Permeable frames: intersections of the performance, the everyday, and the ethical in Chinese street singing

ABSTRACT

Amateur performances of pop classics take place daily in various public spots in Wuhan, China. Audience members reward singers with cash tips; these practices are bound up in personal relationships established as the two parties socialise at and away from the events. Building on Goffmanian notions of frame shifting, I explore how performance, everyday, and ethical realms of experience intersect during these occasions. Boundaries between performance and everyday frames are indistinct in a physical sense and in how participants relate to each other. This in turn feeds into the integration of the performances in participants’ ethical lives. Rather than a shifting between these three frames, I see mutual permeability as the basis for the sociality here.

KEYWORDS:

• Frame analysis
• street performance
• Chinese pop
• Wuhan

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Martin Clayton, Simon Mills, Laura Leante, and anonymous reviewers for valuable advice on this text. I am grateful to those involved in Wuhan’s street music for allowing me access to their lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Samuel Horlor holds a PhD from Durham University, where he currently teaches in ethnomusicology and popular music studies. His research on street music in China has focused on the events’ relationships with the city environment and has led to an ongoing interest in music geography and the materiality of performance locations. He was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research in 2016–17.

ORCID

Samuel Horlor http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7709-2132

Notes

1 Names in this article have been changed.

2 Emcees and backing musicians are paid a flat fee for their participation in a session, usually 90 yuan per person in 2014. Each time a singer steps off the stage, they hand event organisers the cash they have earned during that spell of two or three songs. A session usually gives each singer two or three of these stints on the microphone, and when they leave at the end, they collect back their total earnings for the event, minus the organiser’s 20- or 30-percent cut.