twenty-first century differs in important ways from the big song singing that occurred in Kam villages prior to the emergence of staged performances in the 1950s—a difference that is to be expected if the singing continues to be a living tradition. While the Kam language has no word for ‘tradition’, the fact that ‘exchanging songs in the dare low’ continues to be identified as taking place and continues to involve big song singing can be understood to indicate that Kam villagers continue to identify a tradition of big song singing within Kam village life, despite its differences from earlier forms of such singing.

Although staged big song singing has influenced village big song singing in complex and important ways, staged singing was not and is not the only factor to have influenced village singing. Accounts from older Kam villages seem to indicate that the first of the main recent influences upon village big song singing was the virtual abandonment of singing during the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). I was told that many villagers struggled during the famines of the Great Leap Forward simply to find enough food to keep alive, and had no energy for singing. During the Cultural Revolution village big song singing was prohibited along with most other forms of ‘traditional’ culture, and was amongst the ‘Four Olds’ (old thinking, old culture, old customs and old habits) that the state decreed were to be destroyed nationwide. Villagers who learnt or sang big song during the Cultural Revolution had to do so clandestinely; to my knowledge public performances never occurred and very little of the repertoire was transmitted. However, interest in village big song singing recovered with the increased political freedom of the 1980s, and today many villagers who comprised the youth of that era tell stories of their previous involvement in big song singing groups. As noted earlier, Kam villages have undergone major economic, social and cultural changes since the 1990s (including an absence of most youth from Kam villages for much of the year), leading to a disintegration of earlier modes of big song transmission and performance. The national and international recognition of big song as intangible cultural heritage did not have any immediate obvious influence upon village big song singing, and in fact passed unknown by most villagers in Sheeam and nearby areas.

Alongside these factors, over the last sixty years the cross-influences between staged and village big song singing have been significant, complex and dynamic. From the first staged performances of the 1950s until the involvement of large numbers of Kam villagers in staged big song performances from around 2000 onwards, the direction of influence was mainly from the village to the stage. Influence in the opposite direction was largely restricted to the expansion of village singers’ repertoires to absorb or incorporate newly introduced songs or song categories associated with or made available through staged performances. The early period of staged big song singing clearly relied on village big song singing for its basic musical material (which was sometimes then ‘artistically processed’) and for its modes of musical transmission.18 However, the aesthetics and performance format of staged singing soon diverged from the aesthetics and performance norms of village singing.

The first major influences felt within village singing that appear to derive from staged big song performances date from the beginning of the new millennium, when the number of Kam villagers involved in staged big song performances grew by an unprecedented amount. As I have described in greater detail elsewhere (see Ingram 2012a), amongst the most significant changes have been those concerning the cohort of singers involved in village performances, the big song repertoire, villagers’ attitudes towards musical, lyrical and aesthetic aspects of big songs, and community perceptions of their own musical heritage.

Changes in the Cohort of Singers

In Sheeam and many nearby areas, public big song performance by older villagers—and particularly by married women—has become accepted within the last decade, relaxing a long-standing prohibition concerning big song performance and simultaneously promoting the continuity of big song singing in Kam villages. In earlier times, only young women who had not yet given birth to their first child, and young men who were unmarried or relatively recently married, were permitted to perform big song in public at New Year. My research in Sheeam indicates that this change was initiated by villagers themselves, following recent developments in staged big song singing (see Ingram et al. 2011).

While these changes might be interpreted as radical transformations of a musical tradition, they can also be understood to confirm the primary framing of village big song singing as a social activity rather than a musical tradition. Although village big song singing now involves a new cohort of singers, the adoption of village singing by a new group of singers has meant that the social activity of New Year celebrations can be maintained despite massive social changes within Kam villages. Furthermore, villagers’ involvement in village big song singing continues to be based on social rather than musical factors. For example, when I asked some married singers in 2005 (just a few years after married women had begun their involvement in New Year big song singing in Sheeam) why they had decided to participate, social responsibilities were clearly the motive for many women. One woman explicitly told me that, as her friends had asked her to join them in singing, she had to do so despite her (admittedly modest) claim of a lack of musical ability. Had she refused to sing with them, her friends would have interpreted her action as a disinterest in maintaining their friendship. By 2011, married women's involvement in New Year big song singing in Sheeam had increased to such a degree that I heard of a number of instances where even husbands (many of whom had once been against their wives’ involvement) had queried some women's disinclination to sing with others, apparently asking: ‘Hey, they are going to sing, why aren't you going too?’. I understood their encouragement of their wives’ involvement was not only to maintain social relations through that participation, but also to ensure that their family and, by extension, their clan or region of the village, was not seen as inferior to others. In this sense, it was social value gained through social activity that seemed to be framing their thinking.

