Music

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General

Amar, Nathaniel. “Contesting and Appropriating Chineseness in Sinophone Music.” China Perspectives 2 (2020): 3-6.

—–. “Navigating and Circumventing (Sel)censorship in the Chinese Music Scene.” China Perspectives 2 (2020): 25-33.

Baranovitch, Nimrod. China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethinicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978-1997. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Barbara Mittler]

Bryant, Lei Ouyang. “Music, Memory, and Nostalgia: Collective Memories of Cultural Revolution Song in Contemporary China.” The China Review 5, 2 (Fall 2005).

Chao, Mei-pa. “The Trend of Modern Chinese Music.” T’ien Hsia Monthly 4 (March 1937): 269-86.

Davis, Sarah. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. NY: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Gild, Gerlinde. “Early 20th Century ‘Reforms’ in Chinese Music. Dreams of Renewal Inspired by Japan and the West.” Chime 12/13 (Spring/Autumn 1998): 116-123.

Feng, Xiangjun. “Rhythm Revolution: How Music “Modernized” China (1903–1937).” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 2  (Fall 2020), 1-42.

Gronow, Pekka. “The Record Industry Comes to the Orient.” Ethnomusicology 25 (1981): 251-84.

Hallis, Xiang Chen. Chinese Art Song from 1912 to 1949. Ph.D diss. Austin: University of Texas, 1995.

Hamm, Charles. “Music and Radio in the People’s Republic of China.” Asian Music 2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 1-42.

Hung, Chang-tai. “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937-1949.” Modern Asian Studies 30 (Oct. 1996): 901-929.

Jones, Andrew F. “The Gramophone in China.” In Lydia Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, 214-38.

—–. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

—–. Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jeroen de Kloet]

[Abstract: How the Chinese pop of the 1960s participated in a global musical revolution. What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s, and how did the Beatles and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, suggesting how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music globally.]

Kagan, A. L.. “Music and the Hundred Flowers Movement.” Musical Quarterly 49 (1963): 417-30.

Kraus, Richard Curt. Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Liang Maochun 梁茂春. Zhongguo dangdai yinyue (1949-1989) 中国当代音乐 (1949-1989) (Contemporary Chinese music, 1949-1989). Beijing: Beijing guangbo xueyuan, 1989.

Liang, Mingyue. Music of the Billion: An Introduction to Chinese Musical Culture. New York: Heinrichshofen Edition C.F. Peters, 1985.

Liu, C. C. 劉靖之, ed. Zhongguo xin yinyueshi lunji 中國新音樂論集 (Chinese new music collected essays). 4 vols. HK: Centre of Asian Studies, 1986-1992.

—–. A Critical History of New Music in China. Tr. Caroline Mason. HK: Chinese University Press, 2010.

Kaelyn Lowmaster, with John Crespi, Y. R. Chao’s New Poetry Songbook, (1) Introduction; (2) Translations of three essays by Y. R. Chao; (3) Audio recordings of three musical pieces (from the Songbook with Chinese and English lyrics). Tr. and introduced by Kaelyn Lowmaster, with John Crespi. MCLC Resource Center Publication (July 2009).

Melvin, Sheila and Jindong Cai: Rhapsody in Red: How Classical Music Became Chinese. New York: Algora Pub., 2004.

Mittler, Barbara. “20th Century Chinese Compositions in The C.C. Liu Collection.” Chime 4 (Aut. 1991): 92-95.

—–. Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC since 1949. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997.

Perris, Arnold. “Music as Propaganda: Art at the Command of Doctrine in the People’s Republic of China.” Ethnomusicology 17, 1 (Jan. 1983): 1-25.

—–. Music as Propaganda: Art to Persuade and to Control. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Samson, Valerie. “Music as Protest Strategy: The Example of Tiananmen Square, 1989.” Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology 6 (1991).

Steen, Andreas. Zwischen Unterhaltung und Revolution: Grammophone, Schallplatten und die Anfange der Musikindustrie in Shanghai. Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006.

Stock, Jonathan P. J. Musical Creativity in Twentieth-Century China: Abing, His Music, and its Changing Meanings. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996.

Unbreakable Spirits: Women Breaking Down Barriers in China

[AsiaSource is featuring audio excerpts from Unbreakable Spirits, a 12-part, half hour radio series released by Artistic Circles and Public Radio International. The series takes listeners to the heart and soul of China’s emerging women musical and performance artists from Beijing, Liaoning Province, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Through interviews and music, meet the first all-female rock band, the first woman conductor, and a female Buddhist monk. Though years of research and travel, Ann Feldman, Executive Director of Artistic Circles, produced Unbreakable Spirits as an overview of Chinese women’s cultural creativity in classical, traditional and contemporary music, in religious practice and cultural ceremony]

Wang Yuhe 汪毓和. Zhongguo jinxiandai yinyue shigang 中国近现代音乐史纲 (A brief history of Chinese early modern and modern music). Beijing: Renmin yinyue, 1984.

—–. Zhongguo xiandai yinyue shigang 中国现代音乐史纲 (A brief history of Chinese modern music). Beijing: Huawen, 1991.

Wong, Isabel K. F. “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century.” In Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman, eds., Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Xu Changhui 許常惠. Taiwan yinyue shi chugao 台灣音樂史初稿 (Draft history of Taiwan music). Taibei: Quan yinyue pu, 1991.

Zhong, Yurou. “Musica Practica: The Sound of the Beijing New Worker Band.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 281–301.

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“New Music”/ Classical

Chen, Guangchen. “The Sufferings and Greatness of a Vulnerable Artist: In Memory of Fou Ts’ong.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (March 2021).

Chow Fan-Fu and Richard Tsang. “Music Creation in Hong Kong: Its Development and Prospect.” In The Contemporary Chinese Music Festival. Hong Kong, 1986.

Jin Jingyan, “Musikforschung in der VR (1949-1988).” Acta Musicologica 61 (1989).

