The Women of Quyi: Liminal Voices and Androgynous Bodies

199 Pages·2017·2.18 MB·English

by  Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson

The Women of Quyi
Why has the female voice—as the resonant incarnation of the female body—
inspired both fascination and ambivalence? Why were women restricted from
performing on the Chinese public stage? How have female roles and voices
been appropriated by men throughout much of the history of Chinese theatre?
Why were the women of quyi—a community of Chinese female singers in
Republican Tianjin—able to become successful, respected artists when other
female singers and actors in competing performance traditions struggled for
acceptance? Drawing substantially on original ethnographic fieldwork con-
ducted in the 1980s and 1990s, Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson offers answers
to these questions and demonstrates how the women of quyi successfully
negotiated their sexuality and vocality in performance. Owing to their role
as third-person narrators, the women of quyi bridged the gender gap, creat-
ing an androgynous persona that de-emphasized their feminine appearance
and, at the same time, allowed them to showcase their female voices on public
stages—places that had been previously unwelcoming to female artists. This is
a story about female storytellers who sang their way to respectability and social
change in the early decades of the twentieth century by minimizing their bodies
in order to allow their voices to be heard.
Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson received an undergraduate degree in harp per-
formance from Brigham Young University, USA, a Master’s degree in eth-
nomusicology from University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in
ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. She conducted research
on the inter-relationships of language and music in the narrative arts of Tianjin,
China as a Fulbright-Hays and National Academy of Sciences Research Fellow.
She also worked as a President’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of California at Berkeley
and taught courses in the Asian humanities and in gender-music relationships
at Columbia University in New York City. She is currently the Humanities
Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Comparative Arts and
Letters at Brigham Young University and the 2015 winner of the Jaap Kunst
prize for the most significant article published in the field of ethnomusicology.
Her first book, The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language, was
published by Ashgate in 2011 as part of the SOAS ethnomusicology series.
SOAS Musicology Series
Series Editor:
Keith Howard, SOAS, University of London, UK
The study of the world’s many and diverse music cultures has become an
important part of the discipline of musicology. Often termed ‘ethnomusicol-
ogy’, the resulting studies share the fundamental recognition that music is
cherished by every society in the world. Like language, music is a universal
means of individual and cultural expression. It is also infinitely varied. Music
in any society has intrinsic value in its own right, and can tell us much about
the culture in which it developed. The core of the SOAS Musicology Series
comprises studies of different musics, analysed in the contexts of the socie-
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performers. Studies which integrate music with dance, theatre or the visual
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ognize the value of interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Volumes
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Greek Rebetiko from a Psychocultural Perspective: Same Songs Changing Minds
Daniel Koglin
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Michael Wright
Bulgarian Harmony: In Village, Wedding, and Choral Music of the Last Century
Kalin S. Kirilov
SamulNori: Korean Percussion for a Contemporary World
Keith Howard
The Women of Quyi
Liminal Voices and Androgynous Bodies
Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson
First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson
The right of Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-23413-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-30787-9 (ebk)
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Contents
List of Figures vi
List of Musical Examples vii
Acknowledgements viii
Note on the Text ix
Prologue 1
Introduction 7
1 The Female Voice and Body Problem 19
2 Literary Voices: Metaphysical Heroines 46
3 Musical Voices: Balancing Text and Tune 71
4 Liminal Voices: Transferring Artistry from Master to Disciple 88
Conclusion: Masters of Liminal Space 107
Epilogue 113
Appendices 119
References 170
Index 181
List of Figures
1.1 Female narrator singing with ensemble 39
4.1 A subordinate position implies hidden power and a base from
which to negotiate that power 90
4.2 Comic Routines typically feature a comedian (dougende) and
a straight man (penggende) 92
4.3 In the yitouchen (heavy on one end) style, the dougende is
seemingly superior to the penggende 92
4.4 In the zimugen (two sides of a snap) style, the dougende and
penggende are equal 93
4.5 An yitouchen relationship often evolves into a zimugen
relationship 94
List of Music Examples
3.1 Comparison of T-1 74
3.2 Comparison of vocal styles in T-3, T-5, T-7 74
3.3 Comparison of the tonic vs. the supertonic 75
3.4 Comparison of melodic rendering 76
3.5 Lu’s four-beat vs. Xiao’s two-beat measures 77
3.6 Lu’s four-beat vs. Xiao’s five-beat measures 78
3.7 Comparison of the final cadential formula 79
3.8 Musical transcription of the first couplet of “Listening” in
the lyrical melody 82
3.9 Couplets 36 and 37 of “Listening” in the narrative melody
(akin to speech) 83
3.10 A musical sigh at the end of T-10 85
3.11 T-13 and B-13: Splitting syllables with post-lexical elongations 85
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank many people for their substantial assistance in support-
ing my work on this book. Particular thanks go to the Humanities Center at
BYU for a generous grant to workshop the manuscript. In particular, I would
like to thank Margaret Wan from the University of Utah, Brandie Siegfried,
my colleague at Brigham Young University, and Matt Wickman, my col-
league and the Director of the Humanities Center at BYU, for their careful
reading of this work. Their comments and suggestions have been invaluable.
The Department of Comparative Arts and Letters, the community of schol-
ars in Women’s Studies, and the College of Humanities at Brigham Young
University also provided support and encouragement during the writing and
editing process, which I humbly and gratefully acknowledge.
Nate Thatcher painstakingly transferred all my musical transcriptions to
a digital format, and Lin Guo digitized the Chinese texts in Appendices 1–3;
I thank them both for their skills. Michael Needham provided invaluable
assistance in reviewing this manuscript, and I am sincerely grateful to him
and his staff at Humanities First for their meticulous work.
The editorial staff at Routledge has been generous and especially helpful
in preparing this manuscript for publication. In particular, I wish to thank
the two anonymous reviewers for their astute observations and suggestions
that have dramatically improved this manuscript. I am especially grateful to
Emma Gallon and her editorial staff for their expertise, professionalism, and
goodwill as they have guided me throughout the process of publication.
Finally, I wish to recognize Professor Xue Baokun, my former mentor at
Nankai University, my two teachers, Ms. Wang Yubao and Ms. Lu Yiqin,
and my selfless research assistant, Ms. Bao Zhenpei. These individuals have
been committed to assisting me with my research since the first day I met
them, and I am deeply grateful for their help and friendship over the past
several decades. Most importantly, I want to recognize all the women of quyi
whose stories have been the inspiration for this work; I humbly dedicate this
book to them. My husband, John Lawson, ultimately helped everything to
come together, and to him I owe the greatest thanks.
Note on the Text
Chinese vocabulary used in this book is Romanized according to the pinyin
system without tone marks. A glossary of selected Chinese characters cor-
responding to an alphabetized list of the Romanized words is found in
Appendix 6.
When heard outside of the context of the Tianjin narrative arts commu-
nity, the “r” at the end of words such as “far” and “qiar” is pronounced
as an “n” in standard Mandarin. However, throughout this book I have
Romanized these words according to the way they are pronounced in the
narrative arts communities throughout north China and not according to
standard Mandarin spelling.
My musical transcription of the vocal schools discussed in Chapter 3 is
found in Appendix 4, and my musical transcription of “Listening” is found
in Appendix 5. The Chinese texts for the poems I translate in Chapter 2 are
found in Appendices 1 and 3, respectively. Additionally, the complete text
for the Comic Monologue I summarize in Chapter 2 is found in Appendix 2.