The British Left Singapore in 1959; But Western Cultural Imperialism Remained

Singapore's high school music education program can lead to what is known as AP music in the US, or A-Level music in the UK. In the 1980s and 90s, this was 100% Western music, reflecting the history of the country, which was colonized in 1819 by the British. While decolonization was achieved in 1959 (when the British left), this did not mean decoloniality, as evidenced in the persistence of Western cultural imperialism in the history of music education in Singapore.

The process of decolonizing music education began around 2000, when the musics of the Chinese majority and Malay and Indian minorities in Singapore were introduced (as part of a campaign for national identity), successfully diversifying the curriculum. At that point, the vast majority of teachers were trained in 100% Western music university programs, and so this was a systemic shock. Everyone had to become a student of global musics, cobbling books, CDs, and workshops by musicians to become fluent in these musics. The initial slate of musics included non-Singaporean musics—Japanese music, "African" music (problematically lumped as a continent, instead of regions or countries), and "Latin American" music (again, lumped as a continent). A few years later, the Ministry of Education reduced the slate of musics to just Western and Singaporean Asian musics (Chinese, Malay, Indian), which I consider to be a parochial-nationalist move.

Diversity in the music curriculum is positive, but it does not address the situation that I was often in, which is that 100% Chinese teachers are teaching 100% Chinese students. In my 5 years as a public school teacher in Singapore, I taught 1 Indian student, and had 0 minority colleagues. The diversification of the music curriculum came about because of awareness of Singapore's "Asian" identity. Multicultural musics were included based on the government-administrative framework of "different races" inherited from British colonization. But no one is seriously addressing the issues of inequality between the various Asian peoples in Singapore, nor the fact that these Asian musics are widely considered to be "antiquated" in a global milieu in which "Western" signifies "modern," which is where decolonial theory comes in. Singapore may not be the same as other countries which are caught within the imperialist ambitions of modern-day hegemons, which may effect political regime changes for the purposes of economic profit. But decoloniality has been and continues to be relevant.

Decoloniality is not as simple as diversifying the music curriculum because the very multicultural framework used for that project is inherited from British colonial-administrative division of the "races." This is translated today to strict racial quotas per housing block of government-built apartments that 85% of the population live in. My neighbors in Singapore are a Malay family, and if the quota for the Chinese have been reached in my block, the apartment can only ever be sold to a non-Chinese buyer, which means depressed apartment prices (because of lack of demand). In fact, the COVID-19 crisis in Singapore is sparked by the housing of massive numbers of Indian and mainland Chinese migrant workers in purpose-built dormitories, administered using the colonial logic of divide and govern.

Beyond the issue of race, decoloniality emphasizes the interconnectedness of vectors of oppression according to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. In music education, the initial lack of Asian musics is coupled with another form of invisibility: the queerness of canonic composers such as Schubert and Tchaikovsky is until now still straightened in a heteronormative milieu. Contemporary homophobia in Singapore can be traced to an arcane British colonial-era law (Section 377A of the penal code) that makes gays illegal. While the government stated that they will never make prosecutions based on that law, which they claim needs to be kept to reflect the moral majority, this kind of legal, symbolic, and cultural oppression must be addressed in curriculum reform to develop a music education that reflects the diversity of composers, performers, and music-makers.

Decolonizing Ethnomusicology

In previous weeks, there has been vigorous discussion of Danielle Brown’s open letter on racism in music studies in the SEM email list, but not in the discussion fora of AMS and SMT. As a member of all three societies, I offer the following thoughts on US ethnomusicology. My intention in posting this here is not to insist on one version of decolonizing; ultimately, I speak from my positionality as a queer person of color working outside the US, and partly outside ethnomusicology. If you find any part of this useful in your work--whether as teacher, researcher, peer reviewer, journal editor, academic society board member, or research grant body executive--feel free to use, adapt, modify, or elaborate on all or part of it, and amplify the decolonizing message with proposals for change. 


