Folk sounds, both Eastern and Lower-Eastern

I had only a week left in China, that night I was sitting at the center of Xian, killing time before heading off to the train station for the overnight train to Chengdu. I was across the rotary from the illuminated bell tower. There was a busker was playing folk songs on an erhu. At that point, I wished I had some sort of sound recorder. I reflected on all the sounds I'd wanted to record during my time in China, like the bizarre music at the underground McDonalds in Jinan's Quancheng Square or the KFC across from the Bank of China in Wuxi, the cries of the pushcart vendors, and the opera teacher who lived in the flat below me in Jinan.

I had particular regrets about one evening in Nanjing. My friend Cissy took me to Jiming Si when I visited for the weekend. We arrived shortly before they closed the gates for the evening. We did the normal things you do at a Chinese monestary. We climbed to the top of the pagoda (which has the beautiful view of the city walls and the Yangtze River pictured right). As we were about to leave, about thirty monks filed into the main temple in the complex. I suggested to Cissy that we wait around and see what they would do. They lined up in rows. One stepped aside and started hitting a bell. The rest started chanting. It reminded me a bit of Medieval organum, but it was a totally new sound that I had never heard before.

From that day on, I searched tirelessly for a recording of this sort of Buddhist chant, to no avail. The Buddhist recordings I was able to find were more influenced by Western new age music than anything from traditional Buddhist liturgy. (The theory goes that Buddhism has new-age appeal in America, so accordingly anything with new-age influence will sell to tourists, authenticity be damned.) When I was in Xian -- the same day that I found that busker -- I found what I was looking for. One of the gift shops inside of Dayan Ta was playing that music -- not the same chant, I'm sure, but the same kind of music. I asked them which CD it was, and the clerk apologized, explaining that it wasn't for sale. They only had one copy, but they recommended that I buy one of the many other CD's of Buddhist chant. I sampled them, and they were all wrong. That was the only time I ever pulled the "I'm an American, your feeble currency has no value to me!" trick the entire time I was gone. For the amount of money I paid them, I could have gotten one copy of every CD they had. It was fine; I finally got my chant.

Of course, that was just one sound -- as for the rest, they won't be recovered. Perhaps one day I'll return to China with the sound recorder and capture all those sounds. Maybe I'll even take a page from Tan Dun and The Map and try to seek out local folk musics.

The New York Tenament Museum has a wonderful project right now that focuses on the recorded sounds and folk music of the very diverse Lower East Side. You can make your own musique concrète with sounds from the city. They're working on features that will allow you to save your pieces and listen to others', and upload your own sounds if you have any. Hear the project first-hand at Folksongs for the Fivepoints.