From Oral History to Documentary Film to Biographical Monograph: Three Stages in Telling a Musical Life Story

In August 2008, I undertook a 36-hour oral history with renowned Shanghai-based bamboo flute master Dai Shuhong (b.1937), with whom I had studied since 1987. His almost photographic memory and skills as a raconteur opened up for me not only the story of a remarkable life lived at a time of rapid musical transformation in socialist China’s most cosmopolitan city, but also an unprecedentedly granular view-from-the-ground of how major aesthetic, social, pedagogical and policy changes came about, and what it was like as an individual musician to witness, experience, and contribute to them. My path to writing a biographical monograph based on our oral history took a detour when a filmmaker colleague, inspired by the oral history, proposed a documentary on Dai’s life. We filmed for two weeks in September 2016, and the film, Playing the Flute in Shanghai: The Musical Life of Dai Shuhong, was completed in 2019. This article describes how the originally unanticipated film project transformed the inprogress monograph, in particular how photovoice techniques, emphasis on the visual, and creative ways of capturing interviews and conversations created new types of firsthand materials and fresh ways of conceptualizing the entire book project.