Introduction

1)    Demographics provide the easiest demonstration of the need for decolonizing US ethnomusicology. SEM's 2014 membership survey shows that 3/4 are US citizens; of the US citizens, 3/4 are "Euro-American" (using the terminology in the survey). Of the 1/4 international members, 7 of the 9 countries with most members are European/Australasian (the other two are Japan and South Korea), which suggests that about 3/4 of the international members are European/Australasian. This suggests that overall, SEM membership is about 25% people of color. In contrast, the percentage of members conducting research in areas where people of color live are: Africa (35%), Latin America (41%), Asia (73%). (Members may choose several research areas.) If you add up the total percentages for all research areas, this comes to 268.6% (because you can choose more than one area). The numbers for Africa, Latin America, and Asia alone add up to 150.1%, more than half of 268.6% (without including 63.8% for US, of which a huge chunk of research is focused on minority musics). Comparing the proportion of people of color (c. 25%) relative to proportion of research in the various regions of the world (>50%), SEM has a diversity problem. The diversity problem is likely worse among SEM members who are tenure faculty, since the proportion of people of color is higher among students. Ethnomusicology faculty and students should be comprised mostly of minority and global peoples, since ethnomusicology seeks to understand minority and global musics. There should be a minority-majority composition in ethnomusicology faculty, students, and societies.

2)    Following Mignolo, decoloniality counters coloniality, imperialism, modernity, capitalism, ecology, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. This proposal includes changes to decolonize ethnomusicology in relation to demographics, epistemic issues, multiplicity of decolonial contexts, otherings, methodology, academic norms and societies, conferences, publications, and individual agency. Not all aspects of decoloniality are addressed; emphasis is put on issues of coloniality, identity/othering, racism, access, agency, and ethnomusicologists's positionality.

Epistemic Issues

3)    Decoloniality varies according to context, which means there is a need to recognize that structures of sonic/musical empire and systemic racism differ. For US minorities, this ranges from embodied sonic/vocal stereotyping and violence (see William Cheng 2018), to “blacksound” in popular music (see Matthew Morrison 2019), and—within US university music programs—Western art music. Outside the US, there is e.g. the position of Uyghur music within the Chinese conservatory system (Chuen-Fung Wong 2009). Much needs to be written about minority and global musics in this regard; the long-term ethnomusicological agenda (for the coming years and decades) should include the project of examining empire and systemic racism in their full complexity. The complexity of these systems can be seen in e.g. black and brown performers, conductors, and composers of Western music in US, and other global peoples who appropriate and recontextualize Western music for their own ends. US ethnomusicology needs to recognize its existing form of decoloniality, focused on resisting Western music, as being specific to the professional contexts of US ethnomusicologists, most of whom work in music departments focused on Western music. Latin America, where there is continuing US imperialism and political interventions on behalf of US capitalism, is a different context from East Asia, where there is a history of intra-regional coloniality intertwined with Western cultural imperialism.

4)    US ethnomusicology needs to disassociate from the Eurocentric musical map structured as: Western-self, minority/global-other. This is an apparently “diversified” musical map (with token global musics and ethnomusicology courses within largely Western-focused music programs) that is really the hoary Eurocentric conception of the musical world. The negative effects of this map are several. It can:

a.     reproduce structures of inequities if diversity in the music curriculum is not matched with diversity in the faculty.

b.     lead to dissociation from “minority/global other,” which can result in deadly othering and stereotyping of minority (see references above) and global peoples

c.     lead to dissociation from “Western self,” indexed as oppressive, thereby directing attention away from one's own insider status to empire and systemic racism. Focusing on resisting Western music should not distract from addressing coloniality within the discipline of ethnomusicology that one participates in.

d.     disguise the universal presence of some combination of racism, classicism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism, which are not unique to the “Western self.”

