Roots and routes: A comparison of beiguan in Taiwan and shingaku in Japan.

摘要

This dissertation examines how music travels and roots in different societies. By comparing the musical texts and contexts of beiguan in Taiwan and shingaku (lit. Qing music) in Japan before the 1960s, it addresses how the roles and meanings of music changed when the music was transplanted into different societies and how these changes in turn affected the maintenance of the musics in their respective new homes.; Beiguan and shingaku originated from similar sources, folk music and theater genres from South China, but were transplanted to different lands. Beiguan was brought to Taiwan by immigrants and spread in a new land where people, religion, customs and language were similar to its original land while shingaku, originally a kind of folk music in Qing China, was brought to Nagasaki via trade routes and spread in Japan, a foreign land where the people and language were different from its original land. When beiguan and shingaku relocated in different places with various contexts, although they both symbolized upper class taste in their societies, due to divergences of social factors and peoples' tastes and characters, their roles and meanings were varied: beiguan played an important role in communal life and became the sound that marked the boundaries of places and groups while shingaku, an exotic music from an 'advanced' culture, was mainly a music genre for individual's taste and cultivation. The changes of roles and meanings eventually effected changes in performing styles, size of repertoire, social ethos of the music, and impacted the preservation of the musics when they confronted impacts from Westernization or modernization.; In this study, I am interested in understanding the resignification of music as people and musicians are actively establishing roots for an imported music that they intend to claim as their own. I believe that the comparison of musical texts of beiguan and shingaku helps us to gain an insightful understanding of the two music genres. Furthermore, the comparison of the roles and meanings of beiguan and shingaku provides specific ethnographic data for a broader examination of the relationship among music, migration, place, meaning, and people.