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“Rich or poor, each language always implies a deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth. The mouth, tongue, and teeth find their primitive territoriality in food. In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tongue, and teeth deterritorialize.”

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 

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shawm music (toward a minor music) is a speculative analysis or Sinofuturist science fiction of chuidayue (ritual shawm and drum music from Shanxi, China) as a practice of spatial experimentation. The work constructs a media ecology and amplification network to develop three modes of inquiry:

One: an analysis of chuidayue’s spatiality—questions of movement, position, and staging in various chuidayue rituals and genres—as a deterritorializing historical process. 

Two: an analysis of chuidayue rituals as forms of performativity, replicated in shawm music’s own tension between textual description and performative action.

Three: an analysis of chuidayue’s spatiality, particularly its wealth of signal/background relationships, as a technodiverse other for modernist concepts of spatiality; censoring, differentiation, and blending were “first” articulated as musical parameters by Stockhausen in his “Four Criteria of Electronic Music,” but already play a structural role in chuidayue (at least when the definition of music is extended to its social and physical contexts). And through this entry of spatiality: a disruption of the boundaries between music and its social functions, between art and social systems.