Order Space Ritual Music Classes

Since the 1990s, amidst the chronically harsh conditions of peasants' lives, temples and temple fairs in the three northern districts of Yanggao county in Shanxi province have been rapidly and systematically reviving. Meeting the peasants' needs, amidst the expansion of folk religion and located within peasant ideology and actions, the rebirth of temple fairs after near-obliteration is deliberate and multi-functional, with the power to revive spontaneously while accommodating. This has prompted folk musical groups, hitherto inactive or practising only furtively, to appear impressively at such occasions.Locally, folk ritual bands featuring sheng-guan ensemble and the suona shawm are known respectively as yinyang and gujiang. These instruments, each with their distinctive ethnic backgrounds, encountered each other in an area where several different ethnic groups once mingled, and were accepted and put to use by the peasants. Through the clash of different cultures, revisions were made to the original scale of the suona, making a foreign instrument conform to the musical system of central China;traces of this are still evident even after several centuries of change.As to social status, first of all yinyang and gujiang are ordinary peasants, differentiated as lay ritual specialists by their distinct skills in playing instruments, reciting the scriptures, and so on. The yinyang and gujiangbands are not simply musical organizations, but are ritual groups active locally for temple fairs and funerals. As symbolic culture, they make a link between communal and familial rituals.These yinyang and gujiangbands, deriving their life from life-cycle and communal rituals, are artistic groups, family-based enterprises pervaded both by the mutual support system of the peasant spirit and by the economic receipt of secular collective support. One might say that the members of these groups are small peasant enterprises supporting themselves, surviving through village ritual culture while accepting secular collective economic support.These yinyang and gujiang bands, surviving from the system of folk belief, through similarities and differences in their function, not only constitute the social order of village life, but also, through the different roles they perform in the ritual sequence, define the finer points within that sequence. That the rituals presided over by the yinyang mainly show esteem for the gods explains their adherence to, or even insistence on, their relatively core position in the ritual sequence. The gujiang, on the other hand, are one element in the way that tradition prompts 'change' - but such change is extremely subtle. While additions, subtractions, or changes in their repertory may be apparent, in practice they conceala constancy in function. Precisely because they appear to be open to change, the gujiang actively incorporate fresh items under different political regimes in response to the changing tastes of their audiences, so their ability to rapidly discover and protect their position in between tradition and modernity is far superior to that of the yinyang. This may be one reason why the gujiang can survive and straddle different historical periods.The yinyangand gujiangbands of north Yanggao, as a cornerstone of ordered space, connect the two poles of the spectrum from sacred and secular, divine and peasant, in the axis of ordered ritual and symbolic system. And through their specific environment in ordered space (temple fairs and funerals), their music-making, using the symbols of two similar functions with different applications, creates individual local history.