This paper is concerned with the online representation of hua'er, a genre of mountain songs sung at the brink of the Tibetan and the Loess plateaus. The main performance happenstance of hua'er is at annual festivals, held according to the Chinese lunisolar calendar in the harvesting slack season. Due to this seasonal characteristic, hua'ercould not be heard everywhere, everytime, or by everyone. The seasonal limitation eventually lost its curtail with the rise of video sharing websites after 2005. Hua'er now can be heard in all its varieties throughout the year, by anyone with access to the internet. Video sites are at the intersection of media creation and social networking, they embed people in a participatory culture in which to create and share content. These virtual spaces are portals for communities where people bond with peers, engage in public discourse, explore identity, and acquire new, often musical, skills. Do Chinese video sites likewise have the potential to form strong participatory cultures? Is this aspect of participation also manifested in and through folk videos, e.g. the sharing of hua'er videos and in the comment section of the videos? This paper draws on the ethnographic method of virtual fieldwork, primarily videos posted on China's most popular video platform, Youku, are analysed. Beside theoretical reflections on how changing technologies of communication and dissemination reshape the ethnomusicologist's understanding of fieldwork, preliminary analytical findings point to a major change of hua'er culture, especially in the fields of musical representation, folk classification, and even its mode of transmission: from "hua'er festivals" to "hua'er video channels". These results may furthermore be relevant for other genres of China's folk musics, describing their development in the virtuality of the internet, which - as a socially embedded phenomenon - is by no means separated from reality, but rather is part of everyday life for musicians and audiences.
아시아에서 벌어지는 모든 음악활동을 연구합니다.
특히 아시아에서 일어나고 있는 유럽 음악 편중의 음악상황을 아시아음악 중심으로 전환하기 위한 연구와 운동을 합니다. 아시아음악은 아시아인이 가장 잘 연구할 수 있다는 점에서 아시아음악학 연구는 아시아 학자에 의하여 주도되어야 한다고 생각하는 사람들의 모임입니다.
이러한 목적 달성을 위하여 아시아음악의 역사 이론 연주를 연구합니다. 이 연구 성과는 Asian Musicology라는 영문 저널을 발행하고 있습니다.