Ritual and Music of North China

Book excerpt: The rich local traditions of musical life in rural China are still little known. Music-making in village society is largely ceremonial, and shawm bands account for a major part of such music. This is the first major ethnographic study of Chinese shawm bands in their ceremonial and social context. Based in a poor county in Shanxi province in northwest China, Stephen Jones describes the painful maintenance of ceremonial and its music there under Maoism, its revival with the market reforms of the 1980s and its modification under the assault of pop music since the 1990s. The book is accompanied by a 47-minute DVD and will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists and all those interested in modern Chinese history and society.