5)    Ethnographic methodologies and conceptual frameworks such as insider/outsider (while indisputably valuable) stem partly from the origins of ethnomusicology in the asymmetrical global access that continues to be provided in the present day by colonialist-imperialist enterprises of the past (and present). “Native” researchers, who enter the discipline of ethnomusicology with a relatively high level of cultural fluency in the musics written about (there is no such thing as absolute insider status), rightly have their own approaches (which may incorporate—using examples from music research in China—study of ancient classical Chinese texts on music, theory and analysis of traditional music, history of Chinese music theory, archaeology etc.). Rather than arguing that ethnomusicology is defined by ethnography, consider how this marginalizes researchers on minority/global musics (which constitutes >50% of ethnomusicological research) who pursue hybrid methodologies and do not exclusively practice ethnography.

6)    Considering the positionality of knowledge production from a decolonial perspective, there is a need to prioritize the voices of ethnomusicologists whose cultures are being studied and the voices of ethnomusicologists who are disadvantaged by race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.

7)    The norms of academia stand in the way of equity. US ethnomusicology should:

a.     reject the notion that "ethnomusicology" is solely the pursuit of ethnomusicological theory or some definition of intellectual distinction beyond the usual academic conventions.

b.      embrace the notion that the primary purpose of ethnomusicology is to work towards the goals of diversity and equity through music, as reflected in the composition of faculty, students, and the membership and leadership of SEM. Ethnomusicology is fundamentally a discipline which seeks to understand all musical cultures, which should be explained by the peoples of every musical culture.

c.     The status of ethnomusicology as an academic pursuit is itself a problem. This pursuit is only available to those with access, and there are many differentials in terms of access to education, time, and economic resources. Generally, the people of the musical cultures studied in ethnomusicology tend to have less access to everything. Give minority and global peoples the doctoral funding and jobs necessary to decolonize ethnomusicology.

Institutions and Individuals

8)    Broadly conceived, ethnomusicological institutions include academic societies, conferences, journals, universities, university presses, and the languages used for publications and conferences.

9)    Against the current demographics of US ethnomusicology outlined in point 1 (c. 25% people of color, versus over 50% research in minority/global musics), there should be an initial target of 35% people of color among ethnomusicology faculty, students, and societies (including both membership and leadership), an increase of about 10% from the 2014 level—with a long-term target of >50% people of color. To achieve that, the following are necessary:

a.     Elect minority and global members to boards of ethnomusicology societies, and actively recruit minority and global members.

b.     advocate for university job search committees to adopt racial/ethnic/global diversity as one of the key criteria, alongside research, teaching, and service; and, admit a majority of minority and global peoples to doctoral programs in ethnomusicology. The university is an institution of empire and systemic racism. It has cultivated research in eugenics, area studies directed towards imperialist state interventions, and Eurocentrism, especially in disciplines which are focused on global culture, but fail to provide access to people of color.

10)    Improve access to conferences.

a.     SEM 2020 is going to be held online, potentially changing the future conference format, by raising the prospect of having integrated online and in-person presentations. This will be a positive move for especially minority/global members who may not have the resources to attend conferences in person. There is an opportunity to think about expanding minority/global access to SEM. This will improve access for people with disabilities.

b.     The exclusive use of English in US ethnomusicological conferences and publications is a barrier to access. Accept contributions in other languages.

11)    Asymmetries of access to doctoral education, faculty jobs, and English language skills have resulted in the dominance of some voices over others in ethnomusicological publications. Authorship can be diversified in the following ways:

a.     establish new norms and new criteria in peer review, elevating younger and diverse scholars.

b.     work with publishers to establish new norms which can be enforced through peer review, elevating younger and diverse scholars. Part of the problem lies with the commercial nature of publishers, which may prefer well-known authors for monographs and edited volumes.

c.     co-authorship across various structures of power asymmetry. Ethnomusicology books and journals may require co-authorship. Anyone with some measure of privilege should pursue co-authorship. This may include (using examples I am more familiar with):

                                               i.     all authors from US, Europe, and Australasia,

                                             ii.     authors from high-income countries like Singapore,

                                           iii.     authors who are the majority ethnicity in countries like South Korea or Japan,

                                            iv.     authors who are professors in any country, regardless of majority/minority status, e.g. Tibetan professors in China, who work on Tibetan music.

d.      consider “non-academic” publications such as blog posts or program notes, co-authored with the peoples written about, in job searches and promotions.

e.     consider other forms of collaboration with the peoples written about—performance, educational, and curatorial work, and general public ethnomusicology—as “publications.”

