The next session today, a couple of reminders for those listening and also prosecutors asking questions.
These pictures, a bunch of questions asked and we will then turn to these one by one disclaimer those seeking to remind us.
I'll try to offer a little warning when you have this remaining as towards the end of your settlement and the one that we ask you to reconcile.
So our first speaker this afternoon is Dr. So clearly still active on choral activities.
Associate professor at the University of Ottawa, or just his direct response to the search and led workshops throughout Europe,
Asia Cuba says she began searching for all U.S. forces on the U.S. a on certain types of activities in Taiwan.
China's searches movies must be seen through specialist numbers as most countries themselves investing the essence with music.
University of Michigan. And that.
Greetings colleagues from around the world, and it's now 6:30 in the morning here.
So please excuse me if I stumble over my words or or look really sleepy.
Because restrictions related to the pandemic keep me from travelling to be with you all in Oxford.
I decided to retreat to somewhere beautiful this weekend.
So I'm speaking with you from Park City, Utah, where I am sequestered in a cabin in the woods for this weekend.
I figured I might as well be somewhere beautiful while I taken all your presentations as word of introduction.
I am an Associate Professor of music and director of choral activities at Utah Valley University.
At the university, I oversee a choral programme for choirs, conduct the Review Chamber Choir and You Deep Green Tenor Bass Choir and teach,
conducting vocal technique and lyric diction to singers in Italian, French, German and English repertoire.
I'm also a published composer and arranger, as well as a regular guest conductor with choirs and orchestras around the world.
And I speak fluent Mandarin Chinese and my research areas as an ethnomusicologist include Buddhist chant,
Chinese folk songs and choral performance editions of oral traditions from around the world.
Every year, thousands of Buddhists in the Mahayana tradition gather in Taiwanese temples for the liberation rites of water and land,
or in Chinese Vijaya sung by an chaillu Pudo dodgy shumway or the abbreviated title Chaillu Fuckwit.
This week long ceremony is centred around a highly structured programme of nearly continuous chanting throughout the day.
There are eight shrine halls presenting independent liturgies, all chanted simultaneously.
These locations are divided into two separate categories the inner shrine for Newton and the outer shrine time in the evening.
The entire assembly combines four mass chanting on the final day of the assemblies.
Recitation focuses on a boat burning ritual metaphorically sending the dead to heaven.
At the invitation of this luncheon, Institute for Humanistic Buddhism, I recorded and transcribed chanting of the medicine, Buddha service or of.
And produced a new English translation of its core text,
The Sutra on the Vowels and Merits of the Medicine Master of Radiant Lapis Lazuli, or the only ruled by men converging.
The product of this effort is a book I authored Chanting The Medicine to the Future.
It's published by Air Editions. The primary publisher of critical editions of Music in North America.
In this book, this book serves as Volume 13 in a series of recent researches in the oral traditions of music.
It was published during the pandemic in 2020, and the book is already in Oxford University's Library Collection, as well as 67 libraries worldwide.
Basically, wherever air are, Editions Oral Tradition Series is housed.
So today I will provide a framework for the textual and musical elements inherent in the medicine
to search for this and contextualise it within the overarching water and land ceremony.
Topics I plan to cover include champs, leadership hierarchies, individual individuality through ornamentation,
indeterminacy or impermanence through improvisation, musical form, metre and recitation styles.
But first, I will also approach the oral tradition of suture reading through the lens of an
ethnomusicologist concerned with the ethics and value of rotating oral tradition.
Before I jump in to talk about the ethics surrounding transport corruption of Buddhist oral tradition,
I would like to offer up gratitude to those who steward the faith community in which these chants find context.
My foremost,
thanks go to the foregoing Shan Temple and Institute for Humanistic Buddhism under the capable leadership of venerable neocon and Venerable Meal Fund.
The foregoing China Institute for Humanistic Buddhism is making tremendous
strides to foster and promote a network of international scholars of Buddhism.
Without their kind hospitality,
generous sharing of terrible resources and far reaching vision for the promulgation of humanistic Buddhism through culture,
this project would never have gained traction. Their permission to twice record the medicine,
but a service demonstrates their commitment to making the dogma more accessible by increasing convenience to scholars.
I'm also grateful to chat instructor Venerable You Again for listening to me, chant back the entire service and for her detailed edits.
Her insights into varying traditions based on different channels,
instructors provided another layer of information that had not been readily apparent.
And I am indebted to Dr. Ren of the Dharma Drum Mountain Institute of Liberal Arts for providing insights into chant as a non
performative cultivation and for expanding my understanding of the diversity of Buddhist liturgy in the Chinese diaspora.
