Kunqu

In Kunqu: A Classical Opera of Twenty-First-Century China, Joseph S. C. Lam seeks to tell the multifaceted story of a six-hundred-year-old genre of Chinese opera, focusing particularly on its recent efflorescence and ongoing evolution in the early twenty-first century. A student of the late professor Rulan Chao Pian at Harvard, who was a pioneer in the field of Chinese musicology, Lam has distinguished himself as a prolific scholar of Chinese music especially of the Song, Ming, and early Qing eras. His work is known for its painstaking scrutiny of textual evidence and musical sources, an inquisitive engagement with musicological and social theories, and its learned perspectives and incisive analyses. In Kunqu, Lam delivers another laudable feat by providing a comprehensive scholarly treatise on the subject in English in under three hundred pages. As the author notes at the outset, he approaches the subject not only through the lens of a music scholar and teacher but also as “a devotee of kunqu” himself and an academic administrator organizing and promoting cultural performances on the university campus at Ann Arbor (xii). The multiple self-positionings and resolute refusal to submit to any single disciplinary agenda or a lineal description has yielded a composite portraiture of a dynamic, exquisite, enchanting, and multivalent art form manifest in myriad sites and times.The book is organized thematically with ten chapters. Notwithstanding certain idiosyncrasies in its conceptual design, the introductory chapter and the opening section in each chapter help readers anticipate and navigate the ensuing discussion with ease. Lam's treatment gives explicit attention to the knowledge and perspectives of the practitioners participating, directly and indirectly, in kunqu performance and discourse. Chapter 2 identifies the major troupes in mainland China and Taiwan and several influential organizations in overseas locales, as well as the corpus of insiders’ keywords, labels, and categories. In the following two chapters, Lam invokes the dyad of heaven (tian) and earth (di) to delve into the seemingly timeless, pleasurable aesthetics and stunning virtuosity of kunqu and its malleability as a pragmatic, grounded art form, respectively. Chapter 5 opens the treasure trove of play scripts, music scores, and canonical texts and enumerates a long list of staged characters and visionary patrons. Fashioned as the embodiment of Chinese lives and dreams, these resources help fasten kunqu to its historical roots and propel the genre forward. Although not stated explicitly, the author begins to bring his theoretical underpinnings to the fore from chapter 6 onward. Inspired by the concepts of Arjun Appadurai (technoscape), Murray Schafer (soundscape), and to a lesser extent, Christopher Small (musicking), Howard Becker (art worlds), and Jeffry Alexander (cultural pragmatics), Lam starts using the terms yue (translated loosely as music) and yuescape regularly to reference particular yue events or discourses, and to decipher the configuration of certain yuescape such as turn-of-the-century Suzhou and contemporary Taipei, and mainland China as a national-level entity. The remaining chapters are devoted to the delineation of kunqu production as creative and re-creative processes, a discussion of yue-typology based on instrumental music in traditional and contemporary kunqu debates, and an in-depth examination of how kunqu practitioners and cultural brokers sought to domesticate the language and ethos of intangible cultural heritage (in Chinese, feiyi) in the globalized world. The final chapter explores elements of continuity and change in kunqu's immediate future.This book is a welcome addition to the specialized literature on kunqu even as it is also an excellent introduction of traditional Chinese xiqu to general readers. Lam has rendered a great service by providing accurate and easily understood translations of key terms and proper nouns throughout the book. In cases where the conventional English translation is deemed misleading or inadequate, he defaults to the Chinese characters in pinyin, as in kunqu or xiqu, and offers a precise explanation to shed light on the technical aspects of Chinese music and performance practices, and on cultural nuances as kunqu insiders understand and apply these terms. Lam also weaves numerous examples from kunqu plays (whether in text or in staged performance) into his analysis. Most chapters end with some tastefully selected examples of notable plays for close readings to illustrate the issues at hand. Many passages are illuminating, down to the fine points of artistry. Lam's rendition is so charming and mesmerizing that it makes the reading of the book not only intellectually rewarding but also an experience of sheer delight.Whereas most studies of the genre attend to its irrepressible elegance and its circle of elite patrons in the Ming and Qing, Lam has adopted an expansive definition to encompass the contemporary kunqu world at its broadest. For instance, his exhaustive list of “practitioners” includes those who “actively and professionally create and perform” and others like amateur performers, connoisseurs/critics, patrons, entrepreneurs, scholars, and dedicated audiences/fans (9, 16). The latter are arguably stakeholders who partake of and shape, albeit unevenly, the practice and discourse of kunqu. The author enlists a full spectrum of performances classified as historical, traditional, contemporary, and experimental to formulate a holistic hypothesis on twenty-first-century kunqu (9, 24–25). His site-specific analysis of yuescapes pertains to times and places in mainland China and Taiwan, and important locales in kunqu's global circuitry. A most telling omission is caokun (grassroots kunqu), performed in rural China and mentioned only in passing by Lam (25). The dismissal is not surprising, given his deep personal affection for kunqu as a classical art form that presumably encapsulates more fully and more effectively the richness and depth of Chinese culture and the lives and dreams of its people over and above those popular genres deemed plebian and local. One wonders if the villagers’ take on kunqu-filtered lives and dreams will be different from the affluent tastes and cosmopolitan outlooks of their upwardly mobile urban cousins. Finally, as the yuescape is inevitably shaped, if not constrained, by a host of sociocultural, economic, and political variables and circumstances, I also wonder if the contemporary valorization of kunqu, domestically and interculturally, will continue unabated in the midst of growing economic strains and the escalating international tensions confronting Xi Jinping's China

Archaeology · Art · China · Literature · Opera · Chinese history and philosophy · History

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