12) Individuals are not powerless. As teachers, researchers, search committee members, and peer reviewers—as editors, department heads, school of music presidents—there are norms which ethnomusicologists, as individuals and in our leadership capacities, can implement officially and unofficially to amplify both the number and voice of people of color. Most ethnomusicologists are both insiders trying to survive as individuals within existing systems of empire and systemic racism and outsiders trying to dismantle these systems. As such, ethnomusicologists should recognize and articulate our participation in institutions of privilege while committing to changes within our individual or leadership capacity. 

Difference/Universality, Part 1: Queer Music Theorist, Disoriented

(Working draft. This post is about the concept of “disorientation” in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology.)

When I was 18, I backpacked around Scotland and ended up on New Year’s Eve at a pub in the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of the country. I was having a good time until a homophobic older guy said something incredibly offensive to me. That was my first memory of being overtly discriminated against. In such a situation, I might have felt intimidated, but the 18-year old me, filled with liquid courage from a beer (you can drink at 18 in the UK), felt pretty much fearless and told him to basically shut the front door. I was fine because some random homophobe meant nothing to me.

What was difficult, though, was constantly being ignored by my "own" people. Having lived in the closet in Singapore for my entire life up to that point, I finally came out in London, and sought out the gay community. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the vast majority of white gays regarded people of color as invisible, and that hit me like a sucker punch. I felt like I had nowhere to go, and didn’t know what to do—it was disorientating. Being a person of color defined my experience with the gay community.

Later on, when I was completing my doctoral degree in the US, I returned frequently to San Francisco, where there were so many Asians that I had no difficulty orientating myself within the gay community. Of course, there was still exclusion, but I felt like I could breathe. One time I was waiting for a bus and ended up talking to a bartender about some novel he had read about Buddha’s life. “Was it Hesse’s Siddhartha?,” I asked (it was). Over a Swiss writer’s problematically orientalist novel, a gay-Chinese-musicologist bonded obliquely with a straight-white-bartender. This involved convoluted social intersectionalities and relationalities, but it was not disorienting in the least because our interaction was warm and positive.

I’m not suggesting that my specific experiences in these various places are necessarily indicative of their general social atmosphere. I recall them in an effort to think through experiences of disorientation that Sara Ahmed theorizes as “queer phenomenology.” Starting with the trope of the Orient, Ahmed weaves the imperial gaze of Europe—a way of orienting oneself towards the Other—together with minority racial and queer experiences of disorientation. The privilege of being able to orient oneself, to have access to well laid out paths, is enjoyed by whites, but also, in certain contexts, by people of color who usually face the disorientation of not knowing where to turn, having been shut out.

When doors have been opened for me, it was because others have been inclined towards the alternative and the other (even if viewed through an ethically suspect, orientalist lens). This predisposition towards alterity can be described as a kind of positively valenced, curiosity-based “disorientation” from one’s own culture. When everyone is so inclined, we have a friendly environment in which diversity is a universal value. This is one way of explaining the tenet of anti-normativity which was key in the queer theory of the 90s, and which I have observed in recent years as I led the project for queer music theory. Queer music theory is not just the province of queer music theorists—it encompasses work by all music theorists who are dedicated to the advancement of anti-normative music-theoretical methods, while crucially acknowledging the lives of LGBTQ people who have no choice but to be different. In queer music theory, anti-normativity serves as the general, universal ethical principle and as a means of coalition building across different identities. This is different from my experiences in Orkney and London, when heteronormativity was the universal. While there is a structural similarity between a universal anti-normativity in “queer” music-theoretical practice, and other oppressive forms of universality, the crux of the matter is that the former is anchored in the intention to advance queer recognition and is methodologically structured to achieve that goal.

