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.

Queer Music Theory: Interrogating Notes of Sexuality (AMS/SMT 2014 panel abstract)

Naomi Andre
William Cheng
Amy Cimini
James Currie

Roger Grant
Nadine Hubbs, co-chair
Kevin Korsyn
Gavin Lee, co-chair
Judith Peraino

“Queer music theory” is a fantastically nebulous concept. On the one hand, the academic subfield of music theory has become increasingly interested in queer studies during a time in which queer theorists have had occasion to ask “what’s queer about queer studies now?” (the titular question of a recent Social Text special issue). On the other, the conjunction of queer theory with music theory demands a reinvestigation of what is meant by music theory in the first place. Bringing these two forms of inquiry together, this session aims to generate discussion on music, queerness, and theory, opening up new paths of inquiry at their points of intersection. We hope to provide methods for thinking through the concept, practice, and politics of “queer music theory,” asking how queer theory and music theory might be brought into new productive conversations.

The conundrum of queer music theory is approached first by asking: what is “music theory”? The crux of the issue here relates once again to the hoary problematic of the purely musical. After Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, we are familiar with the marginalization/universalization dialectic that forces otherness into a minute space of irrelevance—for music theory, this arguably means stuffing “queerness” into “musical practice”—and maintaining that closet by unleashing repressing forces when queerness seeps into “music theory.” However expressed, the problematic of queer music theory is not merely one of definition, but also of epistemological policing. The challenge of this panel lies in the questioning of epistemic boundaries: How is musical unity heteronormative? Is formalism queer? What is queer musical temporality and timbre?

A further consideration, informed by Sedgwick, is how queer music theory should negotiate queer studies’ charge of anti-normativity. A queer music theory with general applicability may be attractive for the challenge it poses to varied normativities beyond the sexual. However, this ubiquity also arguably robs queer music theory of its relevance to LGBTQ-identified knowledges, practices, and lives. We address the problematic of the particularity of queer lives versus the broader applicability of queer music theory.

This 3h joint session of alternative format comprises 6 position papers and 2 responses (William Cheng; Kevin Korsyn), each followed by floor discussion.

Nadine historizes the problematic of the broad applicability which stems from queer theory’s anti-normative charge, re-examining the role of dominant American middle-class culture in the success of the LGBTQ rights movement through an analysis of David Allan Coe’s 1978 underground track “Fuck Aneta Briant,” a song of the Outlaw country genre. Beyond the support of White middle-class Americans who love to identify with outsiders and rebels, to the extent that it is no longer clear who is “queer,” working- class people has a long history as sex and gender queers and allies. This study leads to an examination of the definitions of queerness and queer music theory.

Gavin Lee examines musical ambiguity as queer phenomenology. Queer persons are rebuffed by the normative world of people and objects and directed towards alternative forms of personal attachments, experiencing a “wonky” phenomenology of ambiguity through that redirection. The contradiction of musical embodiment in a work about Buddhist disembodiment (the queer composer John Sharpley’s Emptiness) is read as one modality of ambiguity, which is also discerned elsewhere in meter, harmony, and form. With an understanding of ambiguity as queer phenomenology, the resistance to musical ambiguity is read as heteronormative.

James Currie applies a theory of cruising as formalism—a social formation that functions without the participants having to get to know the various realities that constitute the content of the humans they are coming into relationship with—to a re- evaluation of the contemporary pejorative connotation of musical formalism. An examination of the formalism inherent in the social life of cruising affords a re-evaluation of the scripting of musical formalism as resistant to sociality, offering new insights to how musical form was always closer to human social life than anyone had thought.

Roger Mathew Grant examines musical formalism along the lines once coyly suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell—as a practice of “decadent aesthetes” who spend their time reveling in the inexorable complexities of art’s intangible qualities. Drawing on Mitchell and other literary theorists invested in formal analysis, a recontextualization of contemporary American music theory alongside queer practices of decadence and antiquarianism affords a re-evaluation of music theorists as cultural guardians rather than as “pedants” who spend hours measuring phrase lengths and codifying grammars.

Judith Peraino considers music theory’s deferral of live musical time in relation to the urge towards the audio/visual capture of popular music concerts among the “smart phone” generation, drawing in particular on the phenomenological redirection found in queer temporality andthe mediation of time by the technological “actor- network.” Musical time, embodiment, sociality, and text are profoundly altered by the lens of “tiny screens,” through which music is deferred to a time that is both “past” and “future” but never “present.”

Naomi Andre examines the conjunction of vocal timbre with gender, skin color, and historical narrative. The changing expression of masculinity from castrati to women’s operatic voices in the early nineteenth century is elucidated as a site of queer analysis. Further, the intersection of race with gender and sexuality, as expressed in vocal timbre, affords an examination of how new non-minstrel portrayals in operas composed since the 1980s provoke a re-examination of the “folk” as evinced in Gershwin’s conception of Porgy and Bess as an “American Folk Opera.”

