Storysinging and Storytelling in China

Frank Kouwenhoven

Institut für Sinologie

01.07.2017, 18:00 Uhr

Frank Kouwenhoven (b.1956) is a writer and music scholar from Leiden, The Netherlands. He is Director of CHIME, a platform and archive in the realm of Chinese music. With his partner Antoinet Schimmelpenninck (d.2012) he has published widely on Chinese music, produced films and CDs, organized exhibitions and festivals, and arranged Western concert tours for Chinese musicians. Frank lives in Leiden with his two children. Apart from music, his passions include books, poetry, European history, and long walks in quiet landscapes.

Ever since antiquity, teahouses, traditional theatres, public markets, sophisticated gardens, and other indoor or outdoor spaces in China have set the stage for regional storytelling and storysinging (shuochang). The art of the storyteller in China is unique and important in a great many ways. More than six hundred different regional traditions are practised today, and many of them have developed continously over hundreds, if not thousands of years. So what makes (or what made) the Chinese storyteller different, and noticeable? Who are his (or her) audiences, and what are the tricks of the trade?

Short answers to such questions are difficult to give, because the spectrum of different styles and narrative repertoires is truly astonishing. It ranges from short ritual formulae to full-blown epic narratives, from local gossip to epic and 'national' history-telling, from truly sophisticated art forms such as Suzhou storysinging (Suzhou tanci), Yangzhou storytelling (Yangzhou pinghua) and southern love balladry (Nanguan) to all kinds of lesser known forms: rural or urban, itinerant or resident, with or without music, rough or refined, and executed by people from any layer in society, i.e. from highly trained professionals to itinerant priests, beggars and commerical entrepreneurs. Some genres are sung throughout, some alternate between singing and speech, or rely on speech altogether.

A full survey would likely take days! Frank Kouwenhoven selected freely, from his own recent fieldwork and that of some of his close colleagues a number of representative samples. Not claiming any 'completeness', he will attempt to briefly place the art of Chinese storytelling in a wider comparative framework: how does it differ from storytelling in the West, not only in its 'classical' features, but also when looking at its more recent history (the last one hundred years)? And what are its chances for survival in a rapidly modernizing China?