We live in an age when difference has been commodified in monetized blog posts that purport to discover earth shattering difference (choice of words, politicians, ethical orientations). Add to this the catastrophic history of Eurocentric universality, and it may seem to be impossible for us to contemplate a complex ethical framework that differentiates between the positive and negative effects of both difference and universality. Certainly, we seem inclined to prefer to regard academics as purely progressive or oppressive unities instead of imperfect multiplicities. I have seen feminists, including feminists of color, who were rejected based on even just hearsay about (as opposed to evidence of) their alleged transphobia or anti-Semitism. Obviously, no form of discrimination is acceptable, but the lowering of the threshold of judgement to mere hearsay suggests that academia is organized more around the fantasy of a perfectly integrated scholar who is perfectly woke on all fronts, as opposed to the reality of multiple, well-intentioned but conflicting conceptual paradigms that impinge on anyone of us today. Assuming that the scholar has a body of work which indicates their commitment to social equity, intellectual disagreement should (at least at first) be regarded as grounds of intellectual foment that speak to the irreducible complexity of social life, rather than as the means of oppressing one another: this is something that all sides of any debate should bear in mind.

Politically, the concept and practice of coalition building on the left have all but vanished, as all forms of universality (such as within coalitions) are suspected of being racist means of distracting from the experiences of the marginalized. But a coalitional politics without a horizon of universality alongside its internal differences is doomed to failure in a democratic system built on majority rule. My project in The Means and End of Difference is a musicological attempt to cultivate habits of thought that can nourish remedies for this situation.

Difference/Universality, Part 2: Primer for Identity Politics

(Working draft)

This is a “primer for a primer” on identity politics:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/#ContPhilEngaIdenPoli

In the following, I’ll present the main ideas found in the complex secondary literature review on the entire body of work on identity politics (race, class, gender, sexuality, philosophy, poststructuralism) covered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy primer. This post is not a replacement for reading the original primer!

The Stanford primer was revised in 2016 and unfortunately does not give an adequate account of writings since then on especially disability and transgender theory.

Some of the ideas below will already be familiar to the reader, but I have decided to be comprehensive in my approach, as relatively recent developments are related to earlier thinking.

Reading strategy. I would say that the key strategy in reading the primer is to recognize the complexity of the subject of identity politics, expressed in persistent contradictions about it that run throughout the primer. Primarily, there is a recognition of the existence of identity, coupled with the critique that identity is constructed by hegemonic society. Thus any emphasis on identity is simultaneously (i) a means of articulating minority viewpoints and a fulcrum for resisting the majority, and (ii) the maintenance of the hegemonic system in which power asymmetry led to the inequality that necessitates the articulation of different identities. This points to (iii) the need for supplements or alternatives to identity, e.g. the creation of an anti-hegemonic coalition of identities, or a turn to embodiment. All three threads need to be kept in play if identity is to be understood in its full complexity. This is the conceptual background to my work in The Means and End of Difference.

Arguments for identity/difference

(i) What is identity?

·      The basic premise, from a contemporary academic viewpoint (as opposed to a historical or popular viewpoint), is that identity exists within and is “constructed” by society. Social identity is not a reflection of biology and anatomy. “Racial” identity is a means of assigning people of different ancestry into socially-determined groups, as opposed to scientific, biological groups (Omi and Winant 1986, Alcoff 1997, 2006, Piper 1996, Ignatiev 1995).

(ii) The importance of identity:

·      Identity expresses an authentic sense of self (Asante 2000).

·      Identity demands respect for different life experiences (Kruks 2001).