Changes in the Big Song Repertoire

Contemporary accounts from older singers, and the writings of 1950s researchers (such as Dongzu dage 1958), indicate that it has long been acceptable for each local repertoire to change over time by absorbing songs from other areas (the category names given to these songs recall their place of origin) as well as songs known as ga may (‘new songs’—new sets of lyrics which are then sung to a pre-existing melody). For example, when several Sheeam singers and I visited the well-known big-song-singing village of See Wang19 we heard villagers sing big songs that they referred to as ga Sheeam (Sheeam songs). We were told that See Wang villagers had learnt the songs in the 1970s when several Sheeam singers travelled to See Wang after a big fire in Sheeam that had destroyed most of the houses and stores of grain, and that Sheeam singers had taught Sheeam songs in See Wang in exchange for gifts of rice.

Similarly, the big song repertoire in Sheeam includes a category of songs known as ga Gao-sn (Gao-sn songs). While the songs do not bear any obvious musical similarity to those of the Kam village of Gao-sn (located about 7km from See Wang), Sheeam villagers trace family links of many generations past to the villagers of Gao-sn. It is likely that Sheeam villagers learnt songs from people in Gao-sn in earlier times during inter-village social visits, and that the musical aspects of the songs have gradually altered in Sheeam as they have been passed from one generation to the next. Judging from the lyrical content of the ga may in the big song genre that I heard sung in Sheeam during my research, all were written for particular socially-oriented village events—for instance, for various performances at International Women's Day competitions, or to sing during visits by local government officials. However, songs such as ga Yuanlong and ga shor-shyao were not similarly incorporated within village big song singing. Perhaps because of the cultural and symbolic capital that is widely perceived as intrinsically linked to each local repertoire, singers have not been willing to formally admit such songs to their own local repertoire.

At the same time, the use of artistically processed local songs in staged performances given by Kam villagers has occasionally led to some villagers forgetting the local versions of the songs when singing in the village context, and unintentionally singing the very versions of songs they have attempted to avoid. The musical and other reasons for this situation cannot be discussed in full here; in short, there may be a growing permeability in the informal boundary between village and staged repertoires, even while boundaries are formally recognised through the distinct naming and designation of such song categories and their purported avoidance in village singing.

Changes in Attitudes Towards Musical, Lyrical and Aesthetic Aspects

As noted above, those big songs with greater lyrical depth and rhyming complexity were originally considered to be of higher quality than those with short, relatively superficial lyrics and weak or non-existent rhyming patterns. Nevertheless, staged big song performances have never to my knowledge emphasised those songs that are lengthy, dense and poetically complex. While many villagers in their teens, twenties and thirties still enjoy singing the more complex big songs, amongst the younger generation there is less awareness of rhyming patterns as an important feature of lyrics, and less understanding of the complexities of song metaphor and/or its incorporation of archaic words. Some singers—especially those with minimal involvement in village singing—now tend to prefer songs with greater melodic interest over those with lyrical complexity. While such changing attitudes are unlikely to have occurred solely as a result of staged big song singing, they are validated and reinforced by staged performance norms.

My fieldwork in 2011 also indicated that some musical and aesthetic aspects previously distinctive only to staged big song singing are now also becoming accepted within the boundaries of village singing. For instance, the evening song rehearsals in the lead-up to a new pan-Kam festival held in Sheeam at New Year 2011 saw village song experts regularly going to listen to and advise village singing groups on vocal quality and other musical issues (such as phrasing, expression and rhythm). This was atypical of village singing in the past, but was typical in the preparation for staged performances.

These various changes indicate that an unprecedented degree of flexibility is becoming acceptable within village big song singing. Such flexibility may eventually alter the broader framing of village big song singing and hence its form, function and future.

Changes in Community Perceptions of Musical Heritage

In the 1950s, non-Kam researchers erroneously labelled all the different choral songs that groups of Kam people sing in the dare low during lunar New Year celebrations as sub-genres of just one Kam singing genre. They used dage 大歌 (big song)—a Chinese translation of the Kam name ga lao (big/old/important songs) that was originally used to refer to just one of the many choral genres—to label all the choral songs that they heard. The extensive subsequent promotion of staged big song singing has widely publicised this renaming of Kam choral singing, often referring to all such singing as the performance of dage or ga lao. The new use of the Kam name ga lao to refer to this entire choral singing tradition has not been universally accepted within Kam communities, and rather has served to complicate community perceptions of cultural heritage.