Queering Musical Form (SMT 2015 panel abstract)

Marion Gook
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Fred Maus

2014’s “Queer Music Theory” special session discussed what is or can be specifically queer about music theory. With its traditional concern for musical form (broadly construed as the subject of music theory), music theory may provoke debate about how form mediates cultural “content”; a capacious notion of “content” can comprise sexuality, other types of identity, the dissolution of cultural categories themselves, and the very emergence of new conceptions of form. This broad cultural vista lends itself to a far-reaching investigation of the “meta” level at which musical form operates—on the level of mediation and epistemology; it is at this meta level that we investigate the queering of musical form.

At the inception of what we might recognize as queer music theory, musical form was brought together with sexuality content, most famously in the work of Susan McClary (1991) and Philip Brett (1997). This content was broadly narratological in that it commented on the nature of gender and sexuality as manifest in musical form. In so far as this work can be seen as addressing the content “in” form, as if form were a chalice for content, it unwittingly supports the conceptual separation of musical form from sexuality. One way to approach the hoary issue of form versus content is to address the notion of form as content, and to do so not merely on the level of producing empirical cultural content through hermeneutics, but by analyzing how form mediates sexuality-cultural content. What is it about the nature of musical form that avails it of content? How does the analysis of form mediate content?

Aside from the mediation of sexuality content, the queering of musical form takes place also on the level of rethinking the conceptual frame of what cultural content comprises—the very content which is mediated by form. This issue is of critical importance in that the outcome of form’s mediation depends crucially on what we think is being mediated. A key factor in this reconceptualization of cultural content has to do with cultural perspectives. We are familiar with the import of cultural “difference,” but difference is not as obvious as it may seem—perhaps “difference” itself can be queered? The cultural content called “difference” can be further parsed through: the cultural totality that cultural differences form, the emergence or production of difference, and the dissolution of difference. Musical form does not contain this difference, so much as form is predicated on an epistemology of cultural difference.

Ethnomusicology and Affect Theory: Disciplinary Implications (SEM 2015 panel abstract)

Katie Graber
Luis Manuel-Garcia
Ali Collen Neff
Gavin Lee, chair
Ian MacMillen
Matthew Sumera

The emergence of affect theory in the social sciences and humanities signals a shift in scholarship, one principally defined by a downgrading of the importance of language and signification, and the rise of material “force” and bodily consequences. This roundtable brings affect theory (as practiced by Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Laurent Berlant, and others) to bear on longstanding ethnomusicological assumptions, in particular, conceptions of identity, embodiment, and agency. Among the various critical approaches to affect theory which we will present, two threads of thought stand out. First, the process-ontology of force implies change and the potential for a radical re-orientation of power dynamics, which problematizes the concepts of identity (being “identical” to one’s unchanging self) and resistance (what if inequality were no more?)—both key concerns in ethnomusicological fieldwork and writing. Affect theory articulates the capacity for connection and change through networks of media, music, sound, performance, listening, feeling, perception, and bodies. Second, Massumi’s controversial proposition that affect involves unmediated force in relation to the body is read against theories of cultural embodiment. Roundtable participants engage a range of investigations, including: audiovisual representations of war; voice, affect, and historical texts; identity and hybridity as mediated through musical sensation; the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, affective citizenship, and musical scenes; and, participant-observational approaches to racialized sensations of musical danger and aggression. Through our work, we address the broader methodological question: What are the promises, challenges and limitations of affect theory in relation to ethnomusicology, and vice versa?

Reassembling the Bird’s Eye View in Musicology (AMS 2019 panel abstract)

Daniel Chua
James Currie
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Martin Scherzinger
Gary Tomlinson

In the 90s, many scholars criticized the undertone of universality in musicology, understood to be manifest in a focus on Western music, with clandestine Eurocentric values embodied in ostensibly neutral, empirically-oriented accounts of canonic works. Universality was also diagnosed in a range of epistemologies—from 19^th-century musical aesthetics to pre-World War II comparative musicology which abstracted the world’s musical cultures into pitch systems.

