Teaching
Teaching
In the 1970s, Professor Pian taught two ground-breaking courses in collaboration with John Ward, entitled Music and Ritual and Music and Narrative. The two courses could be taken separately, but they were also meant to be companion pieces that explored music in a variety of cultural contexts. Taught in consecutive semesters for the first time during the 1973/74 academic year, these courses satisfied the newly created undergraduate general education requirement. Classes were held in Paine Hall and about 100 students took each course. These two courses predated the establishment of an ethnomusicology program at Harvard but were an important foundational step in that direction. Notably, Professor Pian’s early adoption of fledgling video technology meant that she was one of the first to use original ethnographic video recordings in her teaching.
This is not Professor Pian’s original video camera but is the same model that she used in the 1970s and which she can be seen using in several photos in this exhibit. One of the reasons we do not have her original is because she typically purchased the latest recording equipment for her field trips, but then donated it at the end of the trip to local scholars who had fewer resources or limited access to equipment. As noted, she was an early adopter of video technology and one of the first to use original ethnographic recordings in her teaching. The equipment at that time was very bulky and this camera would have been connected to a large, much heavier reel-to-reel tape deck. She used systems like this extensively and could frequently be seen with her camera in hand. In the early 1970s, her dear student, colleague and friend Bell Yung used to carry the recorder when she captured footage around Cambridge.
Music and Ritual
Music and Ritual (Humanities 112a) was taught as a separate course for the first time in the spring of 1973. In the original course catalog, it was described as “a survey of the role of music in various types of ritual; examples drawn from the life of non-literate, folk, and urban communities of different parts of the world.” Material used in the course included Hare Krishna chants recorded in Harvard Square, Spanish flamenco dance, Confucian sacrificial ritual, English Morris dance, Navajo curing ritual and the Sunday service recorded at Harvard’s Memorial Church. The Navajo and flamenco dance material was provided by David McAllester at Wesleyan University, but the Hare Krishna, Morris Dance and Memorial Church recordings were Professor Pian’s original footage. In fact, she enthusiastically learned Morris dancing herself over a 6-month period, making her a participant-observer in recording the ritual of a Boston-area Morris dance troupe. In September of 1974, she also made her own recordings of a Confucian ceremony in Seoul, South Korea.
Music and Narrative
Music and Narrative (Humanities 112b) was taught for the first time in the spring of 1974 following Music and Ritual in the fall of 1973. In the original course catalog, it was described as “a survey of the different ways of telling a story with music, including the cante fable, ballad, Javanese wayang (shadow play), South Indian kathakali (dance drama), Japanese kabuki, and films.”
In this course, Professor Pian used original Peking drum song recordings that she made in Taiwan in 1964 during her Peking opera research. She also focused on Korean p’ansori, and at the end of the semester, recorded the singer Chung Yoo-jin, who was in residence at Harvard that spring, performing the p'ansori cycle Chunhyangjeon.
As she also covered Indian kathak dance in this course, Professor Pian recorded a demonstration/performance by Birju Maharaj that March at MIT. In one of his sections, John Ward focused on the American ballad singer Almeda Riddle.
The focus on various forms of story songs and sung/spoken hybrids from multiple traditions aligned with Professor Pian’s active research interest in Chinese oral and performance literature. Professor Pian and John Ward continued teaching both of these popular companion courses together for 5 years, and Music and Ritual for almost ten.
P'ansori
P'ansori is a Korean narrative song form dating back to the 18th century that is sometimes referred to as Korean folk opera. It features a single singer/actor, accompanied by a double-headed barrel drum known as a puk.
The singer plays all the roles in large works (cycles) containing both sung and spoken sections, as well as gesture and movement. Although the singer uses only a hand fan (danseon) to play their various parts, performances are full of drama and emotion and there is much interaction between singer and drummer.
Today, p’ansori performances are primarily held on stage, but their story-song cycles were originally heard in large open spaces. There were twelve song cycles in early p’ansori repertoire, but only five are currently performed. These are lengthy works, with a complete cycle lasting anywhere from three to eight hours, and they require great range and vocal strength from the singer.
Professor Pian did not specifically research Korean music, but these recordings from the collection are a testament to her early use of video and her wide range of interests as an ethnographer.
The p’ansori cycle featured here is Chunhyangjeon (Tales of Chun Hyang), which tells the story of the love between an upper-class man and the daughter of a lower-class courtesan. They are a unique and little-known document of the singer Chung Yoo-jin (a disciple of Pak Nok-Ju), who was in residence at Harvard at the time. Recordings were made in Paine Hall on May 12, 1974.
