Lives in Chinese Music

Lives in Chinese Music edited by Helen Rees University of Illinois Press, HK$468

Individualism - you may have heard - is not widely considered a cardinal value of Chinese culture.

Fair or not, this long-standing view of China has influenced generations of scholarship in all fields: a timeless, cyclical country of all-powerful emperors and bamboo-hatted peasants menaced by the occasional barbarian invasion. More sensitive, discriminating studies have largely put an end to this, and less clich?d pictures of the mainland are emerging in studies of politics, history, literature, culture and the arts.

In the last, there is Chinese music, appreciated for its full richness of regional variation within the mainland but often reduced to a caricature of Peking opera, guzheng zithers and sugary pop outside the country's borders.

Everyone and everything - from western academia, the central government's official views and Chinese musicians to the concepts and definitions of music - is challenged and critically considered in Lives in Chinese Music, the first volume to focus on individual musicians (plus a Chinese musicologist).

The articles are by academics, but generally written in an accessible, journalistic style - sometimes too accessible, because it would have been rewarding to see more transcribed songs, or perhaps a CD included for the enjoyment of some of the music described.

Still, the narrative style - with only a few lapses into the sort of academic jargon that makes reading this type of collection a perilous undertaking - complements perfectly the book's goal of bringing individual characters out of the woodwork to illuminate aspects of Chinese musical tradition.