Kouwenhoven, Frank. “Composer Tan Dun: The Ritual Fire Dancer of Mainland China’s New Music.” China Information 6, 3 (1991/92): 1-24.

—–. “Developments in Mainland China’s New Music–Part I: From China to the United States.” China Information 7, 1 (1992): 17-39.

—–. “Developments in Mainland China’s New Music–Part II: From Europe to the Pacific and Back to China.” China Information 7, 2 (1992): 30-46.

—–. “Mainland China’s New Music (1) Out of the Desert.” CHIME 2 (1990): 58-93.

—–. “Mainland China’s New Music (2) Madly singing in the Mountains.” CHIME 3 (1991): 42-75.

—–. “Mainland China’s New Music (3) The Age of Pluralism.” CHIME 5 (1992): 76-134.

—–. “Operas by Qu Xiaosong and Guo Wenjing.” Chime 8 (Spring 1995): 158-161.

—–. “Tan Dun – A ‘Comet Came Thundering.'” Chime 8 (Spring 1995): 162-164.

—–. “New Chinese Operas by Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun and Guo Wenjing.” Chime 11/12 (Spring/Autumn 1997): 111-122.

Lai, Eric. The Music of Chou Wen-chung. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009.

Melvin, Sheila and Jindong Cai. Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. NY: Algora, 2004.

Mittler, Barbara. “Chinese Music in the 1980s: The Aesthetics of Eclecticism.” In In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 80-88.

—–. “Sprachlose Propaganda–Politik und musikalische Avantgarde in Hong Kong, Taiwan und der Volksrepublik China.” In Yaogun Yinyue: Jugend-, Subkultur und Rockmusik in China. Politische und gesellschaftliche Hintergründe eines neuen Phänomens (T. Heberer Hrsg.). Münster: LIT, 1994, 33-46.

—–. “Chinese New Music as a Politicized Language: Orthodox Melodies and Dangerous Tunes.” Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series 10 (1996): 1-22.

—–. “Mirrors and Double Mirrors–The Politics of Identity in New Music from Hong Kong and Taiwan.” CHIME 9 (1996): 4-44.

Rao, Nancy Yunhwa. “Opera Percussions from Model Opera to Tan Dun.” In Helan Yang and Michael Saffle, eds.,  China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017, 163-185.

—–. “The Transformative Power of Rhythm and Gesture: Transnational Inflection in Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2.” In Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft, eds., Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1960-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 127-152. 

—–. “Sonic Imaginary After Cultural Revolution.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds., Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. London: Palgrave, 2016, 213-238.

—–. “The Tradition of Luogu Dianzi (Percussion Classics) and Its Signification in Contemporary Music.”  Contemporary Music Review 5/6 (2007): 511-527.

—–. “Hearing Pentatonicism Through Serialism: Integrating Different Traditions in Contemporary Chinese Music.” Perspectives of New Music 40/2 (2002): 190-232.

—–. “The Role of Language in Music Integration in Chen Qigang’s Poème Lyrique II.” Journal of Music in China 2/2 (2000): 270-91.

Ryker, Harrison, ed. New Music in the Orient: Essays on Composition in Asia since World War II. Buren, The Netherlands: F. Kunf, 1990.

Putten, Bas van. “Tan Dun’s Marco Polo, a multi-cultural journey.” Chime 9 (Aut. 1996): 57-62.

Saunders, Glen. “A Chinese Composer’s views on Greek Drama and Buddhism. Qu Xiaosong’s Opera The Death of Oedipus.” Chime 9 (Aut. 1996): 46-56.

Tan Dun official website

Tan Dun’s works (Schirmer.com)

Utz, Christian. “Tan Dun’s Art for a New Generation: Extreme Cross-over, Extremely Personal Music.” CHIME 12/13 (1998): 142-150.

—–. “A Marco Polo (Re)Constructed by the West: Intercultural Aspects in Tan Dun’s Compositional Approach.” World New Music Magazine 12 (2002): 51-57.

—–. “The Potential of Cultural Diversity: The Impact of Traditional Music on Musical Composition in Taiwan since the 1970s.” Journal of Music in China 4, 1/2 (2002): 129-165 [includes portraits of Lee Tai-Hsiang, Hsu Po-Yun and Pan Hwang-Long]

—–. Neue Musik und Interkulturalität. Von John Cage bis Tan Dun. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002. [broad materials on East Asian 20th century music including an extensive portrait of Chou Wen-Chung’s music and a comprehensive 200-pages discussion of Tan Dun’s music until 1996]

—–. “Listening Attentively to Cultural Fragmentation: Tradition and Composition in Works by East-Asian Composers.” The World of Music 45, 2 (2003): 7-38. [includes discussion of Tan Dun’s Symphony 1997, Guo Wenjing’s Ye Yan, Chen Xiaoyong’s Yang shen, Hsu Po-Yun’s Han Shi]

—–. “Cultural Accommodation and Exchange in the Refugee Experience: A German Jewish Musician in Shanghai.” Ethnomusicology Forum 13, 1 (2004): 119-151. [special issue on “Musical Outcomes of Jewish Migration into Asia c.1870 – c.1950,” edited by Margaret Kartomi]

—–. “Dislocated Identities. Fragmentary Thoughts on East Asian Music in Europe.” World New Music Magazine 17 (2007): 55-61.

—–. “Zur kompositorischen Relevanz kultureller Differenz. Historische und ästhetische Perspektiven.” In Christian Utz, ed., Musik und Globalisierung. Zwischen kultureller Homogenisierung und kultureller Differenz (musik.theorien der gegenwart 1). Saarbrücken: Pfau 2007, 29-49. [includes a discussion of Ge Ganru’s Yi Feng]

—–. “Neue Musik in Ostasien als Kritik essentialistischer Kulturmodelle. Wege zu einer interkulturellen Kompositionsgeschichte.” In Jörn Peter Hiekel and Marion Demuth, eds., Kulturelle Identität(en). Saarbrücken: Pfau 2010, 173-196. [includes discussions of Qin Wenchen’s He Yi, Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera and Symphony 1997, Guo Wenjing’s She Huo]

—–. “Kunstmusik und reflexive Globalisierung. Alterität und Narrativität in chinesischer Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 67, 1 (2010). [includes discussions of Chen Xiaoyong’sSpeechlessness, clearness and ease, Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera and Zhu Jian’er’s Sixth Symphony]

Wang, David Der-wei. “In Search of a Genuine Chinese Sound: Jiang Wenye and Modern Chinese Music.” In Maghiel van Crevel, Tian Yuan Tan, and Michel Hockx, eds. Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essay in Honor of Wilt Idema. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009, 341-60.

