Abstract
Senses of loss and nostalgia permeate the contemporary urban folk singing of the Uyghur people, who are Turkic-speaking Muslims in northwest China, often accompanying icons of a dispossessed rural, pre-modern past. Recent studies have looked at the post-1990s genre of “new folk” as an important venue for the performance of ethno-national sentiments through a variety of musico-textual tropes appropriated from traditional genres. The singing of sorrow and grief, some argue, has worked to interrogate the post-1950s official aesthetics of modernist reformism and its celebratory “singing-and-dancing” minority stereotypes. This is complicated simultaneously by a growing interest among middle-class Chinese audience in the imagined authenticity of certain rural minority folk traditions. This essay looks at how sonic, textual, and visual icons of rurality have been evoked in the contemporary Uyghur singing against a multitude of global popular styles to register a subaltern sense of musical modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
The workshop has been relocated twice since fall 2009. At the time of writing it is located inside a residential neighborhood near Beytulla Meschiti, the big mosque.
- 2.
Recordings of both songs, made in the 1950s, are included on the Smithsonian Folkways album Vocal Music of Contemporary China, Vol. 2: The National Minorities, featuring Uyghur female vocalists accompanied by the Orchestra of the Central National Song-and-Dance Troupe.
- 3.
His real name is Luo Lin. A native of the central Chinese province of Sichuan, he had had no background in the minority northwest until his instant rise to popularity in the early 2000s. As a matter of fact, the pseudonym “Dao Lang” is appropriated from the Chinese transliteration of the Uyghur term “Dolan,” precisely to market the perceived rusticity in minority performance.
- 4.
Various singers and producers confirmed in interviews with me during the mid-2000s that they have sold more copies of VCDs than audio CDs—which are usually released simultaneously—and partly as a result of that, the price of VCDs is usually marked down slightly. This began to change in recent years as DVDs became more popular.
- 5.
Even modernized interpretations of traditional tunes are often framed in visual presentation of natural landscapes of the Uyghur homeland in music videos. See examples of Nurmuhemmet Tursun from his albums Kün we Tün (day and night) (2003), in which most instrumental melodies played on traditional Uyghur instruments are harmonized with a synthesized accompaniment.
- 6.
Nurmuhemmet Tursun was dismissed from his work-unit Xinjiang Song-and-Dance Troupe after a controversial incident at a New Year Concert in 2001. See Harris (2005:641–42) for brief description and analysis of the incident.
- 7.
This, of course, is partly indebted to the post-1950s socialist ideology as described above.
- 8.
The standard pronunciation of modern Uyghur as spoken at major television and radio stations in Urumqi today is based on the Ili/Ghulja accent.
- 9.
The Ili style of singing and instrumental music may be heard on a few recordings widely available outside the Uyghur territories. One good example is the CD-DVD set titled Borderlands: Wu Man and Master Musicians from the Silk Route, released in 2012 as the last of the ten albums under Smithsonian Folkways and Aga Khan Music Initiative’s “Music of Central Asia” series.
- 10.
Unless stated otherwise, all translations in this essay are mine.
- 11.
The trope of returning from modernity to the impoverished rural is common in Uyghur songs. For another example in the “new folk” songs, see Harris (2005:637–38).
- 12.
The ancient Kashgar old city, considered by many as the heartland of Uyghur culture, has been demolished since 2009 in a state project to rebuild the old city. The government cites casualties in previous earthquakes in the area to support its claim, which is widely doubted, that most of the old city’s houses are not earthquake-proof and thus dangerous.
- 13.
The key of F# minor, perhaps not by coincidence, was described by the eighteenth-century German poet Christian Schubart (1806:379) as “a dark, gloomy key” that “drags passions,” with “resentment and displeasure” as its language. (Ein finsterer Ton; er zeert an der Leidenschaft, wie der bissige Hund am Gewande. Groll und Missvergnügen ist seine Sprache.)
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Wong, CF. (2018). Uyghur Folk Singing and the Rural Musical Place in Northwest China. In: Leung, BW. (eds) Traditional Musics in the Modern World: Transmission, Evolution, and Challenges. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91599-9_10
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