Music in Tibet
Music and theatre are included in a subsection of sGra, which is one of the five inclusive sciences, which all things are said to include all types of study.1 Music has played a central role in the lives of Tibetans and continues to console Tibetans in exile. Tibetan music has many venues: chants, Tibetan opera, special troupes of performers, folk songs, and even newer venues like rock concerts and traveling all-female stage productions.
-Rakra Tethong says that Tibetan music can almost be thought of as a mixture of many different kinds of music.2 Tibetan music has had influences from Mongolia, Afghanistan, China, and India.3 And perhaps from places as far away as Syria and Greece, but Tethong argues that the majority of outside influences on Tibetan music came from India, especially when talking about the development of music inside the Buddhist monasteries.4 Tethong claims that typically new musical forms arrive first in Western Tibet, then they make their way to central Tibet where they’re learned by nomads that then bring the songs to Eastern Tibet.5 There was a special troupe of singers and dancers called the gar pa in Lhasa that received many of their influences from India as well as Mongolia, and they also came up with many of their own styles and customs.6
The gar pa represent a unique institution in Tibetan history that lasted for several centuries. The gar pa had many unique traditions and instruments and while some of them have been incorporated into other Tibetan musical venues, others have been lost.7 Tethong recalls how the special drums the gar pa used were, while the looked simple, were in fact very complicated and had the ability to be heard miles away and not be disturbing to somebody in the same room.8
-Another interesting institution related to Tibetan music is Tibetan Opera. Called lha mo, Tibetan Opera is said to have been founded by the legendary figure of Grub chen Tang stong Rgyal po.9 Tang stong Rgyal is honored similarly to other great Tibetan saints and transcripts of his plays were keep on alters to him and offerings to him were made before and after the study of or performance of a play.10 It is said that Tang stong Rgyal felt that people needed to be exposed to religious ideas but that some people are not susceptible to being preached to, so instead plays and music with religious themes could expose people to religious ideas that they would otherwise not be able or willing to accept.11
After the time of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama lha mo saw increased popularity, which was probably somehow related to the Fifth Dalai Lama having a dream about the lha mo which included new mask for them to wear.12 Some modern lha mo troupes still use the mask designed by the Fifth Dalai Lama.
An important event in the lha mo calendar is the drama festival or yogurt party at Drepung monistary.13 The legend goes that the monks at Drepung were too well behaved, so behaved were they that the local demon-god-mountain-being became upset with them and was causing trouble for them. To appease the being, the monks held a large festival and when the being saw them having a big festival he became appeased that they weren’t too well behaved any more and let them alone.14
The Buddhist Monastery is where some of the most complex and actualized Tibetan music comes from according to Tethong, and one of the major influences on Tibetan Monastic music was Indian music.15 However, that’s not to say that Tibetans Buddhist didn’t borrow from other sources or neglected their own indigenous Tibetan traditions. An example of a Bon instrument that crossed over into monastic life in Tibet is the rnga, which is a small kind of drum with a handle on it.16
While Tibetan Buddhism is among the most lenient of all Buddhist sects towards music, stringed instruments were the least popular in the monastery and were even banned in some, because of all the kinds of instruments they are the hardest to meditate to.17 However even though they are not played, stringed instruments are offered as offerings to Bodhisattvas in some ceremonies.18 Each of the four main sects of Tibetan Buddhism, Nymingma, Sakya, Kargyud, and Gelug, each has their own musical tradition. Tethong argues that the Sakya tradition’s music is closest to the Indian tradition in Tibet and that the Gelug tradition is the most conservative of all the movements in regards to music.19 These distinctions are useful but limited because it is also said that every single monastery has its own musical tradition, and sometimes a monasteries tradition will be contrary to the trend of its sect.20 Not only do monasteries have their own views on music, sometimes different parts of the same monastery will have different musical traditions and views.21
After the Chinese took control of Tibet, many lha mo troupe leaders were sent to China to be re-educated in music and to make lha mo performances conform more to their “Chinese origins”.22 In 1959, after a popular uprising, many Tibetans fled the country, following the example of the Dalai Lama. At least two lha mo troupes were set up in exile.23 One troupe toured the United States in 1975.24
One of the first institutions founded by the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala was the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA).25 TIPA’s symbol is the iconic mask of the hunter that introduces all Tibetan Operas and the skeleton dancer mask.26
An important issue to Tibetans in exile is coming to terms with what it means to be Tibetan in the first place. Tibetans in exile live in communities with other Tibetans from all over the region and for the Tibetans in exile this has really widened their sense of who is and who is not a Tibetan.27 Another issue is that of preserving Tibetan culture. What happens when notions of preserving Tibetan culture clash with efforts to stop sectarianism in the Tibetan Diaspora?
