Week 4 Blog

Week 4: 04-26-2007
Our questions come from your reading--Prof. Helen Rees discusses two contexts in which "authenticity" is contended. First, she describes tourists' fascination with "Ancient Naxi Music." Question 1: Why does she say that this music is not as "ancient" as it is marketed to audiences? (Just answer in one paragraph)
When it comes to the substances of music, I think that every element of it plays an important role in defining the style and type of music. This includes dresscode, like in music of the Naxi, which although Professor Helen Rose contends that it is not as “ancient” as it is marketed to audiences, the Naxi women still wear their traditional sheepskin cape for Naxi music concerts and it eschews non-native instruments (136, 138). A reason why Rees believes this to be not as ancient is because, the Chinese have adopted a modern style of music derived from the Han Chinese, using the vocals and the words sung, tune titles, melodies, and the way the instruments were used were all adopted from the Han Chinese. She raises four questions regarding the music not being as ancient as it is marketed to tourists: What were those other origins and uses? What elements have been abstracted to create this traditional display? How do these presentations differ to tourists and to the local population? What is the nature of the “authenticity” marketed to tourists?
This leads me to the second question: Question 2: In a different way, why did Western scholars accuse the modern Chinese orchestra as not being "authentic" enough? What do you think of these arguments? Does authenticity exist on a continuum like identity? In other words, are there a lot of gray areas?
First of all, western scholars accuse the term authentic as not being indisputably defined. In a sense it can mean that it is credible and convincing and tourists do seem to find it convincing (since they probably don’t know better). Another sense of something being authentic is having present validating figures like in the Chinese Orchestra, the Xuan Ke is the only one who allows interpretation possible for the tourists. This kind of figure is a validating figure that makes it more believable that the orchestra is really “authentic.” The reason why tourists find it believable is because they compare it to other performances they’ve attended. The Western scholars, however, don’t think its authentic enough arguing that foreign tourists are not culturally informed and thus don’t know the kinds of traditions in Chinese orchestra. They actually recognized the western style influence on the music and that’s unacceptable for something to be “authentic” traditional music. They set conditions for something to be considered traditional: it should have come down from earlier people and its quality should be so outstanding that it influences future music—“In order to understand traditional music, it is not only necessary to understand its classical and folk origins, but also necessary to understand its modern evolution”(151).
One can say that these arguments are both legitimate and not. The reason why I say this is because when we think of identity and individuality, we all think that we are being as unique and individual as possible but in reality, we are who we are because of past influences and current ones too including fashion, music, traditions, and even certain personality characteristics. This is the same for the authenticity of music. When a new artist begins to develop “his/her own music” they think that just because they are composing it, it is authentic and original and contemporary but its not! Every style of music has some roots in past styles of music whether it be on the instruments, surroundings where the song is played, or the vocals and themes of the songs. Although the artist might not know this at first, doing a little research on similar styles of music will open up an array of similarities with other styles of music. I don’t quite understand what you mean by “gray areas.” It seems like it means fuzzyness in the field of recognizing the origins of a certain style of music. If this is the case, then I definitely think that amongst listeners of the styles of music there is a lot of gray areas. Some (not all) musicians/singers, though, do know the background of the music they compose and recognize the scholarly musicians critique on the authenticity of their music.