Woo, Helen. New Music in China and the C.C. Liu Collection at the University of Hong Kong. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2005.

[Abstract: 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.]

Wu Fei’s Music [composer/performer/improvisor/vocalist from Beijing who plays the guzheng]

Yan, Jun. “UnderGroundGround: A Stealthy Chronicle of New Music.” RockinChina.com 

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Popular/Rock

Baranovitch, Nimrod. China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978-1997. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Barbara Mittler]

Barme, Geremie. In the Red: Essays on Contemporary Chinese Culture. NY: CUP, 1996.

—–. “Revolutionary Opera Arias Sung to a New Disco Beat.” Far Eastern Economic Review 130, 130 (Dec. 26, 1987): 36-38.

Beijing Bubbles [website for a 2005 documentary, by Susanne Messmer and George Lindt, on the Beijing rock scene]

Benson, Carlton. “Consumers Are Also Soldiers: Subversive Songs from Nanjing Road during the New Life Movement.” Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 91-132.

Blake, Fred. “Love Songs and the Great Leap: The Role of Youth Culture in the Revolutionary Phase of China’s Economic Development.” American Ethnologist 6, 1 (1979): 41-54.

Brace, Timothy. “Popular Music in Contemporary Beijing: Modernism and Cultural Identity.” Asian Music 22, 2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 43-63.

—–. Modernization and Music in Contemporary China: Crisis, Identity, and the Politics of Style. Ph.d. diss. Austin: University of Texas, 1992.

—–and Paul Friedlander. “Rock and Roll on the New Long March: Popular Music, Cultural Identity, and Political Opposition in the People’s Republic of China.” In Reebee Garofalo, ed, Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements. Boston: South End Press, 1992, 115-28.

Campbell, Jonathan. Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock and Roll. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2011.

[Abstract: Rock and roll – rebellious, individualistic, explosive –seems incongruent with modern Chinese society. But as the music has evolved from a Western import into something uniquely Chinese, it has shaped and been shaped by China’s unique system and its relationship with the outside world. Red Rock looks at the people and events that have created Chinese rock’s unique identity, and tracks the music’s long journey from the Mao years to present. After boiling below the surface for over twenty years and now emerging from a thriving underground scene, Chinese rock may be ready to smash its guitars on the global stage.]

Chang, Shih-lun. The Face of Independence? A Visual Record of Taiwanese Indie Music Scene.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, 1 (2010): 89-99.

Choice Cuts: Chinese Popular Music. China Policy (2/12/16). [multimedia Prezi presentation on Chinese popular music]

Chong, Woei Lien, “Young China’s Voice of the 1980s: Rock Star Cui Jian.” Chime 4 (Autumn 1991): 4-22; rpt. from China Information 6, 1 (Summer 1991): 55-74.

Chow, Rey. “Listening otherwise, music miniaturized: a different type of question about revolution.” In Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader. London/NY: Routledge, 1993, 382-99. Also in Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 144-64.

Chow, Yiu Fai and Jeroen de Kloet. “Sounds from the Margin: Beijing Rock Scene Faces an Uncertain Future.” Chime 11/12 (Spring/Autumn 1997): 123-128.

Chow, Yiu Fai, Jeroen de Kloet, and Leonie Schmidt. It’s My Party: Tat Ming Pair and the Postcolonial Politics of Popular Music in Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Chu, Yiu-wai. “The Importance of Being Free: Fu©Kin Music as Alternative Pop Music Production.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, 1 (2011): 62-76.

[Abstract: Fu©Kin Music, founded by MC Yan, former vocalist/lyricist of the Hong Kong hip-hop group LMF and founder of the Chinese hardcore street gear label NingSiBuQu, is an alternative music label showcasing a music culture that acts as a form of resistance to the mainstream popular music industry. When LMF first utilized the popular music industry and the media to negotiate its financial survival, the group soon felt strangled by the industry’s conventional standards. From this, Fu©Kin Music set out to defy traditional forms of music production and distribution, giving groups like LMF the space to thrive. The songs of Fu©Kin Music can be seen as an alternative form of cultural production that represents an effort to de-commodify popular music. This article endeavors to analyze the products of Fu©Kin Music in order to shed light upon the possible impact of alternative cultural production on the operational logic of the mainstream music industry. In light of the controversy brought forth by Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price, this article will also discuss the importance of understanding the implications of ‘free’ from different perspectives.]

—–. Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017.

[Abstract: Cantopop was once the leading pop genre of pan-Chinese popular music around the world. In this pioneering study of Cantopop in English, Chu shows how the rise of Cantopop is related to the emergence of a Hong Kong identity and consciousness. Chu charts the fortune of this important genre of twentieth-century Chinese music from its humble, lower-class origins in the 1950s to its rise to a multimillion-dollar business in the mid-1990s. As the voice of Hong Kong, Cantopop has given generations of people born in the city a sense of belonging. It was only in the late 1990s, when transformations in the music industry, and more importantly, changes in the geopolitical situation of Hong Kong, that Cantopop showed signs of decline. As such, Hong Kong Cantopop: A Concise History is not only a brief history of Cantonese pop songs, but also of Hong Kong culture. The book concludes with a chapter on the eclipse of Cantopop by Mandapop (Mandarin popular music), and an analysis of the relevance of Cantopop to Hong Kong people in the age of a dominant China. Drawing extensively from Chinese-language sources, this work is a most informative introduction to Hong Kong popular music studies.]

