'"Authenticity” and the foreign audience for traditional music in Southwest China

Foreign backpackers have since 1988 flocked to Lijiang, southwest China, to hear amateur urban musicians of the Naxi minority play traditional Dongjing music. Often dismayed by professional troupes’ “adulteration” of Chinese music with Western‐style functional harmony, equal temperament and glitzy staging, such tourists delight in the authenticity of the Naxi musicians’ conservative heterophonic style, local tuning, sober gowns, and dignified demeanor. Yet Lijiang's deliberately traditionalist tourist concerts constitute a new forum for Dongjing music, selectively borrowing from disparate historical contexts to create a staged timelessness. Ironically, truly “authentic” traditional musical gatherings flourish in nearby Naxi villages seldom visited by tourists.