·      Identity is the foundation for empirical political action because it accurately describes the unequal conditions of different groups (Cudd 2006, Fanon 1968, McIntosh 1993, Martin 1994, Young 1990).

(iii) Strategies for the use of identity:

·      Identity may be adopted strategically for political purposes (Spivak 1990).

·      Identity can be articulated in relation to one another, in order to avoid creating the “essentialist” impression that these identities are naturally existing, as opposed to socially constructed (Young 2000, Nelson 2001).

·      Hybrid identities should be recognized (Anzaldúa 1999).

Criticism of identity/difference

(i) Problems with identity:

·      Identity is socially constructed (Haslanger 1995, 2005, Hacking 1999, Foucault 1980, Garber 1995) within an unjust system. Hence relying on majority-minority identities discursively reinforces and reproduces the power asymmetry in an unjust system (Fraser 1997, Coulthard 2014, Butler 1999, Connolly 2002), and reflects a simplified account of power (McNay 2008).

·      The essentialist identity of (maternal, caring) “woman” is created by patriarchy (entire section on “Gender and Feminism). See Ruddick 1989 and Gilligan 1993 for a controversial attempt to recoup “essentialist” feminine identity.

·      Identity is exclusionary when transgender identity is excluded in gay and lesbian theorizing (Stone 1991, Lugones 1994).

·      LGBTQ identity alone as a means of resistance is inadequate: identity-based organizing is not immune to the multiplicity of homophobic strategies because identity allows for both resistance and oppression (Sedgwick 1990).

·      Internal variation (by race, class, gender, sexuality, or within their sub-categories) within a specific group identity is ignored (Heyes 2000).

·      A narrow focus on only minority racial, gender, or sexual identity distracts from systemic white perspectives and oppression (Pateman 1988, Young 1990, Di Stefano 1991, Mills 1997, Pateman and Mills 2007, hooks 1981, Mohanty 1991) as well as liberal-capitalist exploitation (Young 1990, P. Williams 1991, Brown 1995, M. Williams 1998, Farred 2000, McNay 2008).

·      A focus on racial, gender, and sexual identity (as opposed to class identity) is due to the reluctance of middle-class whites in academia to examine their privileged economic position. In addition, there may be a focus on racial, gender, and sexual identity (as opposed to class identity) because whites in academia do not recognize their class oppression, displacing this onto others instead (Brown 1995).

(ii) Alternatives to identity:

·      Articulating a future (Zerilli 2005, Weir 2008, Bhambra and Margee 2010, Coole and Frost 2010, Connolly 2011) is important, as opposed to identities premised on the pain of historical oppression (Brown 1995).

·      Meaning, action, feeling, embodiment, affect, time, and space (Protevi 2009, 2011, Butler 2011, Heyes 2007) provide a fuller account of social inequities and existence than identity, which is restrictive (Appiah 1994) and reductive (Spelman 1988).

Arguments against universality 

·      Assimilation to the majority perpetuates hegemony (Young 1990, Card 2007).

·      Color-blindness (not recognizing difference) disguises and perpetuates racism (Appiah and Gutmann 1996).

·      Heterosexuality as a norm is oppressive: varied sexual orientations are immutable and cannot be “cured.”

·      In decolonial and lesbian feminist thought, separatism is the solution (Laforest in Beiner and Norman 2001, Alfred 1999, Asante 2000, Rich 1980, Frye 1983, Wittig 1992).

Arguments for universality (within a coalition)

·      Alliance and coalition formation (Heyes 2000, Young 1997, Cornell 2000) is necessary, as opposed to an exclusive focus on the difference between identities.

Difference/Universality, Part 3: The Means and End of Difference

(Working draft)

Having lived in different parts of the world, I have closely observed variations in social inequities and power structures that inform my project in the rethinking of difference through multiple angles. Below I’ll give an account of some first-hand experiences which have influenced my work. My own primer for the Stanford (Encyclopedia of Philosophy) primer on identity politics provides the conceptual apparatus which the following speaks to.