One such incident happened in 1981 when a deputy in the Tibetan National Assembly, who also happened to be Kargyupa monks, complained that the TIPA would be performing a play the next day for the Dalai Lama that included an immoral clown-type character that at one point chants Kargyupa prayer.28 The deputy argued that things like this were fueling sectarianism and that he was offended by it and it should be removed.29
No official stance was made one way or the other but what happened was immensely interesting. The lha mo went on, as schedule but the Dalai Lama did not attend; the reason for his absence isn’t made clear nor is it ever claimed to be as a result of the controversy.30 When it came time for the character to repeat the Kargyupa prayer he instead stopped and discussed with a God how he did not want to perform that part of the performance because of the controversy and he would instead perform a song from a popular Hindi musical.31 Another alteration that was made to the performance is that when the characaters were suppose to make a bread offering to a demon in an exorcism ritual instead of the using dough and bread they used an effigy of a skeleton dance, which is a symbol of the TIPA, and threw it at duputy-members of the Tibetan National Assembly.32 The implication of this action was to imply that the Tibetan National Assemblies were like demons attacking the TIPA.33 These actions caused the deputies to leave in protest; Marcia Calkowski argues that the argument against the TIPA wasn’t genuinely an argument against sectarianism but a blatant sectarian act in and of itself by the Kargyupa monk for the Kargyupa.34 The act of relating criticisms of an lha mo with an exorcism also have further symbolic meaning in regards to Tang stong Rgyal because legends tell of how the first lha ma was performed to appease a demon that was tormenting a town.35
Another instance where tradition and sectarianism have clashed with each other as well as with modern Western ideas is in regards to how women should be treated and what roles they can perform. The nuns of the Khache Ghankyil Ling nunnery, a nunnery for Tibets in exile in Nepal, study Buddhism on par with their male counterparts and have also study traditional Tibetan songs, dances, and other performance arts.36 Many of the performance arts the nuns learn are learned only for the purpose of raising money in performances in the west.37
-Tibetans, like everybody else, have not been immune to modern or Western influences. While researching the modern state of Music in Tibet ethnomusicographologist Keila Diehl recalls in her book “Echoes from Dharmsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community” how she found many modern musical elements in young Tibetans’ music. She asks the question of whether this is a sign of Tibetans that are proud of their own heritage trying reach out and form complex relationships with other cultures and traditions or is this a sign that young Tibetans, many of which have never been to Tibet or outside of India, are losing their own sense of cultural identity and are just plugging into what’s most easily accessible to them.38 She tells how one contemporary Tibetan band around the area of Dharmsala that call themselves the “Yak Band” plays rock and roll, blues, and incorporates an amplified version of a dranyen (a six-stringed Tibetan lute) into their songs as well as their attempts to turn traditional Tibetan chants and folk songs into dance songs.39