I begin with a disclaimer, the Daodejing asserts the way that can be spoken is not the way.
One might similarly argue that the oral tradition transcribed is no longer the oral tradition.
Or likewise, that the Sutra translated is not the Sutra.
Musical transcription.
An English translation of a Chinese Buddhist liturgy is appropriation of religious culture into the domain of Western scholarship.
Even with the enthusiastic permission and assistance of the set, the stewards is.
Said culture, no written English version of Chinese chanting should be considered a substitute for the original experience.
An audio recording is a richly informative primary source,
but even a recording betrays the principle of non-attachment that is at the heart of Buddhist practise.
Liturgy, the liturgy is never the same twice, nor should it be.
Still, the best way to perceive this chance is to hear and see them firsthand.
Therefore, my first intent with this book is to provide scholars with a window of exposure that may provoke further investigation.
To the best of my knowledge,
this is the first publication in English or in Chinese to examine the complete musical content of the Medicine Buddha service.
Even having made the trek to Taiwan, the uninitiated in a single visit would miss the many layers of meaning inherent in these physical,
musical and textual religious expressions.
For this reason, my second intent is to provide a resource with which Buddhists and non Buddhists
alike may methodically analyse various components of Buddhist chanting in Taiwan.
This transcription and English translation of the medicine,
but the service marks the first time that most of the chants in this volume have been transcribed using Western musical staff notation.
And while this form of transmission is new, I hope it retains their essence as the Maha virus,
O'Connor Sutra assures us in all acts of singing, there is truth and every dance portrays reality.
The purpose of my musical transcription is to provide a written record of the musical and textual elements of the medicine Buddha service.
But the results is necessarily prescriptive.
It represents a moment in time and is not intended to codify an authoritative version of this oral tradition.
Oral tradition is fluid, and in true British fashion, its most reliable characteristic is that it is changeable.
No two utterances of the liturgy will be the same, just as No two live musical performances will be the same.
Amongst the main variables affecting the liturgy are the number of participants both monastic and lay.
The participants musical skill, their literacy level, the venue, spatial considerations, geography, time of day and language.
The particular moment in time notated in my audition spanned the course of two days,
the 16 to 17 December in 2017, when I personally recorded two iterations of the medicine, but a service.
These recordings took place at the Great Compassion Shrine that year,
as you'll see written on stone at the top ad for Trent Monastery in the northeastern outskirts of Goshen, Taiwan.
When during the water land ceremony, the shrine was renamed the Medicine Buddha Shrine, or Yeshua Time.
This transcription reflects the joint chanting of forgotten Shan nuns and lay Buddhists.
The monastics leading both services were all nuns, including one liturgy leader, one chance leader,
five instrumentalists and approximately 10 additional nuns in training from the Buddhist college.
With a different nun serving as the chant leader each day,
the two iterations of the service gave a diversity of experience that clarified intended pronunciations,
timing sequence and other musical considerations. The first day was led by venerable young Chen, who had taken monastic vows almost 40 years prior.
The second day was literally led by venerable Jeonju,
who had been a part of the four long standing monastic community for almost 30 years prior to this recording.
So both nuns had decades of experience leading these chants.
The transcription process was fraught with challenges and choices. For instance, the transcription assumes that those chanting did not go out of tune.
It also assumes an aptitude for correct Chinese pronunciation. Human error is a normal part of religious practise.
Which is why I recorded the same service on two occasions with different leading rectors to identify the most reliable version at any point.
My transcription reflects the strength of both recordings. The musical notation.
Is thus a generic form of the melodies and rhythms.
In a few instances, accidentals above the staff indicate pitch discrepancies amongst the chant gymnastics on a given day or on different days.
One such example occurs in the initial incense praise notated here in Measure 17 and 18.
For those non-musicians in the audience looking at this part right here, that's Measure 17 and Measure 18.
You'll see these sharps or hashtags above the staff to indicate that the pitch has changed.
I will recite this chant for you so you can experience the melody, and I think you will notice that this moment right here,
that is an aberration to the typical collection of pitches in the musical mode.
Let's see if you can hear the shift. Lou?
You share oh, ha ha ha.
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, she he he he he agreed to.
Oh oh, I'm sorry, it's 6:30 in the morning.
I'm a little tired, but my voice is a little bit more in voice, but that that is the first minute of this, this chant.
