"Mountain Guests'" Secular Songs For Rituals

In order to rescue the endangered music heritage of a peripheral ethnic group, this thesis is targeted at She people, a minority group residing in the region around Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. The writer took fieldwork for four times, collecting quite a number of first-hand materials, sorting and summing them up so as to make a overall and detailed analysis and study of their social custom songs in their socio-cultural context. Instead of an isolated being, ethnic culture is closely related to the natural, social, cultural and humanist environment it lies in. The social custom songs of She people are no exception. The Introduction gives an outline of the She communities in Wenzhou region, based on documents, genealogy and oral sources, serving as a panorama of its context. In the first chapter, an attempt is made to employ the sorting method of music's social functions in ethnomusicology to divide the She custom songs into five categories, i.e. marriage songs, funeral songs, hosting songs, persuading songs and farming songs, meanwhile, against their social and cultural surroundings, conducting ethnographic folklore descriptions as well as overall folklore studies. Presented in the second chapter is an analysis of its melodic pattern. Following that is an exposition, from the perspective of cultural understanding, of the cultural phenomena these folk songs reflect. In the last chapter, social reasons for its decline are induced, which leads to suggestions concerning the protection and developing of She music and culture in the conclusion part.