Kam views on this matter became particularly clear when many Kam villagers were involved in singing a Kam choral song in the 2005 performance of ‘Ten thousand people singing Kam big song’. The song performed was from the choral genre known to Kam people as ga sor, not the choral genre that Kam people call ga lao. Consequently, numerous older singers maintained that the performance was not actually of dage (that is, big song) since only ga sor was performed. However, many younger Kam villagers who were unaware of the historical development of their own Kam choral ‘tradition’ could not understand the reasons for their elders’ claims.

Conclusion

As a result of the complex changes that have occurred in villagers’ big song singing since the beginning of the new millennium, locating the concept of ‘tradition’ within contemporary big song singing is no longer a straightforward endeavour. In particular, there is a lack of clarity in how the divergence of big song singing into different performance formats should be situated within analyses of big song singing. While Feld (2012, p. xxii) queries whether modernity ‘produce[s] as much, or more, or less difference than it effaces?’, the Kam case indicates that difference—especially in the form of complexity—is certainly increasing. The discussion in this article has illustrated many of the key concerns in relation to dealing with such difference in locating tradition and situating divergence, as well as the complexity of the task. I suggest that there are at least four different ‘theoretical cuts’ (Seeger 2002) that potentially elucidate this situation.

The first approach, drawing on the literature on the invention of tradition,20 is based on the argument that researchers in the 1950s ‘invented’ the big song tradition. Previously, the various kinds of choral songs were only grouped by being designated as part of the social activity of ‘exchanging songs in the dare low’, and did not have unique status for Kam people as a musical tradition. The lack of a Kam word that corresponds to ‘tradition’ can be used to further support this analytical approach. From this perspective, divergence began with the designation of choral singing as ‘big song’.

In the second ‘theoretical cut’, the two different formats for Kam big song singing—the village and the stage—are understood to represent two separate big song traditions: the ‘village tradition’ and the ‘staged tradition’. The two ‘traditions’ are not static, but are nevertheless clearly delineated. This distinction is supported by the many ways in which Kam people distinguish between the two formats: their naming (‘exchanging songs in the dare low’ and ‘going onstage to sing songs’), the numerous factors which differ between them, and their different chronological history. In this approach, the divergence of staged big song singing is recognised as having created a new, separate big song singing tradition.

Third, the two types of big song singing that Kam villagers perform in the two different formats (namely, in the village and on the stage) are seen as a bifurcation of the one tradition. In this ‘theoretical cut’ big song is exclusively defined by its having a two-part musical structure, following the main way in which researchers in the 1950s and since have conceptualised such singing. Kam understandings of choral singing—in which the musical structure is but one feature that is no more important than others (such as the social context for the singing)—are not taken into account, and the divergence into village and staged performance formats is not of great analytical significance. While this approach does not correlate with Kam views of big song singing, Kam people may find it useful when promoting big song performances.

In the fourth approach, tradition is understood to have ‘multiple meanings’ (Phillips & Schochet 2004, p. xi) that the massive socio-cultural changes of the twenty-first century, in particular, have necessarily rendered flexible and porous. Tradition and divergence are considered to be central and subjective concepts that demand careful, nuanced attention; approaches which fix the meaning of either concept are eschewed. One example of how this approach might be applied is in the recognition of the new cohort of singers involved in village big song singing as continuing tradition (because their involvement upholds the basis of village big song singing as a social activity) rather than transforming tradition (because their involvement relaxes a previous prohibition). According to this approach, determining whether innovations such as new songs or performance styles are consistent with a ‘village tradition’ of big song ultimately requires attention to the performers' own assessments, which may also be multiple and shifting.

Versions of all these four different approaches can be or have been applied in analysing Kam villagers’ big song singing. All approaches are supported in various ways by the ethnographic data, or by previous research in the area, and offer important insights into big song singing of the twenty-first century. Seeger (2002, pp. 190–1) comments precisely on the problem of combining the diverse results through different theoretical cuts by noting that:

We may understand music better by trying to put together the varied results of the different theoretical approaches rather than claiming our own to be the uniquely true perspective. [Moreover] there is a real danger in assuming that we know what music is, and that we have a shared experience of it as a singular form…Just like the aroma of a banana, aspects of music may extend far beyond its ‘common sense’ definition. We must not essentialise music, but rather seek to understand it by examining different ‘theoretical cuts’ of what we think music is, as well as the results of other theoretical cuts extending far beyond what we consider music to be.