In the example of Measure, 17 right here was sung as a B sharp,
an unusual incidence of chromatic ism that one might suspect indicates poor intonation rather than intended inflexion,
except that multiple chant leaders sang it this way. However, the similar notes on beat for of Measure 17 and B,
one of Measure 18 here were sung by one Chad leader as be natural and by another the following day as be sharp.
It therefore seems that oral tradition has made room for variation.
These measures may even demonstrate the ongoing value evolution of this oral tradition,
and I think it's important to note that these moments right here that go outside of what we would call the pentatonic scale of five notes,
five notes being the standard for the entire hour long ceremony.
Suddenly here for about five seconds, we go outside of that pentatonic scale.
And and so it's a moment that that causes a red flag or draw.
It draws attention. And this, to me, shows the changing nature of the oral tradition.
In musical oral tradition, individuality is inherent in the evidence evolving transformation of the melody over time,
but often individual individuality is a central characteristic of the melody itself.
This makes transcription of a melody with independent, individualised ornamentation in a very, very challenging.
My transcription includes all predictably recurring ornamentation notated by means of grace notes.
This does not mean that all small loads are sung every time they might be omitted altogether,
chosen selectively or augmented ornamentation is improvised on an individual level and should not be dictated or regulated.
The style, frequency and appropriateness of chant ornamentation varies considerably from temple to temple.
My hope is that the ornaments from a given recording or transcription might serve as a
hint for the kind of ornaments one might expect to hear at a folk junction monastery,
as well as the moments in which one might expect to hear them. Here is a forgone sun chant at the conclusion of the Medicine Buddha service.
This is a side by side comparison of a simplified version of a simplified version and an ornamented version.
These two versions might be charted simultaneously by different attendees.
I will recite six measures of each to demonstrate the difference. Hmm.
Hmm, hmm. There she is.
Uh huh. Yeah.
That's the simplified version and ornamented version. And there are many kinds of ornamental versions, but this represents one.
So it would sound like this. So uh, she he he's uh huh.
Yeah. And I hope you can notice some of the differences.
Well, Grace notes turns even triplet terms that represent represented more ornamented style.
In general, where nuns at Buddhist monasteries in Taiwan serve as the chant leader.
They tend to choose lower musical keys than monks do.
In my experience, Chant Leaders Chant Leader nuns often choose keys so low that the melody is nearly impossible for most people to sing comfortably.
Many times, the majority of those chanting will simply drop out for a note,
a syllable or phrase because the pitch is simply too low for them to fill it.
Men rarely jump up the octave in unison with the women when the melody gets too low to sing.
And women never jump up an octave for comfort if the pitches are too low.
This psychological aversion to producing high notes is ubiquitous,
and Taiwanese nuns are generally of the impression that men can sing in their high registers more comfortably than women can in theirs.
As an aside, amongst teachers of singing worldwide, this opinion is not generally accepted.
In fact,
it's generally accepted in the singing community that women have an easier time naturally negotiating the registers shifts in their voice than men do.
And I think most people are familiar with that idea of the adolescent boy going through their voice change and how uncomfortable that can be.
The indeterminate nature of the musical expression should steer the chanting away
from a spirit of performance and toward a cultivation of a meditative mind.
Thus, while transcription of Song Chant is a resource or framework for organising pitch and rhythm,
the changeable nature of those pitches and rhythms should be represented in any song reading of Sutra.
This can be done through collective improvisation variations in key ad hoc to be set by the chant leader,
soloist, etc. truly know two recitations of the native medicine, but a service are exactly the same.
And yet they are similar enough that monastics and the assembly of regularly attending devotees
would be able to predictably stay together as a cohesive unit of expression for at least two hours,
with only the visual aid of the sutra text and no visual reminders of pitch or rhythm.
This is a remarkable feat. To begin to speak of form or structure of such a recitation.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I will next dive into an analysis of the musical elements of suture recitation in this tradition, including form, metre and recitation styles.
To begin to speak of form or structure of the future recitation, drink the water in that ceremony,
it is helpful to first understand the complexity and scope of the full ceremony.
This is the temple's schedule of recitation activities for the full week,
including which Sutra is to be recited in each of the outer shrines at all times of the day.
I have highlighted the medicine Buddhist Sutra Recitation schedule.
You will see that it begins at 5:30 a.m. on day one of the ceremony,
which is why maybe this chanting for me this early in the morning is actually quite appropriate.
Half of the sutra is recited, followed by a morning meal.
After eating, the second half of the sutra is recited, which concludes at 9:30 a.m.
At this point, there is a 20 minute break and then the cycle starts over again.
At Fogelson Monastery, the medicine Buddhist Sutra is uttered in six sections three in part one and three in part to cheer marked in
blue with the medicine Buddhist recitation here marked in yellow serving as a sort of return elo or chorus.
