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On the Hua'er Songs of North-Western China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Yang Mu
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Extract

People of north-western China sing what they call hua'er or shaonian songs, hua'er meaning “flower” (suggesting “beautiful female”) and shaonian “youth”. (For convenience, I shall refer here to all these songs by the former name.) This article first introduces the hua'er phenomenon and surveys the current state of relevant research. It then raises and discusses two issues linked to the hua'er that have been largely ignored to the present: (1) local sexual customs and (2) economic, technological and political influences on the hua'er song culture and its research. I wish to show how shifting scholarly interests, economical and technological changes and political pressures have shaped the largely Chinese scholarship into an important folk song genre over seven decades. The present discussion is based on my own research since 1978, including field work undertaken in the region in 1982, and the results of other researchers' work to date, including published articles and reports and unpublished conference papers.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 26 , 1994 , pp. 100 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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References

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