Locating East Asia In Western Art Music

How does a piece of music embody the sound of a different culture?

Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories, and classical music performance competitions. In the first book on the subject, Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at the age of three. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households, established Yamaha as the world's largest producer of pianos and gave the Suzuki method of music training an international clientele. Soon, talented musicians from Japan, China and South Korea were flocking to the United States to study and establish careers, and Asian American families were enrolling toddlers in music classes. Against this historical backdrop, Yoshihara interviews Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan, Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be. Their personal histories and Yoshihara's observations present a snapshot of today's dynamic and revived classical music scene.

This volume asks what Koreans consider makes music Korean, and how meaning is ascribed to musical creation. Keith Howard explores specific aspects of creativity that are designed to appeal to a new audience that is increasingly westernized yet proud of its indigenous heritage--updates of tradition, compositions, and collaborative fusions. He charts the development of the Korean music scene over the last 25 years and interprets the debates, claims and statistics by incorporating the voices of musicians, composers, scholars and critics.

This book explores art song as an emblem of musical modernity in early twentieth-century East Asia and Australia. It appraises the lyrical power of art song – a solo song set to a poem in the local language in Western art music style accompanied by piano – as a vehicle for creating a localized musical identity, while embracing cosmopolitan visions. The study of art song reveals both the tension and the intimacy between cosmopolitanism and local politics and culture. In 20 essays, the book includes overviews of art song development written by scholars from each of the five locales of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Australia, reflecting perspectives of both established narratives and uncharted historiography. The Art Song in East Asia and Australia, 1900 to 1950 proposes listening to the songs of our neighbours across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Recognizing the colonial constraints experienced by art song composers, it hears trans-colonial expressions addressing musical modernity, both in earlier times and now. Readers of this volume will include musicologists, ethnomusicologists, singers, musicians, and researchers concerned with modernity in the fields of poetry and history, working within local, regional, and transnational contexts.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections introduces Asian music as a way to ask questions about what happens when cultures converge and how readers may evaluate cultural junctures through expressive forms. The volume’s thirteen original chapters cover musical practices in historical and modern contexts from Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, including art music traditions, folk music and composition, religious and ritual music, as well as popular music. These chapters showcase the diversity of Asian music, requiring readers to constantly reconsider their understanding of this vibrant and complex area. The book is divided into three sections: Locating meanings Boundaries and difference Cultural flows Contributors to the book offer a multidisciplinary portfolio of methods, ranging from archival research and field ethnography to biographical studies and music analysis. In addition to rich illustrations, numerous samples of notation and sheet music are featured as insightful study resources. Readers are invited to study individuals, music-makers, listeners, and viewers to learn about their concerns, their musical choices, and their lives through a combination of humanistic and social-scientific approaches. Demonstrating how transformative cultural differences can become in intercultural encounters, this book will appeal to students and scholars of musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.

In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres—including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk—Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

The zheng zither is one of the most popular instruments in contemporary China. It is commonly regarded as a solo instrument with a continuous tradition dating back to ancient times. But in fact, much of its contemporary solo repertory is derived from several different regional folk ensemble repertories of the mid-twentieth century. Since the setting up of China’s modern conservatories, the zheng has been transformed within these new contexts of professional music-making. Over the course of the twentieth century, these regional folk repertories were brought into the performance traditions of modern regional zheng schools. From this basis, a large new zheng repertory was created by conservatory musicians, combining aspects of Western classical music with folk music materials. With the ’opening up’ of China’s economy since the 1980s, the zheng has been brought into the wider stage of international music-making which includes contemporary art music compositions by overseas based Chinese composers and commercial world music works by Western composers. Through a series of case studies, this book explores how the transformation of the Chinese zheng has constantly responded to its changing social context, critiquing the long-standing arguments concerning ’authenticity’ in the development of tradition. This work arises out of, and reflects on, the research methodologies known as performance as research. As an insider to the tradition, brought up within China’s zheng society, a trained and practising zheng performer, this study is largely drawn from the author's own experiences of practising and performing the music in question; her study also draws on fieldwork, as well as primary and secondary written sources in Chinese and English. This book is accompanied by downloadable resources which contain audio visual materials relating to the author's fieldwork and zheng performances by different zheng musicians.

This book studies the three concepts of translation, education and innovation from a Nordic and international perspective on Japanese and Korean societies. It presents findings from pioneering research into cultural translation, Japanese and Korean linguistics, urban development, traditional arts, and related fields. Across recent decades, Northern European scholars have shown increasing interest in East Asia. Even though they are situated on opposite sides of the Eurasia landmass, the Nordic nations have a great deal in common with Japan and Korea, including vibrant cultural traditions, strong educational systems, and productive social democratic economies. Taking a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, and in addition to the examination of the three key concepts, the book explores several additional intersecting themes, including sustainability, nature, humour, aesthetics, cultural survival and social change, discourse and representation. This book offers a collection of original interdisciplinary research from the 25th anniversary conference of the Nordic Association for Japanese and Korean Studies (2013). Its 21 chapters are divided into five parts according to interdisciplinary themes: Translational Issues in Literature, Analyses of Korean and Japanese Languages, Language Education, Innovation and New Perspectives on Culture, and The Arts in Innovative Societies.