Clark, Matthew Corbin. “Birth of a Beijing Music Scene.” China in the Red website (Feb. 13, 2003) [a good overview of the Beijing and Shanghai rock scenes, with videos of rock performances]

de Kloet, Jeroen. “‘Let Him Fucking See the Green Smoke Beneath My Groin’: The Mythology of Chinese Rock.” In Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 239-74.

—–. “Audiences in Wonderland: The Reception of Rock Music in China.” In: T. Mitchell and P. Doyle, eds., Changing Sounds – New Directions and Configurations in Popular Music. Sydney: University of Technology, 2000: 130-44.

—–. “Living in Confusion, Remembering Clearly – Chinese Rock.” In: Mitsui, T., ed., Popular Music: Intercultural Interpretations. Kanazawa University & Hoyu Printing: Kanazawa, 1998: 38-51; also published in:Crawdaddy no. 18 (1997): 1-4.

—–. “Commercial Fantasies: China’s Music Industry.” In: S. H. Donald, M. Keane and Y. Hong, eds., Media Futures in China, Consumption, Content and Crisis. London and Surrey: Routledge / Curzon Press, 2002: 93-104.

—–. “Marx or Market: Chinese Rock and the Sound of Fury.” In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003, 28-52.

—–. “Authenticating Geographies and Temporalities: Representations of Chinese Rock.” Visual Anthropology (2005)

—–. “Popular Music and Youth in Urban China: The Dakou Generation.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 609-626.

—–. “Sonic Sturdiness: The Globalization of ‘Chinese’ Rock and Pop.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, 4 (Nov. 2005).

—–. China with a Cut: Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: IIAS Publications, Amsterdam University Press, 2010.

[Abstract: In the wake of intense globalisation and commercialisation in the 1990s, China saw the emergence of a vibrant popular culture. Drawing on sixteen years of research, Jeroen de Kloet explores the popular music industry in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, providing a fascinating history of its emergence and extensive audience analysis, while also exploring the effect of censorship on the music scene in China. China with a Cut pays particular attention to the dakou culture: so named after a cut nicked into the edge to render them unsaleable, these illegally imported Western CDs still play most of the tracks. They also played a crucial role in the emergence of the new music and youth culture. De Kloet’s impressive study demonstrates how the young Chinese cope with the rapid economic and social changes in a period of intense globalisation, and offers a unique insight into the socio-cultural and political transformations of a rising global power.]

de Kloet, Jeroen and Andreas Steen, “Popular Music in Shanghai.” In J. Shepherd, D. Horn and D. Laing, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. London: Continuum International, 2005.

De Kloet, Jeroen, and Landsberger, Stefan. “Fandom, Politics and the Super Girl Contest in a Globalized China.” In Koos Zwaan and Joost De Bruin, eds., Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity and Performance in a Global Television Format. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, 135-147.

Dujunco, Mercedes M. “Hybridity and Disjuncture in Mainland Chinese Popular Music.” In Timothy Craig and Richard King, eds., Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2002, 25-39.

Efird, Robert. “Rock in a Hard Place: Music and the Market in Nineties Beijing.” In Nancy Chen, et al, eds., China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

“The Evolution of Chinese Rock.” ChinaToday.com.cn. [good chronological list of moments in Chinese rock history]

Field, Andrew D. “Beijing Is Rock, Shanghai Is Jazz: Musical Identity Formations and Shifts in the Big City Soundscapes of China.” In Brett Lashua, et al, eds., Sounds and The City, Volume 2. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018, 151-72.

—–. Rocking China: Rock Music Scenes in Beijing, Shanghai and Beyond. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2023.

[Abstract: Rocking China traces the rise and spread of indie rock scenes from the rock capital of Beijing to Shanghai and many other cities in China. Through interviews with key players in these scenes over a period of twenty years, Andrew Field explores the meanings of rock music in Chinese society as well as the many challenges and obstacles to the development of indie rock scenes in China. Highlights include a journey by rail into the heartlands of China with the hardcore rock band SUBS and legendary “rock godfather” Cui Jian. Along the journey to document the live rock music scenes of Beijing, he discovered an emerging world of musicians, bands, clubs, festivals, promoters, record shop and record label owners that were pushing the envelope of indie music for China and the world. This book takes the reader deep into the world of independent rock music that has been flourishing in urban China since the 2000s.]

 

Friedlander, Paul. “China’s ‘Newer Value’ Pop: Rock-and-Roll and Technology on the New Long March.” Asian Music 22, 2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 67-79.

—–. “Rocking the Yangtze: Impressions of Chinese Popular Music and Technology.” Popular Music and Society 14, 1 (Spring 1990): 63-73.

Fung, Anthony. “Western Style, Chinese Pop: Jay Chou’s Rap and Hip-Hop in China.” Asian Music (Winter/Spring 2008): 69-80.

Fung, Anthony and Michael Curtin. “The Anomalies of Being Faye (Wong): Gender Politics in Chinese Popular Music.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 5, 3 (2002): 263–290.

Groenewegen, Jeroen. Tongue: Making Sense of Beijing Underground Rock, 1997-2004. MA Thesis. Leiden University, 2005.

—–. “Screaming and Crying Androids: Voice and Presence in Chinese Popular Music.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, 1 (2010): 108-14.

—–. Tongue: Making Sense of Underground Rock, Beijing 1997-2004. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011.

—–. “Asima, Her Pimp and a Melancholic Boss.” Norient: Independent Network for Local and Global Soundscapes (May 4, 2011). [on the rock star Zuoxiao Zuzhou]

Hamm, Charles. “Music and Radio in the People’s Republic of China.” Asian Music 22, 2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 1-41.

Harris, Rachel. “Cassettes, Bazaars, and Saving the Nation: The Uyghur Music Industry in Xinjiang, China.” In Timothy Craig and Richard King, eds., Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2002, 265-82.

