ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how and why Kam cultural custodians seek to leverage the significance of both recent and long-standing music-and-place connections in their efforts to promote big song singing within today’s remarkably altered social context. The so-called ‘discovery’ of Kam minority choral singing by Han Chinese researchers in the early 1950s ushered in a new phase of big song singing, and since that time a shifting of connections between music and place has begun to impact upon Kam big song singing in many unprecedented ways. The chapter focuses on several of the most significant ways that the intimate connection between big song singing and concepts of place. It suggests ways that changes to the form of this connection have impacted upon big song singing today. Many Chinese written accounts describe the main importance of the so-called ‘discovery’ of big song during the 1950s as being its usefulness in disproving Western musicologists’ statements that Chinese music was entirely monophonic.