Seeger's comments are an important reminder that discussion of musical heritage—including tradition and divergence—deals with a complex event that incorporates and acts as a locus for many different facets of human existence (including social, political, philosophical, cosmological, historical and geographical aspects) that are then expressed within the single activity of singing. These various aspects are also linked with language and with the multiple physical experiences of producing sound together with other people, and both the form of that sound and the process of making it are encoded with multiple complex messages that also influence various aspects of life. As Seeger (1991, p. 34) also states:

When groups sing, they are doing more than creating sounds in the present; they are creating both the past and the present and projecting themselves into a future of their own construction, even in situations of domination and apparent powerlessness. In these cases music not only makes history but constructs the future, helping to unite the present with both past and future in an intelligible way.

As Seeger suggests, and as shown in this paper, the importance of understanding the singing of a community may not only concern the study of musical sounds and their immediate context. In striving to understand the ways that communal singing traditions are currently conceptualised and practised—and acknowledging how such practice and conceptualisation is influenced by the massive socio-cultural changes that have occurred immediately prior to and during the twenty-first century—we also enhance the understanding of the present and future of one part of our world.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge many Kam singers and song experts for assistance with my research; especially, I thank song experts Wu Meifang, Wu Pinxian, Wu Xuegui and Wu Zhicheng and other singers in Sheeam. I acknowledge financial and other support for this research provided by an Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong Research Fellowship, the University of Melbourne, PARADISEC (www.paradisec.org.au), and the Research Institute of Ritual Music in China (Shanghai Conservatorium of Music). Thanks also to Cathy Falk, Kao Ya-ning, Wang Liren, audiences at the presentation of earlier drafts of this paper (staff and students at the Department of Anthropology, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan and the Department of Social and Anthropological Studies, Guangxi University for Nationalities, PR China in 2011) and to two anonymous reviewers and Philip Taylor for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Ingram

Catherine Ingram is Honorary Research Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music

Notes

1. See, for example, Fan (1998, pp. 3–4) and Pu (2003).

2. Data from the 2005 census indicate that the Kam population in Guizhou alone had then reached 2.4 million (available at www.chinadataonline.org, accessed 9 September 2011). Consequently, the current Kam population (for which data are unavailable) almost certainly exceeds by a substantial amount the figure of 2.96 million given for the year 2000 (as cited in Minzu zizhi 2009). A small number of Kam are also registered as resident in Hubei Province (see Wu 2000). Today, a significant proportion of Kam people live outside these areas for work or study.

3. Significant English-language studies of the Tai-Kadai language family and, particularly, the position of Kam, include: Diller et al. (2008); Long & Zheng (1998); Edmondson & Solnit (1988); Sagart (2004); and Matthews (2006) (see also OLAC's Resources (2009), and Gerner's (2009, p. 737) succinct overview of the controversies regarding the categorisation of Kam with respect to Kam-Tai, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian languages).

4. A ‘lect’ refers to a regional variant of speech within a dialect grouping. The lects of Kam are defined slightly differently by different researchers: for some examples, see Long & Zheng (1998, pp. 180–203); Yang & Edmondson (2008, p. 579).

5. I transcribe Kam words using my own practical phonemic orthography that is based upon standard (Australian) English pronunciation, and which I have described elsewhere (see Ingram 2007, 2010a). All such transcriptions are based on the Kam language as spoken in Sheeam.

6. The unique and extensive social significance of group singing—as Feld ([1982] 2012, pp. 217–38), Russell (2003), and Ng (2009), among many others, have described—is one of many other important points that cannot be covered here; see also Ingram 2007, 2010a, 2011, 2012a.

7. Luo & Wang (2002) quote figures provided by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences giving the population in big-song-singing areas as 100,000. Dare low are sometimes referred to in English as drum towers (see Ingram 2010a, 2011).

8. In most cases, all songs in the one category within this genre as sung within the one village share the same basic sor or ‘melodic habitus’ (see Ingram 2010a, 2010b, 2012a).

