A Critical History of New Music in China

A Critical History of New Music in China PDF Author: Jingzhi Liu
Publisher: Chinese University Press
ISBN: 9629963604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 962

Book Description
By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese culture had fallen into a stasis, and intellectuals began to go abroad for new ideas. What emerged was an exciting musical genre that C. C. Liu terms "new music." With no direct ties to traditional Chinese music, "new music" reflects the compositional techniques and musical idioms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European styles. Liu traces the genesis and development of "new music" throughout the twentieth century, deftly examining the social and political forces that shaped "new music" and its uses by political activists and the government.

A Critical History of New Music in China

A Critical History of New Music in China PDF Author: Liu Chingchih
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN: 962996970X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 960

Book Description
By the end of the nineteenth century, after a long period during which the weakness of China became ever more obvious, intellectuals began to go abroad for new ideas. What emerged was a musical genre that Liu Chingchih terms "New Music." With no direct ties to traditional Chinese music, New Music reflects the compositional techniques and musical idioms of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth–century European styles. Liu traces the genesis and development of New Music throughout the twentieth century, deftly examining the cultural, social, and political forces that shaped New Music and its uses by politicians and the government.

Echoes of History

Echoes of History PDF Author: Helen Rees
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195351622
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
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.

Composing for the Revolution

Composing for the Revolution PDF Author: Joshua H. Howard
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824885732
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
In Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism, Joshua Howard explores the role the songwriter Nie Er played in the 1930s proletarian arts movement and the process by which he became a nationalist icon. Composed only months before his untimely death in 1935, Nie Er’s last song, the “March of the Volunteers,” captured the rising anti-Japanese sentiment and was selected as China’s national anthem with the establishment of the People’s Republic. Nie was quickly canonized after his death and later recast into the “People’s Musician” during the 1950s, effectively becoming a national monument. Howard engages two historical paradigms that have dominated the study of twentieth-century China: revolution and modernity. He argues that Nie Er, active in the leftist artistic community and critical of capitalism, availed himself of media technology, especially the emerging sound cinema, to create a modern, revolutionary, and nationalist music. This thesis stands as a powerful corrective to a growing literature on the construction of a Chinese modernity, which has privileged the mass consumer culture of Shanghai and consciously sought to displace the focus on China’s revolutionary experience. Composing for the Revolution also provides insight into understudied aspects of China’s nationalism—its sonic and musical dimensions. Howard’s analyses highlights Nie’s extensive writings on the political function of music, examination of the musical techniques and lyrics of compositions within the context of left-wing cinema, and also the transmission of his songs through film, social movements, and commemoration. Nie Er shared multiple and overlapping identities based on regionalism, nationalism, and left-wing internationalism. His march songs, inspired by Soviet “mass songs,” combined Western musical structure and aesthetic with elements of Chinese folk music. The songs’ ideological message promoted class nationalism, but his “March of the Volunteers” elevated his music to a universal status thereby transcending the nation. Traversing the life and legacy of Nie Er, Howard offers readers a profound insight into the meanings of nationalism and memory in contemporary China. Composing for the Revolution underscores the value of careful reading of sources and the author’s willingness to approach a subject from multiple perspectives.

Yellow Music

Yellow Music PDF Author: Andrew F. Jones
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380439
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Yellow Music is the first history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and urban media culture in early-twentieth-century China. Andrew F. Jones focuses on the affinities between "yellow” or “pornographic" music—as critics derisively referred to the "decadent" fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms—and the anticolonial mass music that challenged its commercial and ideological dominance. Jones radically revises previous understandings of race, politics, popular culture, and technology in the making of modern Chinese culture. The personal and professional histories of three musicians are central to Jones's discussions of shifting gender roles, class inequality, the politics of national salvation, and emerging media technologies: the American jazz musician Buck Clayton; Li Jinhui, the creator of "yellow music"; and leftist Nie Er, a former student of Li’s whose musical idiom grew out of virulent opposition to this Sinified jazz. As he analyzes global media cultures in the postcolonial world, Jones avoids the parochialism of media studies in the West. He teaches us to hear not only the American influence on Chinese popular music but the Chinese influence on American music as well; in so doing, he illuminates the ways in which both cultures were implicated in the unfolding of colonial modernity in the twentieth century.

New Music in China and the C.C. Liu Collection at the University of Hong Kong

New Music in China and the C.C. Liu Collection at the University of Hong Kong PDF Author: Helen Woo
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9789622097728
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
This book comprises five invited papers, each of which touches on a topic directly or indirectly related to the music of China in the twentieth century. And it consists of the catalogue of library materials related to new music of China donated by Liu Ching-chih to the University of Hong Kong.

Dangerous Tunes

Dangerous Tunes PDF Author: Barbara Mittler
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447039208
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Book Description
Barbara Mittler's book is the first comprehensive monographic study of China's New Music written in a Western language. It deals with two key points of contention: the effects of politics on the development of Chinese New Music, and the importance of China's indigenous musical traditions for the development of her New Music. In many ways, it is a handbook to New Chinese Music as it provides biographical and musicological sketches of the greater number of China's composers. As a reference work it will thus be of interest to libraries as well as to musicologists and music impressarios. The book is unique as a comparative study of New Chinese Music under three different political systems. Its conclusions, the discovery of (and explanations for) inherent similarities in those three New Musics will be of interest to sinologists in the field of politics and cultural studies.

Musical Meaning

Musical Meaning PDF Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520382978
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
Ranging widely over classical music, jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of new resources for understanding music. In this accessible and eloquently written book, he argues boldly that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. He demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. First published in 2001, Musical Meaning anticipates many of the musicological topics of today, including race, performance, embodiment, and media. In addition, Kramer explores music itself as a source of understanding via his composition Revenants for piano, revised for this edition and available on the UC Press website.

A New Literary History of Modern China

A New Literary History of Modern China PDF Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1033

Book Description
Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors, this landmark volume, edited by David Der-wei Wang, explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres, emphasizes Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences, and offers vibrant contrasting voices and points of view.

Chime

Chime PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description