This study focused on the musical context and characteristics of Yao wedding music in Jinxiu, Guangxi, China, to use a qualitative research methodology. The objective was to 1) examine the musical context of Yao’s wedding music. 2) Analyze the musical elements of the Yao wedding music. The research designed the interview and observation forms that were used throughout the interviews and observations. By key informant, the interviews were divided into three groups. The results of the study are as follows: 1) Jinxiu Yao wedding music is related with the culture, religion, language, and history of the nation. While preserving its traditional culture, it has important national cultural significance. 2) The music of Jinxiu Yao has the most intricate musical characteristics and is performed alone or in a group with percussion instruments. With the main melody in pentatonic mode and played in a flexible rhythm, the relatively fixed wedding music is simple and simple to understand. The music and ritual of the Jinxiu Yao wedding are complementary, representing the Yao’s traditional culture and preserving the transmission of music from their ancestors through the ceremony.
The traditional music and performing arts in the ASEAN have found new powerful conduits of transmission with the advent of the digital age. Although claims of cultural ownership over music and dance occasionally appear on social networks and media platforms, the ubiquity of the Internet has in fact benefitted the general public, allowing them access to images and sounds hitherto unknown. Modernisation has taken its toll on the region’s musical heritage. Ancient elements of indigenous music have faded away. The influx of popular and Western music has increasingly eroded the space and demand for traditional music. Many orchestras in the region feature diverse musical instruments tuned to a common Western tuning system, thus relinquishing their Asian musical roots. The fusion of Asian musical ensembles with Western musical instruments has forced the tuning of gongs, xylophones, metallophones, and singing to the Western diatonic scale, losing their indigenous resonances, sonorities, and timbres. Urbanisation and the migration of the young into urban areas disrupted the discontinuity in generational transmission of music. Village rituals and ceremonies play an important role in preserving ancient religious systems where music, dance, and theatre were essential as part of agricultural life, trance and curing rites, and communal well-being. The onslaught of mass media and the Internet has also accentuated the de-sacralisation of ritual spaces, leaving many musical traditions behind as memories of the past.Keywords: traditional music, urbanisation, de-sacralisation, memories, ASEAN.
The growth and expansion of maritime trade in the first millennium CE altered the musical landscape of Asia, from earlier Austronesian and Austroasiatic migrations, to the early contacts with India, China, Arabia, and the continuing navigation towards the Pacific and Oceania. Much later in the tenth century, Chinese chronicles describe that peoples from the south called Luzoes (Luzon, Philippines) had invaded its southern shores, while Indian histories record the voyages of sailors from western Indonesia. By the eighth century, Austronesian languages from Borneo had spread towards Madagascar. A trade centred on beads, tin, copper, pottery, ceramics, natural products, and food also carried musical instruments and musicians bearing new ideas in music making and ritual life.
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