One of my most striking memories of living in China for the past 5 years was when I checked in to a hotel in Shanghai, and the concierge—upon seeing my Singaporean passport—said, “Oh, so you’re a laowai.” Laowai is a derogatory term which denotes foreigners, but literally translates as “old outsider.” It is usually used to refer to white foreigners, so the concierge’s application of the term to me was rather shocking. What that speech act accomplished, in no uncertain terms, was that I—a Chinese Singaporean in China—am as much of an outsider as white foreigners. This experience of being marginalized as a Chinese in China brought back other memories, e.g. people yelling out “Chinese,” or, even better, “Japanese,” during the years which I spent in London. The dynamics of the contexts were different: being a minority in the UK is not the same as being “not Chinese enough” in China. Whereas I felt like I had to escape from the people mis/identifying my difference in the UK, I never felt afraid in China, though I had to prove my Chineseness by reciting the syllabus for my Chinese music history course to the then chair of music education at my university. (She asked, in an innocuous conversational tone, during the first few months I spent in China, “So what are you teaching for the history of music in China?”)

Within my personal experiences of marginalization, there were definitive differences. There is, in addition, the difference in the way that racism operated in my encounters in London, versus in the tumultuous race politics of the US. Over the past decade, social media has contributed to the development of ever more insidious forms of racism, as racist discursive innovation is nurtured by the textual nature of voluminous Facebook posts and tweets. “All Lives Matter,” while maintaining the “plausible” deniability of being about a universal concern for humanity, is in fact intended as a racist invisibilization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Oppression exerts itself through both universalization and minoritization (“Japanese!”).

Because systemic racism is universal and can be found everywhere in racist society, so anti-racism must be vigilant against all acts and discourses—anti-racism must be universal as well. Yet the universalization of our anti-racist responses can create problems when we examine cases that depart from catastrophic oppression, because anti-hegemony constitutes part of the totality of social life, and points to strategies which we may use to fight back.

Over the past few years, I have been involved in the work of queer advocacy within the Society for Music Theory. In 2018-9, I was appointed to a Task Force for Diversity which recommended the formation of a standing committee for LGBTQ issues. The task force was comprised of representatives from various constituencies, including the SMT Executive Board, as well as groups dedicated to issues of race, gender, and accessibility. Together we formed an alliance that was dedicated to the advancement of queer advocacy, even though most members of the task force did not identify as queer—that is to say, members of the task force, coming from multiple anti-normative perspectives (whether race, gender, or accessibility), converged on the specific anti-normativity of issues surrounding LGBTQ music theory theorists and queer music theory. In this case, a paradoxical universality of anti-normativity within our alliance was critical to the advancement of minority rights, showing that even universals are not universally oppressive. Anti-normativity was a key tenet for queer theorists in the 90s (David Halperin, Lee Edelman), and continued to be the guidepost for more recent theorizations of queer temporality (Elizaeth Freeman) and queer phenomenology (Sara Ahmed).

Aside from my work and life in the US, UK, and China, my experience in Singapore has brought another perspective to the problem of inequity, related in this instance to the issue of difference and stereotype. Those of us from various parts of Asia are regularly consigned as “other” in the West and are expected to “perform” our identity. One of the Singaporean composers I work with, Joyce Koh, recounted to me the alienating experience of being expected by the French audience to write “intercultural” music incorporating Chinese culture into her modernist musical language, which she developed over the course of her doctoral degree at York University (UK), and a decade spent working in Paris, initially at IRCAM and under the mentorship of Tristan Murail. In this case, the cosmopolitan universality of modernism was a means of escape from enforced ethnic stereotype, complicating the colonial history of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. There are times when joining a progressive or cosmopolitan universality can be freeing.

