Project Details
Description
This long-term project examines how early-twentieth-century Chinese constructed the field of “music” when realizing modernity during colonial encounter with the West. As the first part of the project, this proposal focuses on Shanghai (1918-1937). It explores the soundscape of the semi-colonial city where Chinese resided with mixed Chinese and Western cultures, and examines how music was envisioned there as the best cultural means to cultivate virtues needed for strengthening the nation. Musical reformers are here studied as music advocates who promoted such new visions, engaging complex negotiations between the modern West and China’s past, which the concept of “Western impact” cannot adequately address. The modern field of music, or “yinyue,” emerged through their negotiations and actions. But their visions were divided, and can be heuristically identified as “pro-Western” and “pro-native.” This project argues that despite their competition, both sides shared common goals and musical resources. Their increasingly tense relation not only shaped their respective agendas, but also the inherent conflicted nature of the modern Chinese field of music. This project seeks to understand how Chinese conducted cultural negotiations in their discourse, how transnational and contingent factors converged to make possible their founding of new musical institutions, and how Chinese realized their reform values and expressed personal feelings in their new music making. Specifically, this project examines how music advocates combined scientific and aesthetic powers with moral values to define the virtues of music, and how their new music-making practices realized those modern values. Presenting an analytical framework based on “translation,” which is theorized as transaction processes during which the “host” (Chinese musical agents) receives the “guest” (Western musical agents), this project compares and contrasts how both “pro-Western” and “pro-native” reformers mediated the adoption of the musical West with continual subscriptions to pre-modern, native culture. Their degrees of emphasis on the spectrum between the “Western” and “Chinese” systems differed, but both sides moved within the same cross-cultural spectrum, co-building music and virtues in Chinese modernity. The long-term project traces Republican modernity to the late-Qing reform culture in both imperial and colonial contexts. This project focuses on new musical formations emerging in Shanghai, where colonial partitions brought circulation of cosmopolitan resources and fueled nation-building aspirations. Reconstructing the city’s soundscape through musical-cultural mapping and network analysis, analyzing discourses in print, using rare sound recordings and films, this project locates modern Chinese musical thinking, practices, and feeling in a complex web of local and transnational relations emerging from colonialism. Methodology of the project crosses disciplines. Drawing from recent studies in musicology (on the German field of music, Gramit 2002), cultural anthropology (on the construction of “classical music” in colonial India, Weidman 2006), urban musicology (Baker 2008), and ethnomusicology (Castro 2011, Solis 2012), and built from previous studies on modernity of Republican Shanghai (Lee 1999, Yeh 2000), this project integrates discourse and historical analyses with musicological and ethnographic approaches. Outcomes will enhance understanding of the Chinese musical condition of agency, changes, national identity, and modernity, and will generate new intellectual dialogues on music and culture.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 2018/08/01 → 2021/07/31 |
Keywords
- Musical modernity
- Chinese modernity
- musical translation
- Republican Shanghai
- music and city
- music and virtue
- music and competing relation
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