—–. “Reggae on the Silk Road: The Globalization of Uyghur Pop.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 627-643

Herberer, Thomas, ed., Yaogun Yinyue: Jugend-Subkultur und Rockmusik in China. Politische und gesellschaftliche Hintergrunde eines neuen Phenomens. Munster: LIT, 1994.

Hirschfeld, Gerhard and Jesko Sander. BAP övver China. Bonn: Vorwärts Verlag GmbH, 1989.

[Abstract: The book covers the China tour of German rockband BAP in 1987 including preparations, the concerts itself, outdoor experiences and meetings between students and the band. Written in German, dozends of photos accompany a band through a totally different culture and their attempt to understand it and communicate with it. First hand account on the opening of China experiencing rock concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hongkong. The book is written with two points of view: One, as being a fanbook for the band, presenting the twists in band at that time and how they went along with each other. The other view is that of a band building a bridge and searching for the real China, the youth of China. In total, three concerts in Beijing, three in Shanghai and two in Guangzhou.]

“History of Rock in China.” RockinChina website.

Ho, Wai-Chung. “Music and Cultural Politics in Taiwan.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10, 4 (2007): 463-483.

Huang, Hao. “Voices from Chinese Rock, Past and Present Tense: Social Commentary and Construction of Identity in Yaogun Yinyue, from Tiananmen to the Present.” Popular Music and Society 26, 2 (2003): 183-202.

Huot, Claire. “Rock Music from Mao to Nirvana: The West is the Best.” In Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 154-81.

Jaivin, Linda. “Beijing Bastards – The New Revolution.” Chime 8 (Spring 1995): 99-103.

Jones, Andrew F. Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Institute, 1992.

—–. “The Politics of Popular Music in Post-Tiananmen China.” In Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry. eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, 148-65.

—–. “Beijing Bastards.” SPIN Magazine 8, 7 (1992).

—–. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

—–. Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

[Abstract: How the Chinese pop of the 1960s participated in a global musical revolution. What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s, and how did the Beatles and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, suggesting how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music globally.]

Kilroy, Charlotte. “Beijing Boogie.” Beijing Scene 2, 19 (Aug. 1996): 4-6.

Lee, Gregory. “The ‘East is Red’ Goes Pop: Commodification, Hybridity and Nationalism in Chinese Popular Song and Its Television Performance.” Popular Music 14 (1995): 95-110.

—–. “Chineseness and MTV: Construction of the ‘Ethnic’ Imaginary and the Recuperation of National Symbolic Space by the Official Ideology.” In Mario Vieira de Carvalho, ed., Music and Lifeworld: Otherness and Transgression in the Culture of the Twentieth Century (in memoriam Fernando Lopes Graça). Lisbon: Fundaçao D. Luis I.

Liang, Heping and Ulrike Stobbe. “Cui Jian and the Birth of Chinese Rock Music.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 89-92.

Lin, Chen-yu. “Relocating the Functions of Chineseness in Chinese Popular Music after the China Wind.” China Perspectives 2 (2020): 7-14.

Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. “Toward a New Identity: Nativism and Popular Music in Taiwan.” China Information 17, 2 (2003): 83-107.

Liu, Jin. “Alternative Voice and Local Youth Identity in Chinese Local-Language Rap Music.” positions: asia critique 22, 1 (Winter 2014): 263-92.

Micic, Peter. “‘A Bit of This and a Bit of That’: Notes on Pop/Rock Genres in the Eighties in China.” Chime 8 (Spring 1995): 76-95.

—–. “Pop ‘n’ Rock Loan Words and Neologisms in the PRC.” Chime 14/15 (1999/2000):103-123.

Mitsui, Toro and Shuhei Hosokawa, eds, Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Moskowitz, Marc L. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Discontents. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.

[Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop’s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years.]

Niederhauser, Matthew. Sound Kapital: Beijing’s Music Underground. NY: Powerhouse Books, 2009.

[Abstract: In Sound Kapital, photographer Matthew Niederhauser captures the energy of the personalities and performers at D-22, Yugong Yishan, 2 Kolegas, and Mao Livehouse. These revolutionary Beijing nightclubs remain at the core of the city’s creative explosion by hosting an eclectic mix of punk, experimental, rock, and folk performances. Included with the book are concert posters and illustrations that encapsulate the underground scene in Beijing, as well as a CD sampler of the new music being produced. There is no doubt that these musicians will continue to break ground within Beijing’s nascent artistic landscape, helping to push the boundaries of an already expanding realm of independent thought and musical expression in China.]

Pan, Keyin. “Red China Blues Woman.” Beijing Scene 5, 2 (n.d.).

Rea, Dennis. “A Western Musician’s View of China’s Pop and Rock Scene.” Chime 6 (Spring1993): 34-55.

—–. “‘Balls under the Red Flag’: Cui Jian Makes His U.S. Debut in Seattle.” Chime 8 (Spring 1995): 96-98.

Rodekohr, Andy. “1995, May 8: The Death of Teresa Teng.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 833-39.

Shi, Anbin. “Rock-and-Roll on the Road of a Post-Socialist ‘Long March’: A ‘Chinese Bob Dylan’ and His Quest for a New Socio-Cultural Identity.” In Shi, A Comparative Approach to Redefining Chinese-ness in the Era of Globalization. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2003, 79-128.

Smith, Joanne. “Barren Chickens, Stray Dogs, Fake Immortals and Thieves: Coloniser and Collaborater in Popular Uyghur Song and the Quest for National Identity.” In Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights, eds., Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

Steen, Andreas. “Die Entwicklung der Popmusik in der VR China: Von Zhou Xuan bis Cui Jian.” In Thomas Herberer, ed., Yaogun Yinyue: Jugend-Subkultur und Rockmusik in China. Politische und gesellschaftliche Hintergr¸nde eines neuen Phenomens (Munster: LIT, 1994), 47-68.

—–. Der Lange Marsch Des Rock n’ Roll–Pop und Rockmusik in Der Volksrepublik China. Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 1996.

—–. “Buddhism and Rock Music — A New Music Style?” Chime 12/13 (Spring/Autumn 1998): 151-164.

