Hidden musicality in Chinese Xiangsheng: a response to the call for interdisciplinary research in studying speech and song

Recent scholarship in the field of music cognition suggests the need for increased interdisciplinarity in moving beyond the boundaries of Western European music, and the study of the relationship between language and music is an especially fruitful area that can benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration. This paper heeds the call for collaborative research in cultures outside of Western Europe by focusing on Xiangsheng, a form of Chinese musical comedy that features an intriguing relationship between speech and song in performance. The present paper argues that analytical tools and perspectives from conversational analysis, communicative musicality, empirical research on music-language relationships, and performative mutuality in ethnomusicology all speak to the idea of musicality—the underlying capacity that undergirds our ability to communicate both verbally and musically—as a common foundational behavior in both speech and song. Musicality is particularly apparent in the way Chinese Xiangcheng actors relate to each other and their audiences in both spoken and musical modalities, and this paper suggests how judiciously employing a variety of methodological approaches in the study of musicality can yield important insights for researchers from all disciplines.