Rock concerts can be understood in terms of Victor Turner’s communitas and Deihl says that is also true when looking at modern Tibetan music in the Tibetan Diaspora.40 However communitas does not fully explain the tensions that exist between Tibetans that are resistant to these new forms of music, even when you try to argue that there is a subculture of young Tibetans that are looking outside their own traditional for inspiration.41 For those Tibetans that are resistant to new musical forms Diehl argues that it might not be the music itself they have a problem with but the tension they feel with trying to maintain their own cultural identity while being exiles.42 Despite the hardships that go along with being a people in exile, Diehl explains that in her experience that even though it is difficult many Tibetans hold onto what it means to be Tibetan, even those that are reaching out and looking for something else or new, such as rock and roll, still have a sense of being Tibetan.43 Diehl argues that even though Tibetan refugees can be described in terms of hybridity and pastiche, that many refugees regard these things as sources of failure and an unfortunate consequences of the life of a refugee.44
A lot of cultural transmittion takes place in the home, as it does in most cultures around the world. However because of their status as exiles, there is a great importance placed on how the culture is presented and preserved in the public sphere.45 It is because of this that public performances of become ever so important to the Tibetan diaspora as the gap between living memory and Tibetan identity widens, Tibetans cling to what makes them Tibetan and try to avoid displacement and assimilation.46 However Marcia points out that there is more more emphasis on preserving Tibetan culture in the face of Chinese culture and an over-arching globalzied world culture, but few Tibetans seem bothered or notice the influences of Hindi culture on their own.47
1 Jeanette Snyder, “Preliminary Study of Lha Mo”, Asian Music, 10, no 2 Tibetan Issue (1979): 35-38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org
2 Rakra Tethong, “Conversations on Tibetan Musical Traditions,” Asian Music, 10, no. 2 Tibetan Issue (1979): 5. JSTOR, www.jstor.org.
3 Tethong, 5.
4 Tethong, 5-8.
5 Tethong, 7.
6 Tethong, 6-7.
7 Tethong, 6.
8 Tethong, 7.
9 Snyder, 24.
10 Snyder, 24.
11 Snyder, 26.
12 Snyder, 28.
13 Snyder, 29.
14 Snyder, 29-30.
15 Tethong, 9.
16 Tethong, 9.
17 Tethong, 10.
18 Tethong, 10.
19 Tethong, 11-13.
20 Tethong, 10, 12.
21 Tethong, 11-12. Tethong describes how different grwa tshang or “colleges” in his own monastery of Drepung, forbid certain monks from learning instruments because their section of the monastery focused on logical, philosophy, or metaphysics, but required other monks in different colleges to learn to play instruments because their focus was on Tantric rituals.
22 Snyder, 29.
23 Snyder, 29.
24 Snyder, 29.
25 Marcia Calkowski, “A Day at the Tibetan Opera: Actualized Performances and Spectaular Discourse,” American Ethnologist 18, no. 4 (1991): 645. JSTOR, www.jstor.org.
26 Calkowski, 645.
27 Calkowski, 645.
28 Calkowski, 648.
29 Calkowski, 648-49.
30 Calkowski, 648-50.
31 Calkowski, 650.
32 Calkowski, 650.
33 Calkowski, 651.
34 Calkowski, 651-52.
35 Calkowski, 653. Snyder, 29.
36 Claudia Orenstein, “A Taste of Tibet: The Nuns of the Khache Ghankyil Ling Nunnery and the Theatre du Soleil,” Asian Theatre Journal 19, no. 1 (2002): 213-15. Google Scholar, www.scholar.google.com.
37 Orenstein, 214. That’s not to suggest that the nuns are greedy or not living up to their goals by taking money.
38 Kelia Diehl, Echoes of Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xx.
39 Diehl, xx-xxiii.
40 Diehl, 2.
41 Diehl, 2-7.
42 Diehl, 3.
43 Diehl, 4.
44 Diehl, 5.
45 Diehl, 66.
46 Diehl, 66.
47 Calkowski, 654. Calkowski points to how nobody seemed to have any problem or qualms about a popular Hindi movie song being used in what is considered the quintessential lha mo.
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