Daoism—lives—language—performance. And jokes
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A recent talk at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul, when Ara Dinkjian (son of the great Onnik) and Vahé Tachjian introduced early recordings of Armenian classics, led me to the impressive website Houshamadyan: a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life. With navigational aids, including useful context here, the site covers local Armenian communities […]
In our modern world, the flight booking reference consists of a seemingly random combo of six letters and numbers, so on booking my recent flights for Istanbul I was impressed to find the last three letters FND which one might suppose to be a quaint honorific that is tailor-made for a trip to Turkey… Surely […]
After my dabblings with Songs of Asia Minor, Road to rebetika, and Folk traditions of Greece, I’m browsing the new volume The SOAS rebetiko reader: a selection of papers associated with the Hydra rebetiko conferences 2000-2020 and seminars held at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London (2025) (online here), edited by Ed Emery, […]
Source: CHIME newsletter. On Sunday SOAS hosted a grand celebration of the life of the great ethnomusicologist David Hughes (1945–2025), who died in May. Among many notices online, see this by Rachel Harris and Hwee-san Tan; Frank Kouwenhoven wrote eloquently in the CHIME newsletter. After embarking on a PhD in ethnomusicology at Michigan under William […]
I’m most gratified that my film Seated at the altar, on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo village, was awarded two prizes at the Chinese Musics Ethnographic Film Festival (CMEFF) International Biennial of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology, held in July at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In addition to the Bronze Award, it received the Intangible […]
An international conference in honour of Craig Clunas will be held on 16–17 September at Lincoln College, Oxford, bringing together leading scholars in the field of Ming studies and art history. From the publicity: The Ming period (1368–1644) is central to our understanding of Chinese art, both as the time when many key texts and […]
By way of reminding you of my series on the great Gustav Mahler, some brief comments on the three symphonies of his performed at this year’s Proms, while I consult Norman Lebrecht’s handy guide Why Mahler?, marvelling at Mahler’s busy conducting schedule amidst the tribulations of his personal life. Nothing can be so overwhelming as […]
Ida Rubenstein leading the original 1928 production of Boléro. Source. Ravel’s Boléro and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring have become concert “classics”, but they are challenging in very different ways. It was exhilarating to hear both in the same Prom the other day. For The Rite, I refer you to various posts, starting with my own […]
Earworms can be most insistent. For some reason my current one is Tico tico no fubá, composed in 1917 by Zequinha de Abreu. I first got to know it via the Nimbus CD Choros from Brazil by Os Ingênuos, but recently I’ve been listening to a variety of performances. There’s much to admire in the […]
Before my diachronic ethnography of Gaoluo village was published, I surveyed the modern fortunes of amateur village ritual associations on the Hebei plain south of Beijing in “Ritual music under Mao and Deng”, British journal of ethnomusicology 8 (1999). The same journal soon elaborated on the theme of ritual under Communism in a useful special issue […]
