Present Situations And Changes Of The Dongcun Drum Society At Zhouzhi County, Nanjixian Village, Xi'an

The Dongcun drum society is located at Zhouzhi county, Nianjixian village, Xi'an, Shang xi province. It is one of many music societies that belong to the famouslocal music species, Xi' an drums music (Xi' an guyue), which is one kind of thenorthern "drum and wind society" music category in China. Since the middle of the20th century, the folk music societies of Guanzhong basin have attracted greatattentions of many musicologists because the long history, rich cultural contents,complicated structure and the unique style of large-scale sets of music (Da qu) thatthey perform. They brought the research field to a high starting point. Theyinvestigated this kind of music from the aspects of its instrumentation (Qi), script(Po), temprament (Lv) and tonality (Diao), which built a strong foundation of theresearch field.However, previous scholars haven't fully discussed the cultural background ofthese music societies due to the limitations of their thought of their particular time.For example, they haven't investigated the environment that these societies survivedand how they have been organized. This thesis aims to make up the inadequacy ofprevious studies by focusing on the cultural migration of the music society. It expectsto show the ups and downs of a folk music society in a 50-years time period. It alsoserves as a case study, which expects to record the positive and negative influences ofthe social-cultural environment on folk music.This thesis aims to answer three questions. First, how does the society changes inthe past fifty years and what is its current state? Second, what are the social causes ofthe changes of the society? Thirdly, as a society of traditional music, how do themusicians deal with the influences from outside? What makes the society survivedover the past fifty years and what makes them attract attentions from outside?To summarize, the focus of the thesis is to understand the migration of theDongcun drum music society. By doing field work, I expect to explore the migrationof the drum music as local music species in the past half-century and also record thecurrent situation of the Dongcun yueshe.