This panel responds to the current musicological landscape, structured by many views which are not aligned under a hoary Eurocentric ideology. Poststructuralist musicological approaches to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability have disrupted the univocal Eurocentric voice, making space for a “global music history” that looks beyond the West. But a new set of epistemological problems have arisen around the ethical precept of difference (Bloechl et. al. eds. 2015) that have not been satisfactorily addressed. Most disturbing is the universalist demand for difference as embodied in disconnected parcels of “contextual politics” (Currie 2009)—in musicology, many forms of the bird’s eye view are conventionally understood to be misleading or oppressive. This has led in part to a scenario where there is little sense of an overarching frame of reference for approaching methodological contradictions which have emerged: e.g. identity as deeply held belief and as deconstructed, narratives of agency versus those of oppression. Furthermore, contextual politics have contributed to a misunderstanding of legitimate scholarship which operates at a (by now) unfamiliar epistemological register of large-scale forces, long time frames, and a global view, often performing systemic analyses that are incompatible with a cultural outlook premised on a human viewpoint. The concept of a heterogeneous “totality” advanced in this panel responds to an emerging consciousness that something other than “difference” may be needed to fully grasp a range of catastrophic forces that spell impending humanitarian disasters in the twenty-first century: global capitalism, neocolonialism, climate change, and technological disruption. Much is at stake in assembling, under a new dispensation, a musicological bird’s eye view.

Experts in this panel speak to the register of “totality” from various perspectives including: a revisionist Marxist view of Romantic transcendentalism as a defense against encroaching industrialism (James Currie); the colonial and neocolonial resonance of the epistemology of cultural relativism embraced in music research (Martin Scherzinger); issues in music historiography on a global scale (Thomas Irvine); the explanatory power of biocultural evolution for human nature as well as human difference (Gary Tomlinson); the ethical force of the notion of an “alien” musical otherness which compels us to articulate what a post-humanist musicology might entail (Daniel Chua); a musical work as itself a model of the heterogeneous totality termed “assemblage” by Deleuze and Guattari (Judith Lochhead); and, a methodology of contradictions within the totality, premised on Slavoj Žižek’s conception of the “parallax view” (Gavin Lee, chair). Through rigorous interrogation of received musicological wisdom, we discern misconceptions about and articulate the value of a reconstructed totality. This session of two hours comprises 10-minute position papers and ample time for floor discussion.

Provincializing Music Theory: Epistemic Frameworks for the New Comparativism (SMT 2020 panel abstract)

Amy Bauer
Gavin Lee, chair
John Roeder
Martin Scherzinger

Music theory today is structured by the legacy of European and North American epistemologies, deeply interwoven with a history of colonialism. This panel proposes new comparative frameworks that attempt to depart from these epistemologies.

A new kind of global comparativism is clearly emerging across the music disciplines today, including global music history (Strohm 2019) and comparative ethnomusicology (Wood 2018a, 2018b). In music theory, comparativism can be said to have taken place in the emergence of world music analysis, including the deployment of Western music-theoretical approaches to world music (Tenzer and Roeder 2011), a continued interest in interculturalism (Everett), and explicitly comparative frameworks used to discover universals or commonalities across musics and cultural sites (Margulis). While the new diversity is encouraging in some respects, the panel attempts to supplement these developments with new ethical and epistemological frameworks.

Following the postcolonial theory of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), “provincializing” music theory as it is practiced (originally in Europe, but now globally) means destabilizing Eurocentric musical epistemology. This does not translate to a reflex turn to difference, however, as the latter term has been problematized as a function of commodification and colonial governance (Currie 2009, Scherzinger 2019). An anti-hegemonic and/or non-hierarchical comparativism would have to navigate similarity—and indeed universality—as well as difference, against the unstable ground of shifting but particularized epistemic contexts. This 180-min panel comprises four papers which adopt different angles in parsing comparativism in music theory. The four paper segments are followed by a response and floor discussion (the six segments are all 30-min in length).

The first paper (Martin Scherzinger) inverts the universalization of the Newtonian, unilinear conception of musical temporality (formalized in the 18^th century) that is persistently privileged, even as the relative temporality of other musics is articulated in music theory. In this epistemic context, this paper argues that the only option is to universalize the temporality of the cultural (African) other.

The second paper (Gavin Lee) regards sonic objects (such as the pentatonic scale) as a multiplicity that is found across history and around the world. A “global sonic genealogy” is premised on an ontology of circulation that counters the conception of cultural siloes and discrete cultural identities that emerged in the 16^th century (Sykes 2019).

The third paper (John Roeder) conducts a historically-grounded, cross-cultural comparative analysis of works of Chinese and German modernism. The personal interaction between two composers provides the justification for a spectrographic analysis of the flow of musical “energy” (qì in Taoist philosophy) in both Jia Daqun’s Whispers of a Gentle Wind and Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro sostenuto.

The fourth paper (Amy Bauer) recognizes the global dissemination of post-tonal compositional techniques, as seen in the work of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. Global modernists circulate within a cosmopolitan musical space that privileges musics and musical languages of Western origin, and their complex output is often mischaracterized by an insistence on cultural difference.

Through “reverse” universality, circulation, and contextualization, these papers rethink “difference” and propose a series of epistemic correctives—unique to music theory—against unqualified applications and blanket condemnations of comparativism.