I go into detail about all these experiences because they inform my rethinking of difference and universality, wherein the difference of identity can in some contexts be oppressive, and universality (of anti-normativity and cosmopolitanism) can in some contexts be progressive. Which is to say, that context is everything when we perform ethical analysis. This is why we need to recognize how difference and universality are each means to multiple, different ends. I realize that this level of detail is increasingly difficult to maintain in a US context which has been becoming more and more racist over the past 4 years. But as scholars, our responsibility is to articulate ever more finessed truths, because the complexity of systemic racism calls for a multiplicity of anti-racist approaches. This ties back to a fundamental point: As musicologists, we know that the articulation of historical and cultural difference, as well as difference within archival and ethnographic data, is one of the hallmarks of good scholarship. It’s time to bring this differentiation to the analysis of ethical frameworks and precepts.

For more on the new universality, see my guest lecture at University of Oregon, Provincializing Western Modernism, Ping-Ponging the New Universality, and my panel at AMS 2019, Reassembling the Bird's Eye View in Musicology.

Global East Asian Music Research: Proposals for New Directions in Musicology (AMS 2018 panel abstract)

Sheryl Chow
Brent Ferguson
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee (respondent)
Jungmin Mina Lee
Yawen Ludden
Noriko Manabe
Brooke McCorkle
Dani Osterman
Hye Jung Park

In recent years, research on music and East Asia has achieved critical mass within AMS. Extending beyond the exotic representation of East Asia within European and American music, this body of work draws on an eclectic array of primary resources and methodologies. This panel unites a new generation of researchers who deal with corpuses of texts, images, musics, and sounds flowing in and out of East Asia. The presenters have deep knowledge of East Asian languages and cultures and examine multiple Western and non-Western musical genres. We aim to provide a comprehensive survey of methodologies, areas of study, and interdisciplinary formations that currently inform global East Asian music research.

While ethnomusicology has long been the disciplinary home of East Asian music research, this panel consolidates an emerging framework that complements the ethnographic study of folk music and departs from it. In recent decades, AMS has witnessed an emerging global consciousness, as evidenced both in peer-reviewed panels (2017 panel on “Western Music and China: A Chapter in Global Music History”), and non-peer reviewed panels specially organized by the AMS leadership (e.g. 2011 panel on “Teaching Western Music in China Today”). Building on that momentum, we present papers that have a close affinity with research directions broadly recognized as _musicological_ in orientation. Our papers are anchored in history, music analysis, and visual studies, and we address avant-garde, Western, and hybrid music. We are comprised of senior scholars in the field such as Thomas Irvine (co-chair) and Noriko Manabe, as well as emerging scholars such as Jungmin Mina Lee (co-chair) and Gavin Lee (respondent).

Our papers are organized around the following research clusters. 1) The impact and contestation of Western music as discerned in the emergence of new hybrid genres in Korea (Hye-Jung Park), the Korean avant-garde (Jungmin Mina Lee), and the development of musical institutions of Western art music in Japan (Brooke McCorkle). 2) “Global intellectual history” (Thomas Irvine, drawing on Moyn and Sartory’s concept), historiography of music in China (Gavin Lee), and history of music theory in China (Sheryl Chow). 3) Theory and analysis of Chinese traditional music (Yawen Ludden). 4) Visual culture of Japan (Matthew Richardson), and multimedia studies of film, anime, and video games (Brent Ferguson, Dani Osterman). 5) Transnational popular music (Noriko Manabe).

A distinctive feature of this panel is that presenters, who are often individually experts in one East Asian country, will collaborate on the crafting of position papers, with the aim of articulating connections between multiple East Asian countries within each presentation. In this way, we model collaborative research within a transnational framework. Eleven presenters will speak for ten minutes each in this three-hour evening panel, leaving over an hour for general floor discussion. The concluding goal of this panel is the formation of a Global East Asian Music Research study group within AMS.

Western Music and China: A Chapter in Global Music History (AMS 2017 panel abstract)

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.

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.