UCLA

The Zhuang minority in Guangxi, China, are commonly celebrated for their “sea of songs.” While the epithet of being “good at singing and dancing” is an overused description applied to China’s fifty-five minorities, Zhuang do gather in parks during weekends and holidays and sing strophic songs outside their homes and on mountain tops to each other in annual festivals. Although a given geographic area typically features only one of these tunes, in many areas of Guangxi, these songs are the primary form of music-making. This kind of strophic singing, known throughout China as mountain songs (shan’ge), has a variety of names spread among the dialects of the eighteen million Tai-Kadai speakers who make up the Zhuang. The Zhuang who live along the Youjiang river valley call their traditional singing fien. However, the Zhuang do not typically refer to this kind of music as something that is sung, but rather something that is done. Youjiang Zhuang do (gueg) fun, business, travel, and fien. This linguistic sleight of hand indicates a significant difference in how a traditional Zhuang singer approaches music compared to most singers in Western societies. The primary way Zhuang evaluate fien is through the quality of the lyrics. A good song is one that has witty lyrics, or words that reference critical parts of Zhuang culture. These words are often extemporized and must fit a specific rhyme scheme and phrase structure that correspond with major sections of the tune used to gueg fien. These features bring an excellent lens to examine relationships between music and language.

While music does not have organizational or meaningful equivalents to verbs, nouns, and adjectives, recent cognitive studies demonstrate that the same areas of the brain processing syntax and semantics are employed for both music and language (Patel 2003, Koelsch et al. 2004). However, many of the models reflecting these relationships have limited themselves to tonal music, especially from the West, and have not accounted for “the interplay of sound structure with the context and cultural assumptions of its creators/listeners” (Feld 1974:207). My dissertation begins to address these issues through positing that a combined analysis of language and music is possible in Zhuang singing. Specifically, I hypothesize that sections of melody and complete clauses of lyrics meet at consistent points in their respective structures, creating the possibility for a joint syntactic analysis of melody and lyrics. I further posit that Zhuang melody in this context has demonstrable semantic significance as an overt marker of a possible Zhuang literary world.