Deng Jia
Hong Ding
Gavin Lee, chair
Nancy Rao
Zhu Huanqing
Today, Western art music is growing at an unprecedented rate in China, with the setting up of new conservatories every few years, and the continual emergence of star Chinese performers such as Lang Lang. With China set to spearhead the global growth of Western art music in the twenty-first century, a consideration of the history of Western art music and China is timely. Rather than focusing merely on how Western art music is taught in China (AMS 2011 panel on “Teaching Western Music in China Today”), there is a critical need to examine the reception and practice of Western art music in China. (The definition of the “West” as a cultural unit—and by extension “Western music”—can be taken from Cook 2014, which tracks 1) the global reception of Europe as the musical reference point of the last five centuries, 2) the impact of American popular music, and 3) the Euro-American consumption of “world” music.) As detailed in McCollum & Hebert eds. 2014, the history of music around the world has been documented since the nineteenth century. Even with the rise of interest in historical ethnomusicology (which focuses mostly on non-Western music), however, it is clear that there is a hunk of global music history which falls outside the purview of both ethnomusicology and musicology—Western art music in the non-Western world. This panel addresses that lacuna.
Hong Ding
Gavin Lee, chair
Nancy Rao
Zhu Huanqing
Today, Western art music is growing at an unprecedented rate in China, with the setting up of new conservatories every few years, and the continual emergence of star Chinese performers such as Lang Lang. With China set to spearhead the global growth of Western art music in the twenty-first century, a consideration of the history of Western art music and China is timely. Rather than focusing merely on how Western art music is taught in China (AMS 2011 panel on “Teaching Western Music in China Today”), there is a critical need to examine the reception and practice of Western art music in China. (The definition of the “West” as a cultural unit—and by extension “Western music”—can be taken from Cook 2014, which tracks 1) the global reception of Europe as the musical reference point of the last five centuries, 2) the impact of American popular music, and 3) the Euro-American consumption of “world” music.) As detailed in McCollum & Hebert eds. 2014, the history of music around the world has been documented since the nineteenth century. Even with the rise of interest in historical ethnomusicology (which focuses mostly on non-Western music), however, it is clear that there is a hunk of global music history which falls outside the purview of both ethnomusicology and musicology—Western art music in the non-Western world. This panel addresses that lacuna.
Recent scholarship building towards a global history of music includes the 2016 AMS panel led by Bloechl and Solis, Bohlman ed. 2014, and Strohm’s Balzan Prize project. However, these projects often replicate the current state of scholarship by continuing to privilege Western academic voices. There is a need to involve the voices of others who speak for themselves as co-creators of knowledge in a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire 1970). This panel features large-scale collaboration between researchers from different disciplinary traditions. While most of us are located in an innovative institution set up in China in 2013 with a majority of international faculty—Soochow University School of Music, we work across the research traditions of China, Hong Kong, and the United States.
The opening paper by Gavin Lee (Soochow University) advances a global history of Western art music, through the case of China, as: 1) the history of _contested reception_, 2) the history of _adaption_ to local musical culture, and 3) comparative historiography. The use of the Folk as an organizing concept in Chinese music historiography creates conceptual distortions (e.g. the concept of the Folk Music Era, 960-1911), as well as an opportunity to rewrite a people-focused, global history of Western art music. Lee chairs the panel and has published and presented in conferences across musicological and ethnomusicological lines.
The remainder of this 90-min session comprises three historical papers and a response by Nancy Yunhwa Rao (Rutgers University), who is known for her extensive research in Chinese, Chinese-American, and American composers and musical culture. (All five of the panel segments are 10 minutes in length and are delivered consecutively without intervening discussion, leaving 40 minutes for general discussion with the audience at the end.) The three historical papers are presented by bilingual researchers who are mining Chinese texts in order to write the Chinese chapter of the global history of Western art music. All of these papers focus on the years before, during and after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and document the shifting reception and practice of Western art music during these tumultuous years. Aside from the obvious topical relevance of this time period, the increasing number of Chinese publications on cultural and musical issues from 1950 onwards makes research in this time span possible. The meticulous work in the three historical papers builds on the general narrative of Western art music and China, as well as on more detailed studies, in existing scholarship (e.g. Melvin & Cai 2004, 2015).
The second half of the twentieth century saw the large-scale professionalization of Western art music—barring the period of the Cultural Revolution when Western art music was banned—as well as the attendant contest of cultural values. Hong Ding (Chinese University of Hong Kong) examines the reception of one of the only eight officially approved works which could be performed during the Cultural Revolution, the Peking opera _Victory at Tiger Mountain_, which however uses the Western symphony orchestra. He analyzes discourse on the opera to track how the use of the symphony orchestra served as a political lightning rod that variously received approbation during the Cultural Revolution (when no opposition could ever be voiced), and criticism after 1976 when the political movement was officially refuted.
The final two papers focus on the years before and after the Cultural Revolution through case studies. Deng Jia (Soochow University) examines the controversy which erupted over Debussy in 1964 in _Wenhui_ newspaper, in which proponents of the composer were pitted against communist critics who refuted Debussy on the grounds that he is “capitalist.” Zhu Huanqing (Soochow University) examines the cultural background of the work of Debussy-influenced composer, Wang Lisan, whose post-Cultural Revolution piano suite _The Paintings of Dongshan Kuiyi_ (1979) was inspired by the titular Japanese artist. Using the discourse (recorded in print in the Chinese journal _Music of the People_) of Chinese and Japanese composers who visited each other’s countries in 1981, Zhu elucidates the surprisingly successful re-establishment of diplomatic-cultural ties between the two countries after China’s multiple and catastrophic defeats at the hands of the Japanese.
Together, the papers in this panel articulate a framework of global music history, and elaborates on it through the case study of Western art music and China. In line with the postcolonial thought of Homi Bhabha and Achille Mbembe, we focus on untangling the morass of factors affecting the local context where Western art music was introduced, examining reception, composition, and orchestration. It is by delving deeply into historical details that we can contest the notion of a “Western art music” which preserves a constant identity as it is disseminated throughout the world.
