The Music Associations of Hebei Province, China: A Preliminary Report

folk music and traditional observances are defunct. This is not so, but their survival is certainly precarious. In this paper1 we show that in the field of instrumental music alone, and even quite close to the modern city of Beijing, there is still much to study. In China vocal, notably dramatic, music has been more popular than instrumental music for many centuries. However, instrumental ensembles serving ceremony have long been an important part of rural life, and many such ensembles still survive today, forty years after the founding of the People's Republic of China. There is a considerable volume of work in Chinese on the regional instrumental traditions, based partly on the work of local scholars since early in the 1950s.2 In the West, some research has been done on solo art traditions.3 In ensemble music, as in other genres, secular and entertainment functions were becoming important in cities (especially along the southeastern coast) since well before the founding of the PRC in 1949, changing at various paces under the influence of modernizing and Westernizing values.