From "Mentu" To "Daban": The Change Of Folk Music Tradition In Shanghai

This paper is to study the change of folk music tradition today in Shanghai. The argument bases mainly on various cases and multi-perspective first-hand sources from fieldwork, together on supplementary literatures, aiming to do a holistic ethnomusicological study that taking the folk music into the context of folk events. In this paper, I will focus on the organization form of folk musicians'society in different times and different social contexts, describing, analyzing and interpreting the process that musicians disciplined themselves by the organization form of "Mentu (门图) "and the way they are maintaining their living through "Daban (搭班) "in order to adapt to changing context.This paper consists of the following parts. The introductory part includes the background, concepts, theoretical framework, methodology and sources of data; Chapter one is an overview on the "Mentu (门图) "in old times, including an explanation on the characteristics of "Mentu (门图) "and "Liuseren (六色人) "together with an discussion on the folk limitation on region of their activities and music they can use. Chapter two begins to describe and analyze another organization form of "Daban (搭班) "in nowadays, including the way that secure this form, the music played, the method used to adapt to new times and increasing urbanization; Chapter three focuses on the historical development of Shanghai folk music, discussing the process from "Mentu (门图) "to "Daban (搭班) "and the influences they brought to music. Chapter four is an insight into the mechanism that drives this change, trying to reveal the historical process of change from "Mentu (门图) "to "Daban (搭班) "and the reason behind. In the conclusion part, this paper adopts Luoqin's analytical model——"Cultural Study of Man and His Doing in Music (音乐人事与文化研究)"——for the analyze on what kind of unique mechanism maintaining the "Man and His Doing in Music (音乐人事)", and for the uncover of what kind of historical context determines the emergency of specific mechanism. In the end this paper is to give an interpretation on folk music's "tradition" and "modernity" and the transition process in-between. The supplementary conclusion is a theoretical thinking on how to understand the concept "folk music tradition" and how to perceive the folk music tradition as a whole in Shanghai. From this two-year long fieldwork, I understand that folk music still play a key role in some people living in modern Shanghai. It is undoubtedly an important issue worthy of study, especially in the field of urban-ethnomusicology. This paper thus explains the above phenomenon from the perspective of "folk knowledge" and demonstrating the history and today of it in the course of inquiring on "tradition in today", which extend the study of ethnomusicology in the field of urban folk music.