9. Kam song experts explained that some of the words used in song lyrics derived from Kam gao (literally, ‘old Kam’), an archaic version of the Kam language no longer spoken. These words have no obvious relationship to their contemporary equivalents within the Sheeam dialect, and I know of no detailed research in this area. However, they occasionally resemble Chinese words, especially words from Cantonese. Words from the local Chinese dialect are referred to in Kam as lee ga (Han/non-local/outside/outsider language). In Chinese this dialect is known as Liping hua 黎平话 (Liping speech) or kehua 客话 (guest speech), and it is classified as belonging to the Cenjiang dialect group of Southwest Mandarin (Xinan guanhua cenjiang fangyan 西南官话岑江方言; see Campbell (2008), Qiandongnan fangyan zhi (2007, pp. 99–116)). Such Chinese words used in song lyrics sometimes include borrowed Chinese words that also appear in daily Kam speech (for examples of Chinese borrowing into the Kam language, see Yang & Edmondson (2008) and Pan (2005)).

10. One important written record describing the residents of today's Kam areas (mainly Kam areas of Guangxi) appears in the late Ming Chiya 赤雅 (1635) by Kuang Lu 邝露 (1604–50): ‘They do not like to kill, and are very good at music. They play the fiddle and the bamboo mouth organ. They sing long songs with their eyes closed, and bend up and down and kick their feet to perform a simple-minded dance’ (Kuang Lu [1635]1995, p. 46). Despite his somewhat condescending attitude, Kuang's observations about music-making are significant and have been regularly quoted in recent Chinese-language publications. Although it is suggested that ‘long songs with their eyes closed’ is an early record of big song singing, it is not clear that Kuang visited today's big-song-singing areas—moreover, his description of the singing is hardly one that could pertain only to big song. The system of big song transmission, which cannot be fully detailed here, involves villagers recognised as sang ga or ‘song experts’ using a specific method of instruction to teach groups of singers (see Ingram 2007, 2010a).

11. A translation of the opening lines to the big song called Ban bao juuee (Friends say you are proud); Ingram (2007) includes a translation of the full lyrics as well a musical transcription of the opening lines.

12. After the Republic of China was established following the 1911 Revolution, five ethnic groups were recognised. Kam people were not individually recognised but were subsumed within the general category of ‘Han’. Prior to and during this time they were looked down upon by the wider population, and their culture was not widely considered to be worthy of interest.

13. In the Liping County Airport Opening Arts Festival in 2005, 10,000 singers gave a massed performance of one Kam big song (preceded by one introductory choral song sometimes sung during exchanges in the dare low). A big song performance on such a scale had never been given before, and has not been replicated since.

14. In practice, while singers who have participated in village big song singing may learn to perform in a staged context, those who have only sung big song within the staged context are rarely familiar with a sufficient number of songs from the village repertoire to also sing big song in village performances. In many cases, they also do not appear to be interested in participating in village singing.

15. In one of her important analyses of heritage conceptualisation in the current era, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995, p. 374) states that: ‘A hallmark of heritage productions—perhaps their defining feature—is precisely the foreignness of the “tradition” to its context of presentation. This estrangement…makes the interface a critical site for the production of meanings other than the “heritage” message’. While the notion of yuanshengtai is obviously linked to the practice of presenting ‘tradition’, I suggest that the Kam use of the new ‘singing song sections’ custom within this performance context adds a further dimension to the theory deriving from Kirschenblatt-Gimblett's analysis. While singing song sections may produce a result that is foreign in the context of staged musical presentation within China, it is similarly foreign in terms of accepted Kam cultural practices within the village context of big song singing.

16. For example, in 2005, a group of young Kam women from a village in neighbouring Congjiang county received first prize in the Colourful Guizhou singing competition for their entry in the minjian changfa 民间唱法 (singing style of the people) competition division, a precursor to the then-non-existent yuanshengtai division. In their performance, they sang (in Kam) a big song given by the Chinese name Chunchan'ge 春蝉歌 (Spring cicada song); this alleged ‘song’ was a medley composed of different phrases from original and ‘artistically processed’ versions of big songs, and its performance attracted the group considerable media attention. See Ingram (2012b) for a discussion of the ‘Colourful Guizhou’ big song performance given in Australia in 2012 that also featured a medley of different song phrases.

17. Dor translates in this context as ‘sing’; ga and may translate as ‘song’; don probably derives from the Chinese duan 段, and is used to refer to a section of a song.

18. For a concise description of such transmission within the Liping Kam Folk Chorus (active 1958–60), see Yang (2003).

19. See Wang (in Chinese Xiao Huang 小黄) is located in Congjiang county and is approximately two days walk from Sheeam.

20. As presented or critiqued in numerous sources including Hobsbawm & Ranger (1983), Briggs (1996, pp. 435–46), Bronner (2000), Gilman (2004, pp. 33–5), and Phillips & Schochet (2004).