The festival's sound environment
Every year, around the full moon of the lunar month of Tabaung (typically March), the grounds of the 12th-century Bawgyo Pagoda are busy. Located about five miles west of Hsipaw town, the Bawgyo Pagoda Festival (Bawgyo Paya Pwe) attracts thousands of people from across Shan State. For six days, pilgrims and merchants gather, with long processions of traditional ox-drawn carts arriving from the countryside. The event is a harvest celebration, a market for local produce, and a time for making religious merit by giving alms to monks.
In the bright atmosphere, a unique musical tradition persists. The music performed at the festival is integral to the proceedings, connected to both Buddhist ceremonies and older, pre-Buddhist belief systems. This includes the worship of nats, or nature spirits, an animist tradition that existed in the region long before the arrival of Buddhism. Music is a primary means of communicating with and honoring these spirits. The traditional Shan orchestra, or saing waing, provides the soundtrack. This ensemble typically features a circle of tuned drums (pat waing), circles of brass gongs (kyi waing and maung hsaing), and a reed instrument similar to an oboe called the hne. This music is for ritual; it is a functional part of the ritual, believed to send merit to the deceased.
An acoustic signature
The musical practices at the Bawgyo Pagoda Festival have attracted the attention of ethnomusicologists. The reason for this interest lies in the tuning of the traditional instruments. While much of the traditional music in Myanmar and neighboring China uses pentatonic (five-note) scales, the music of the Shan people here shows distinct characteristics. Spectral analysis, a method that decomposes a sound into its constituent frequencies, allows researchers to quantitatively measure these differences. This technique reveals the precise frequencies of the fundamental tones and their overtones, which together create an instrument's unique timbre or tone quality.
Analysis of the instruments used in Shan festival music reveals a tuning system that does not precisely align with the common major pentatonic scale (approximating Do-Re-Mi-So-La in Western terms) found in much of East Asia. It also differs from Western 12-tone equal temperament. The specific intervals between notes reflect a localized acoustic tradition. This musical system is a tradition, preserving sonic traditions that predate the cultural and political unification of Myanmar under the Pagan Empire in the 11th century. The sounds heard during the festival are an audible link to the region's complex history, where animist beliefs and Buddhist practices have coexisted for centuries.