—–. “Tradition, Politics, and Meaning in 20th Century China’s Popular Music–Zhou Xuan: ‘When Will the Gentleman Come Back Again?'” Chime 14/15 (1999/2000): 124-153.

—–. “Sound, Protest and Business: Modern Sky Co. and the New Ideology of Chinese Rock.” In Berliner China-Hefte 19 (2000): 40-64.

—–. Zwischen Unterhaltung und Revolution: Grammophone, Schallplatten und die Anfange der Musikindustrie in Shanghai. Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006.

Tao, Ran. “Chaos and Collusion: Contemporary Chinese Rock.” China Today 6 (June 2000).

Tong, Wei. “Rock ‘n’ Roll China.” Nexus: China in Focus (Summer 1990): 14-21.

Tsai, Wen-ting. “Taiwanese Pop Songs History.” Trs. Glenn Smith and David Mayer. Web article based on an article originally published in Sinorama (May 2002).

Tuohy, Sue. “Metropolitan Sounds: Music in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 200-21.

Wang, Ao. “1989, May 19: The Song That Rocked Tiananmen Square.” In David Der-wei Wang, ed., A New Literary History of Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, 803-9.

Wang, Shuo. “Cui Jian: Power to the Memory.” 2000 Prince Claus Awards. The Hague: Prince Claus Fund, 2000, 54.

Witzleben, Larry. “Cantopop and Mandapop in Pre-Postcolonial Hong Kong: Identity Negotiation n the Performances of Anita Mui Yim-Fong.” Popular Music 18, 2 (May 1999).

Wong, Cynthia P. “Cui Jian: Rock Musician and Reluctant Hero.” ACMR Reports: Journal of the Association for Chinese Music Research 9 (1996): 21–32.

Wong, Isabel K. F. “The Incantation of Shanghai: Singing a City into Existence.” In Timothy Craig and Richard King, eds., Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2002, 246-64.

Yan, Jun. Beijing xinsheng (Beijing’s new voice). Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 1999.

Yang, Fang-Chih. “Working Class Girls and Popular Music in Taiwan.” Jump Cut 40 (1996).

Yao, Sijia. “Teresa Teng in Diaspora: Affective Replacement in Chinese World-Making.” Comparative Literature Studies 57, 3 (2020): 520-529.

Yeh, Yueh-yu. “A Life of Its Own: Musical Discourses in Wong Kar-Wai’s Films.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999).

Zhao, Jamie J. “From ‘Kill This Love’ to ‘Cue Ji’s Love’: The Convergence of Queer, Feminist and Global TV Cultures in China.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 44, 4 (2023).

[Abstract: This research looks at women-centred Chinese competition-style programmes that are adapted from foreign TV formats and synthesise transnational televisual elements, idol cultures and gendered aesthetics. With particular attention to imaginaries of women with nonnormative gender and sexual identities, I expound how and why representations of female gender and sexuality on Chinese TV are fashioned by the intersected discourses on China’s TV and cultural globalisations and digitisation, the party-state’s manipulations and regulations of feminism, androgyny and homoeroticism, and the entertainment industry’s capitalisation of queer women’s stardom and fandom. My analysis reveals that the emergence, survival and endurance of queer women on Chinese TV has coincided with China’s appropriations of both global formats and twenty-first-century idol girl group cultures. Through examining some key moments in popular idol group-cultivating shows produced in 2020 and 2021, I capture a multilevel, ambivalent queer convergence that transforms these televisual stages into queer-charging venues through which queer imaginaries of womanhood have actively incorporated local situations and transcultural televisual, gender and sexual knowledge to bypass, compromise with – and even partly connive with – the government’s ideological and moral controls.]

Zheng, Su. “Female Heroes and Moonish Lovers: Women’s Paradoxical Identities in Modern Chinese Songs.” Journal of Women’s History 8, 4 (Winter, 1996).

Zhou, Xun and Francesca Tarocco. Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 

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Jazz

Field, Andrew D. “Beijing Is Rock, Shanghai Is Jazz: Musical Identity Formations and Shifts in the Big City Soundscapes of China.” In Brett Lashua, et al, eds., Sounds and The City, Volume 2. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018, 151-72.

Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Rea, Dennis. “Chinese Jazz.” dennisrea.com.

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Folk/Regional/Traditional

Baranovitch, Nimrod. “Between Alterity and Identity: New Voices of Minority People in China.” Modern China 27, 3 (2001): 359-401.

Benson, Carlton. “The Manipulation of ‘Tanci’ in Radio Shanghai during the 1930s.” Republican China 20, no. 2 (April 1995): 117-146.

Chu, Leonard L. “Sabers and Swords for the Chinese Children: Revolutionary Children’s Folk Songs.” In Godwin Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978, 16-50.

Davis, Sara L. M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. NY: Columbus University Press, 2005.

Gibbs, Levi. “Culture Paves the Way, Economics Comes to Sing the Opera: Chinese Folk Duets and Global Joint Ventures.” Asian Ethnology 76 (1) (2017): 43-63.

—–. Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018. [CD Album available here]

[Abstract: When itinerant singers from China’s countryside become iconic artists, worlds collide. The lives and performances of these representative singers become sites for conversations between the rural and urban, local and national, folk and elite, and traditional and modern. In Song King, Gibbs examines the life and performances of “Folksong King of Western China” Wang Xiangrong (b. 1952) and explores how itinerant performers come to serve as representative symbols straddling different groups, connecting diverse audiences, and shifting between amorphous, place-based local, regional, and national identities. Moving from place to place, these border walkers embody connections between a range of localities, presenting audiences with traditional, modern, rural, and urban identities among which to continually reposition themselves in an evolving world. Born in a small mountain village near the intersection of the Great Wall and the Yellow River in a border region with a rich history of migration, Wang Xiangrong was exposed to a wide range of songs as a child. The songs of Wang’s youth prepared him to create a repertoire of region-representing pieces and mediate between regions, nations, and multinational corporations in national and international performances. During the course of a career that included meeting Deng Xiaoping in 1980 and running with the Olympic torch in 2008, Wang’s life, songs, and performances have come to highlight various facets of social identity in contemporary China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with Wang and other professional folksingers from northern Shaanxi province at weddings, Chinese New Year galas, business openings, and Christmas concerts, Song King argues that songs act as public conversations people can join in on. As song kings and queens fuse personal and collective narratives in performances of iconic songs, they provide audiences with compelling models for socializing personal experience, negotiating a sense of self and group in an ever-changing world.]

