The Oxford Handbook Of Music In China And The Chinese Diaspora

In The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora, twenty-three scholars advance knowledge and understandings of Chinese music studies. Each contribution develops a theoretical model to illuminate new insights into a key musical genre or context. This handbook is categorized into three parts. In Part One, authors explore the extensive, remarkable, and polyvocal historical legacies of Chinese music. Ranging from archaeological findings to the creation of music history, chapters address enduring historical practices and emerging cultural expressions. Part Two focuses on evolving practice across a spectrum of key instrumental and vocal genres. Each chapter provides a portrait of musical change, tying musical transformations to the social dimensions underpinning that change. Part Three responds to the role that prominent issues, including sexuality, humanism, the amateur, and ethnicity, play in the broad field of Chinese music studies. Scholars present systematic orientations for researchers in the third decade of the twenty-first century. This volume incorporates extensive input from researchers based in China, Taiwan, and among Chinese communities across the world. Using a model of collaborative inquiry, The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora features diverse insider voices alongside authors positioned across the anglophone world.

Understanding China's world role has become one of the crucial intellectual challenges of the 21st Century. This book explores this topic through the adoption of three conceptual approaches that help to uncover some of the complex and simultaneous interactions between the global and domestic forces that determine China's external behavior.

Framed by a century and a half of racialized Chinese American musical experiences, Claiming Diaspora explores the thriving contemporary musical culture of Asian/Chinese America. Ranging from traditional operas to modern instrumental music, from ethnic media networks to popular music, from Asian American jazz to the work of recent avant-garde composers, author Su Zheng reveals the rich and diverse musical activities among Chinese Americans and tells of the struggles of Chinese Americans to gain a foothold in the American cultural terrain. She not only tells their stories, but also examines the dynamics of the diasporic connections of this musical culture, revealing how Chinese American musical activities both reflect and contribute to local, national, and transnational cultural politics, and challenging us to take a fresh look at the increasingly plural and complex nature of American cultural identity.

Music in China is one of many case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study. Music in China offers a unique exploration of the rich, dynamic, and multifaceted Chinese musical landscape. In contrast with previous scholarship--which focused almost exclusively on the role of music in elite culture--this volume takes a balanced look at a variety of traditional and modern genres, including those performed among local and regional folk musicians, in academia, in the media, and on concert stages both inside and outside of China. Using the interrelated themes of identity, modernization, and ideology as a narrative framework, author Frederick Lau discusses the musical features of the selected genres, the processes through which they came into existence, and related socio-political issues. Lau draws on his own extensive fieldwork and performance experience in both mainland China and its diasporic communities to show how the ever-changing Chinese musical tradition takes on particular meanings in China, in overseas Chinese communities, and in diverse international settings. Enhanced by eyewitness accounts of local performances, interviews with key performers, vivid illustrations, and hands-on listening activities, Music in China provides an accessible and engaging introduction to Chinese music. It is packaged with an 80-minute audio CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book.

Based on extensive fieldwork and documentary research in China, this book is a chronicle of the musical history of Lijiang County in China's southern Yunnan Province. It focuses on Dongjing music, a repertoire borrowed from China's Han ethnic majority by the indigenous Naxi inhabitants of Lijiang County. Used in Confucian worship as well as in secular entertainment, Dongjing music played a key role the Naxi minority's assimilation of Han culture over the last 200 years. Prized for its complexity and elegance, which set it apart from "rough" or "simpler" indigenous Naxi music, Dongjing played an important role in defining social relationships, since proficiency in the music and membership in the Dongjing associations signified high social status and cultural refinement. In addition, there is a strong political component in its examination of the role of indigenous music in the relation of a socialist state to its ethnic minorities. The first in English on this rich musical tradition, this book is also unique in providing a complete history of the music in a single region in China over the twentieth century. It integrates individual, local, and national histories with musical experience and musical change. Ethnic music in China provides a vivid example of the tremendous cultural changes over the past century, and the tradition continues to evolve as China encourages ethnic diversity within a unified socialist nation. The book includes a case study of China's tourist trade and its policies toward minorities.

Ya-Hui Cheng examines the emergence of popular music genres – jazz, rock, and hip-hop – in Chinese society, covering the social underpinnings that shaped the development of popular music in China and Taiwan, from imperialism to westernization and from modernization to globalization. The political sensitivities across the strait have long eclipsed the discussion of these shared sonic intimacies. It was not until the rise of the digital age, when entertainment programs from China and Taiwan reached social media on a global scale, that audiences realized the existence of this sonic reciprocation. Analyzing Chinese pentatonicism and popular songs published from 1927 to the present, this book discusses structural elements in Chinese popular music to show how they aligned closely with Chinese folk traditions. While the influences from Western genres are inevitable under the phenomenon of globalization, Chinese songwriters utilized these Western inspirations to modernize their musical traditions. It is a sensitivity for exhibiting cultural identities that enabled popular music to present a unique Chinese global image while transcending political discord and unifying mass cultures across the strait.

What does it mean to be Chinese? How did the major political events of the early 20th century affect the everyday lives of ordinary people in China? This book uses a wealth of new sources, including newspapers, memoirs, interviews, and photographs, to look at the political history of the period and to understand the ways in which politics intersected with the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people. To be a modern citizen of the Chinese republic meant repudiating much of the very ritual that had previously defined one as Chinese. As we follow the changes in everyday life, ranging from the unbinding of women's feet to the commemoration of the events of the a new republican history, we see the complex interactions between an ever more activist state and its new citizens.

This book is a study of the change and continuity in paradigms in China studies, both inside and outside of China. In the last few years, the United States and China appeared to be moving in the direction of “de-coupling,” indicating that the engagement policy with China in the last four decade is ending. The “modernization theory” that is the theoretical foundation of the engagement policy has proved to be insufficient. This situation calls for a reexamination of the field of China studies. Historically, scholarly paradigms shifts often went hand in hand with drastic social change. As we have entered an era of great uncertainty, it is constructive to reflect on the paradigms in China studies in the past and explore the possibility of new paradigms in the future. How are the shifts of major theories, methods and paradigms in China studies in the west related to social change? How did some of China’s paradigms impact on the country’s social change and developments? This book will appeal to a wide readership, including scholars and graduate students, upper division undergraduate students of China studies, Asian studies.