Narratives of Chinese Music and Musicians: Uyghur Muqam and Global Music Education

Narratives of Chinese music and musicians

Rachel Harris provides an account of the Uyghur twelve muqam tradition that links it not only to the concept of 'humanity' but also to related 'masterpieces' found in Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Her life-story of the muqam is told as stories within stories, with considerable attention to historical figures and events. Harris positions herself in the narrative as she is introduced to and learns the dutar lute from the musician, travels with him, and investigates his musical knowledge.

Nimrod Baranovitch explores the figure of Teng Ge'er in a chapter titled 'Compliance, Autonomy, and Resistance of a "State Artist"'. As a pop musician on the state's payroll, a Mongolian living in Beijing who enjoys popularity across China, Teng Ge'er compels readers to reconsider the common distinction between state-approved artists and independent ones. The case prompts reflection on the complexities that arise when a minority artist presents himself or allows himself to be presented through music. Baranovitch offers only a brief life story, instead allocating more room to discussions of the singer's music and lyrics. These contain elements of protest and contentious representation—Teng Ge'er rejects being always labelled as Mongol and exudes modernity, yet he is regularly photographed in traditional Mongolian costume, singing about the rivers, plains, and skies of Mongolia.

Synthesising these seven chapters is no simple matter. Rees's brief effort to identify overarching trends is not entirely successful, though this may be unnecessary since each narrative stands independently and has its own merits. Collectively, they illuminate different facets of the subject matter, moving from the scholar to the folk singer, from the literati qin to rock and pop, and from Xinjiang to Liverpool. This diversity is perhaps enough—giving voice and identity to musicians who in the past have often remained invisible within ethnographies, and revealing much about the many ethnic and cultural backgrounds from which Chinese music derives.

Facing the Music: Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective

Huib Schippers delivers a highly engaging account that blends theory with practice, combining concepts from music education and ethnomusicology with actual experience drawn from his thirty-year career as a sitar player, music teacher, and scholar. The book advances discourse on key themes such as tradition, authenticity, and context across contemporary music education in schools, community organisations, and professional training programmes, seeking to reconsider and reshape them through a global lens. Its aim is to rethink established ways of teaching and learning world musics to create more vibrant environments for transmitting and experiencing music.

A notably compelling aspect is Schippers's personal engagement with the individuals he encountered during his career. Readers gain a real sense of his learning processes, lending the book an authority rarely found in the literature on cultural diversity in music education and transmission.Facing the Music takes a deeply auto-ethnographic approach, combining thick, reflexive descriptions of his own experiences with conceptualisations about music education for the twenty-first century.

The book's structure is commendable for its consistent treatment of diverse content. Each chapter explores a relevant issue surrounding cultural diversity in music education: it first outlines the history, concepts, and theoretical perspectives, then illustrates their application, and closes with a brief conclusion drawing together the main themes. A significant contribution appears in Chapter 3, which examines themes of tradition, authenticity, and context. Schippers acknowledges that music education still often centres on subject matter that valorises older, traditional repertoires from outside the West. However, a term like 'authenticity'—specifically 'reconstructed' authenticity—could perhaps have received deeper critique from more postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives.

Schippers puts forward an impressive range of theoretical positions relating to context, transmission, interaction, and cultural diversity. These involve several binary oppositions, brought together in a framework called the 'Twelve Continuum Transmission Framework'. Issues of context are understood as existing on a continuum between static traditions and those in constant flux, or between 'reconstructed' authenticity and 'new identity' authenticity.

This is arguably the most comprehensive framework for understanding musical transmission in culturally diverse environments. Yet by attempting to encompass 'everything', it naturally lacks a more concrete proposal for world music education. The tool seems particularly useful for describing specific situations of musical transmission to better understand a tradition, as demonstrated in Chapter 7. Still, there are issues with subjectivity and reliability, along with the binary oppositions themselves—these may reinforce in students preconceived, stereotypical views of self versus other or West versus the rest, raising questions about whether continua are best suited for a framework that claims to be inclusive and non-hierarchical.

The framework seems centred mainly on transmitting musical performance practice, as shown in the final chapter. While performance is important in musical learning, a more inclusive framework for cultural diversity could have addressed other theoretical and practical activities. The epilogue is brief and does not provide strong conclusions about 'shaping music education from a global perspective', missing an opportunity to explore concrete curriculum strategies. Although the global reach of the book lies in its varied case studies and examples from teaching and learning practices around the world, the actual ways in which music education may be reshaped from a global perspective remain relatively undeveloped.

The book comes with a user-friendly companion website, though much of the content already appears in the book itself. New elements include photographs and password-protected audio and video tracks, such as excerpts from documentaries, field recordings by performance classes, and interviews with teachers. These are valuable materials but are not referenced within the print book, leaving readers to make the connections independently. Also, placing references directly in the text instead of as endnotes would have improved reader-friendliness, as would eliminating the occasional typo.

Overall, the book is a positive exploration of current issues in cultural diversity in music education and transmission. Occasional claims about 'successfully' recontextualising a tradition into a new environment or providing 'satisfying learning and teaching experiences for all involved' might have warranted a more circumspect treatment. Nonetheless, this is an authoritative book that effectively combines ethnographic evidence from the author's standpoint assitar player, scholar, and facilitator of music teaching with a range of discourses from ethnomusicology and music education.

Considering that the focus tends on performance practice and musical transmission as reflections of tradition, this remains a fascinating, essential work. It represents an important acknowledgement of world music pedagogy as an academic field still often overlooked in certain circles. The book is a necessary milestone that will matter to music educators, ethnomusicologists, and students of ethnomusicology alike.