Before and after the course, sutra sections are introductory and concluding chants here bracketed in lavender.
Thus, the overall musical form mirrors that of the text and can be represented schematically as ABC in part one and a prime,
be prime and see prime in part two. This prime label refers to the same musical material, but with different texts.
This blue yellow alteration alternation between suture reading and fixed melody chance gives variation
that keeps the mind focussed through what would otherwise be a very long recitation because in total,
the duration of this service is about an hour per part or two hours total.
Metre refers to a hierarchy of beats or pulse metre in unison, melodic chanting consists simply of a steady, steady pulse regulated by the rector,
and in Chinese we call it rector, the winner with monastics playing Dharma instrument dharma percussion instruments.
Here is an excerpt of the steady pulse of chanting.
N.A. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.
Most chants begin with a regular pulse while the rector delivers the first syllables and defines the key.
Once the assembly joins in, the pulse begins as the percussion starts.
At this point, the pulse remained steady until further notice.
In free chance, there's a steady, undifferentiated pulse with no hierarchy of beats and updates, sutra syllables fall on each pulse without exception.
And there is no flexibility for additional rhythmic delivery of the text.
Macro rhythms do sometimes occur when particularly creative centres incorporate recurring motives or patterns in their improvised melodies.
Such patterns might compromise for I might comprise four or eight notes,
for example, giving a sense of quadruple time or for so we get one two three four.
Like Sudoku or Jean Chen Trend Zhou Yongkang Rondon's, I'll find one two three four.
Others chant other cheddars, create melodies that rise and fall with the sentence structure, which also often results in groups of four syllables.
This sentence structure is usually comprised of eight syllables divided into two sets of four,
but occasionally creates groups of five, seven or nine syllables.
When this happens, there is a metric shift which can feel asymmetrical amidst the mostly four syllable phrases.
One example of this is the listing of the 12 Yakuza generals in section six of the Medicine Buddhist Sutra.
Each of the 12 generals has five syllables to his name, which creates the feeling of 12 measures of five four.
In other circumstances, the list of names might be made up of differing numbers of syllables,
creating the sensation of constantly changing metres, which in itself is another kind of macro rhythm.
Here are the five syllables sound like this gong P Lord John Fogerty, Lord John Michie,
Lord John one two three four five one two three four five Which is would feel like a break from this that four syllabic pulse.
There are two musical styles of recitation in the medicine Buddhist service.
This is my last topic. Five Chant Free Chant Excuse Me and fixed melody chant in Free Chant, which features a regular rhythm and an improvised melody.
It's used for sutra recitation and the opening sutra opening verse during free chant passages.
Assembly members pronounce each syllable at the same time, following a pulse kept by a percussion instrument as they chant these improvised individual
melodies based on a timescale outlined by the rector at the outset of the chant.
Here's a bit of the whole story here in long, frequent passages, the director typically begins the chanting with a set melody,
which outlines the collection of pitches that form the key and then fades into the larger sea of sound.
As the improvising assembly joins in at the conclusion of the passage, the rector vocally reasserts themselves by leading the assembly in a retardant.
That's a musical term for slowing down, essentially bringing the steady pulse to a halting stop and then initiates a credential
melody that indicates the final resting pitch at the end of the section of text.
The rector's opening and closing musical phrases serve as a transitional function,
and they generally occur on the first and last three syllables of a given audio of text.
In Fixed Chant, the non sutra text of the ceremony are recited in fixed chant melody chant of excuse me,
the non sutra text of the ceremony are recited and fixed melody chant, where the assembly members chant an established melody in unison like this?
Miles, for passages in the second style, you will note the inclusion of ornamentation,
drunk scene such as note bending or drawing in scoops, slides and neighbouring grace notes despite being pre-determined.
These melodies can vary in small ways based on the lineage of the oral tradition under which the tensely leader learnt them so as free passages.
The Assembly follows the Raptors lead. Sharon is particularly famous for its monastics, progressive and free use of ornamentation.
Conversely,
more musically conservative have support unadorned melodies and conclusion as musicologist by studying music and its social and cultural contexts,
Ethnomusicology examines music as a social process in order to understand not only what it is, but what it means to its practitioners.
My field is highly interdisciplinary,
so I am grateful for this opportunity to share my research with this impressive array of international Buddhist scholars.
If perhaps my interest in the musical recitation of Sutra interacts with your work, I would particularly love to hear from you.
And I look forward to learning from each of you and in the remaining presentations. Thank you so much.