Theorizing Musicality: Theory, Analysis, and Ethnography on 黄梅戏 Huangmei Opera and 歌仔戲 Kua-a Opera

Abstract

My dissertation examines the sounds and performance practices of two Sinitic opera traditions in China and Taiwan to 1) elucidate music theoretical concepts local to these communities, 2) illuminate the place-bound aesthetic and cosmological ideals expressed through these theories, and in so doing, 3) center modes of musical listening (and in turn, “musicalities”) that expand the cultural sensitivities of the field of music theory. Drawing on a multipronged methodology involving music analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and comparative literature, this work uplifts first-hand perspectives from 黄梅戏 huangmei opera and 歌仔戲 kua-a opera (or Taiwanese opera) artists to tease the resonances and divergences that abound across their musical practices, and moreover, to reveal the limitations of canonized principles in Anglo-American music theory. The dissertation ultimately yields an examination of the ethical and aesthetic consequences of listening cross-culturally and theorizing globally. The Introduction introduces Sinitic systems of worldmaking that, I posit, are necessary to fully comprehend the music theories and performance practices employed within huangmei opera and kua-a opera circles. Those systems include olfactory and gustatory sensory epistemologies, the aesthetic primacy of linguistic sound, and yin-yang and Daoist-inflected cosmological ideals of changeability and unfathomability. These paradigms of meaning-making constitute what I term the “musicality” of huangmei opera and kua-a opera—the conditions by which a sonic object becomes more than sonic and charged with the aesthetic, the political, the philosophical, the corporeal, the socio-cultural, etc.—thus destabilizing widely accepted tenets of Western musicality including ocular-centrism, symmetry, and categorical precision. In light of these cross-cultural tensions, I outline a methodology that synthesizes disciplinary approaches to the study of musicality: whereas music theorists argue that extra-musical significance becomes attached to musical sound by way of conceptual metaphors while ethnomusicologists attribute the same to institutionalized sociocultural forces, I posit that listeners make meaning out of musical sound via cross-domain metaphors, and these are in turn systematically related under the pressure of institutionalized forces (e.g. epistemologies, cosmologies, ideologies) which systemically constrain and select for the metaphorical domains we listen and live by. The method I propose would reveal the way one or more institutionalized forces work to substantiate a range of locally salient musical metaphors. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the use of this methodology within two short analytical vignettes concerning 1) the aesthetics of vocal timbre in huangmei opera and 2) the blurring of public and private social spaces expressed in kua-a opera ensemble textures. Chapters 1 through 3 illustrate how the above-mentioned Sinitic systems of worldmaking evince indigenous formulations of musical mode, meter, and formal coherence, respectively. Chapter 1 contains two case studies that unpack Sinitic intuitions of tonal organization. The first case study examines notions of tonal function and tonal resolution in huangmei opera. Whereas mainstream Anglo-American music theory holds that do projects a sense of resolution and sol expresses tension, the opposite can be found in huangmei opera due to an enculturated preference for unbounded artistic spaces, as captured by the sensorial ideal of 韵味 (yunwei) “aesthetic flavor.” The second case study investigates instrument-based notions of mode in kua-a performance, whereby a single modal classification can polysemously support a range of emotive valences and flexible intervallic possibilities. I argue that the capaciousness of these modes and their adjacent gongche notation labels are conducive to 活奏 (huozou) “living performance,” a practice that hints at the entanglement of kua-a opera within a change-oriented, Daoist philosophical background. Chapters 2 and 3 respectively concern local and global processes of temporal organization. Most huangmei opera melodies and some older kua-a opera melodies feature changing accent profiles that resist Western theories of metric accent. Yet, both traditions also operate within the periodic bounds of a metric construct known as 板眼banyan—a framework that is regularly conflated with Western meter. I review the shifting meanings of banyan from premodern to post-colonial times to show how metric order in huangmei opera and kua-a opera originates not in the strict patterning of accents, but in deference to the unfolding of a guiding poetic text. From there, I describe the privileged role of linguistic sound in shaping melodic contour and Sinitic concepts of musical authorship more broadly, as expressed in the performance practice of 以字行腔 (yizixingqiang) “the melody follows from the text.” Chapter 3 returns to issues of temporality, discussing how the variable phrase lengths found in both opera traditions cannot be appropriately analyzed using mainstream frameworks of symmetry and regularity. Rather, these formal structures are more productively understood against Sinitic “timeways” involving cosmological change and the pursuit of auspicious timings. The Conclusion charts, in two directions, the process and ramifications of learning to listen across cultural boundaries. First, in light of colonialism, Westernization, and artistic innovation, Sinitic opera has become clearly intercultural: indigenous musical constructs have shifted to accommodate foreign aesthetic expectations, while imported theoretical concepts have been transformed to serve local musical needs. I also offer an analysis of the opposite process—an autoethnography documenting my experience with growing into my ancestral ears over the course of this project. These case studies reveal a certain paradoxical quality in cross-cultural and global musical objects and subjectivities, showing them to yield palimpsestic, dense, and incommensurably plural ontologies. Indeed, under the pressures of intercultural exchange, each of the musical qualities that previous chapters had aligned with huangmei opera or kua-a opera practice can be shown to warp out of shape, taking on the very characteristics I had striven to pose in opposition. The dissertation closes by sketching a novel methodology for global music theory that seeks to emulate rather than stabilize the creative tensions afforded by these paradoxical objects of study.