—–. “Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts.” Journal of Folklore Research 55, 1 (2018): 1-19.

—–. “Chinese Singing Contests as Sites of Negotiation Among Individuals and Traditions.” Journal of Folklore Research 55 (1) (2018): 49–75. doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.55.1.03

—–. “‘Forming Partnerships’: Extramarital Songs and the Promotion of China’s 1950 Marriage Law.” The China Quarterly, vol. 233 (2018): 211–229, doi:10.1017/S0305741017001692.

—–. “A Semiotics of Song: Fusing Lyrical and Social Narratives in Contemporary China.” In Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, eds. Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 94–117.

—–. “Going Beyond the Western Pass: Chinese Folk Models of Danger and Abandonment in Songs of Separation.” Modern China 47, 2 (2020): 178-207.

[Abstract: From the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the beginning of the People’s Republic, men in northern China from drought-prone regions of northwestern Shanxi province and northeastern Shaanxi province would travel beyond the Great Wall to find work in western Inner Mongolia, in a migration known as “going beyond the Western Pass” 走西口. This article analyzes anthologized song lyrics and ethnographic interviews about this migration to explore how songs of separation performed at temple fairs approached danger and abandonment using traditional metaphors and “folk models” similar to those of parents protecting children from life’s hazards and widows and widowers lamenting the loss of loved ones. I argue that these duets between singers embodying the roles of migrant laborers and the women they left behind provided a public language for audiences to reflect upon and contextualize private emotions in a broader social context, offering rhetorical resolutions to ambivalent anxieties.]

Harris, Rachel. Music, Identity and Persuasion: Ethnic Minority Music in Xinjiang, China. Ph.D. Dissertation. London University, 1998.

—–. “Wang Luobin: ‘Folksong King of the Northwest’ or Song Thief?: Copyright, Representation and Chinese ‘Folksongs.” In Kevin Latham and Stuart Thompson, eds., Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001.

—–.”Music of the Uyghurs.” Encyclopedia of the Turks, vol. 6. Istanbul: Yeni Turkiye, 2002, 542-49.

—–. “Wang Luobin, Folk Song King of the Northwest or Song Thief?: Copyright, Representation, and Chinese Folk Songs.” Modern China 31, 3 (2005): 381-408. [abstract]

Jones, Stephen. Folk Music of China: Living Instrumental Traditions. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.

—–. “Reading Between the Lines: Reflections on the Massive Anthology of Folk Music of the Chinese Peoples.” Ethnomusicology 47, 3 (2003): 287-337.

—–. Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China. Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 2004.

—–. Ritual and Music of North China, Volume 1; Shawn Bands in Shanxi. Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007.

—–. Ritual and Music of North China, Volume 2: Shaanbei. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009.

[Abstract: This volume is another major contribution from Jones to our understanding of the ritual and expressive culture of northern China…One gets a real sense of what the musicians think and how they express their views, as well as of individual life stories. This is a unique introduction to the ritual and music of a part of China we would never otherwise encounter, and provides invaluable comparative material.]

Lau, Frederick. “‘Center’ or ‘Periphery’: Regional Music in Contemporary China.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 2, 1 (2015): 31-47.

Lawson, Francesca R. Sborgi. The Narrative Arts of Tianjin: Between Music and Language. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

[Abstract: explores one of the richest forms of Chinese cultural expression: performed narratives. . . . Lawson examines the relationships between language and music in the performance of four narrative genres in the city of Tianjin, China, based upon original field research conducted in the People’s Republic of China in the mid-1980s and in 1991.]

Li, Jing. “The Making of Ethnic Yunnan on the National Mall Minority Folksong and Dance Performances, Provincial Identity, and ‘The Artifying of Politics’ (Zhengzhi yishuhua).” Modern China 39, 1 (Jan. 2013): 69-100.

[Abstract: This article looks at Yunnan’s theatrical, overly professionalized minority folksong and dance performances at the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. Yunnan’s presentation presents an opportunity to explore the way a provincial government culturally and spatially imagines its governed administrative territory through ethnic performing arts on a global stage. The article argues that Yunnan’s image crafting is not only structured by the politics of international artistic exchange. It can also be viewed as a global extension of the Yunnan provincial government’s provincial identity project and economic development scheme back home. Its strategy, described as “the artifying of politics” by one of Yunnan’s cultural officials, reveals how ethnic performing arts are programmed to aestheticize Yunnan as a place and economic-cultural brand in this context, and, thus, how the Yunnan government manages both the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics in order to carry out its economic agenda by way of aesthetic experience.]

McConaghy, Mark. “Where You Labor Is Where You Sing: The New Folksong Movement of 1958 and the Fissured Mediascape of Maoist China.” Modern China 47, 5 (Sept. 2021): 475-509.

[Abstract: This article examines the New Folksong Movement (NFM) of 1958–1959, which was launched by the Chinese Communist Party in conjunction with the Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign. It employs an analytical strategy called fissured reading, whereby a discursive assemblage that seems ideologically uniform can be made to reveal the myriad tensions that its own positive facade works to conceal. While the NFM seems suffused with songs of praise for the GLF, closer inspection reveals a project riven with tensions regarding the creative agency of the people, the persistence of “old” songs in popular culture, and dialects. Such methodological concerns were in fact foundational to modern folk study in China as it developed from the 1920s onward. Understanding such historical connections can help us rethink the cultural revolutions in modern China as fissured projects, with tense cracks just beneath their surface that indicate unresolved contradictions passed on from one generation of reformers and revolutionaries to the next.]

Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford University Press, 2000.

—–, ed. Lives in Chinese Music. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Schimmelpenninck, Antoinet. Chinese Folk Songs and Folk Singers: Shan’ge Traditions in Southern Jiangsu. Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 1997.

Stock, Jonathan. Abing, His Life and His Music.

—–. Musical Creativity in Twentieth-Century China: Abing, His Music, and Its Changing Meanings. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,1996.

Tang, Yating. “Influence of Western Ethnomusicology on China: A Historical Re-evaluation.” Journal of Music in China 2, 1 (2000): 53-72.

Tuohy, Sue. “The Social Life of Genre: The Dynamics of Folksong in China.” Asian Music 30, 2 (1999): 39-86.

Traditional Songs and Stories of the Hua Miao of Southwest China (Steve Rake)

Wang Luobin, the Official Website

Wang, Yiwen. “Homoeroticizing Archaic Wind Music: A Rhizomatic Return to Ancient China.” China Perspectives 2 (2020): 15-23.

Witzleben, Laurence. ‘Silk and Bamboo’ Music in Shanghai: The Jiangnan Sizhu Instrumental Ensemble Tradition. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1995.

Yang Mu. “Academic Ignorance or Political Taboo? Some Issues in China’s Study of its Folksong Culture.” Ethnomusicology 38, 2 (1994):303-20.

—–. “On the Hua’er Songs of North-Western China.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 26 (1994): 100-116.

—–. “Ethnomusicology with Chinese Charactersitics? A Critical Commentary.” Yearbook of Traditional Music 35 (2003): 1-38.

Zhao, Mi. “State Capitalism and Entertainment Markets: The Socialist Transformation of Quyi in Tianjin.” Modern China 44, 5 (2018)

Zheng, Su De San. “From Toisan to New York: Muk’yu Songs in Folk Tradition.” CHINOPERL 16 (1992) 165-206.

Zhong, Yurou. “Musica Practica: The Sound of the Beijing New Worker Band.” positions: asia critique 31, 2 (2023): 281–301. 

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Revolutionary

Bryant, Lei Ouyang. “Music, Memory, and Nostalgia: Collective Memories of Cultural Revolution Song in Contemporary China.” The China Review 5, 2 (Fall 2005).

—–. “Flowers on the Battlefield are More Fragrant.” Asian Music (Winter/Spring 2007): 88-122.

—–. “‘Tiny Little Screw Cap’ (‘Xiaoxiao Luosimao‘): Children’s Songs from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Music and Politics 12, 1 (Winter 2018): 1-27.

Cheng, Philip H. “A Comparative Value Analysis: Traditional versus Revolutionary Opera.” In Godwin Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978.

Chi, Robert. “‘The March of the Volunteers’: From Movie Theme Song to National Anthem.” In Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007, 217-44.

Chu, Godwin and Philip H. Cheng. “Revolutionary Opera: An Instrument for Cultural Change.” In Godwin Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978, 73-103.

Chu, Leonard L. “Sabers and Swords for the Chinese Children: Revolutionary Children’s Folk Songs.” In Godwin Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978, 16-50.

Clark, Paul, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

[Abstract: Bringing together the most recent research on the Cultural Revolution in China, musicologists, historians, literary scholars, and others discuss the music and its political implications. Combined, these chapters, paint a vibrant picture of the long-lasting impact that the musical revolution had on ordinary citizens, as well as political leaders.]

Dai, Jiafang. “A Diachronic Study of Jingju Yangbanxi Model Peking Opera Music.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 11-36.

Denton, Kirk A. “Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.” In C. Tung and C. Mackerras, eds., Drama  in the People’s Republic of China. Buffalo: SUNY Press, 119–136.

Ferrari, Rossella. “Xiqu 2.0: Expanded Chinese Opera in Digital Times.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 265-96. 

[Abstract: Xiqu 2.0 designates an experimental approach to adapting and updating the classical theaters of the Sinophone region (xiqu) and a form of expanded Chinese opera in digital times. It highlights strategies of versioning and serialization of classical texts and tropes in (post-)modern performance environments and foregrounds media and textual interactivity, networking, and participatory contexts of production, reception, and circulation—including the production, reception, and circulation of cultural memory in the contemporary Sinosphere. The stage practice of Hong Kong–based multi-genre artist Danny Yung of Zuni Icosahedron and his long-term work with Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (1598) illustrate the multiple dimensions of xiqu 2.0. Representative productions include the digital Kun opera Sigmund Freud in Search of Chinese Matter and Mind (2002, 2016) and the series The Interrupted Dream, launched in 2018. The latter links Tang’s oneiric imaginary to the postcolonial critique of orientalism through references to seventeenth-century chinoiserie at the court of Louis XIV. Updated for livestreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic, the series served as a virtual channel of mediated memory across the digital Sinosphere in the aftermath of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests and as a commentary on ancien and modern regimes, past and present revolutions, old and new Chinese dreams.]

Howard, Joshua. “‘Music for a National Defense’: Making Martial Music during the Anti-Japanese War.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 13 (Dec. 2014).

[Abstract: This article examines the popularization of “mass songs” among Chinese Communist troops during the Anti-Japanese War by highlighting the urban origins of the National Salvation Song Movement and the key role it played in bringing songs to the war front. The diffusion of a new genre of march songs pioneered by Nie Er was facilitated by compositional devices that reinforced the ideological message of the lyrics, and by the National Salvation Song Movement. By the mid-1930s, this grassroots movement, led by Liu Liangmo, converged with the tail end of the proletarian arts movement that sought to popularize mass art and create a “music for national defense.” Once the war broke out, both Nationalists and Communists provided organizational support for the song movement by sponsoring war zone service corps and mobile theatrical troupes that served as conduits for musicians to propagate their art in the hinterland. By the late 1930s, as the United Front unraveled, a majority of musicians involved in the National Salvation Song Movement moved to the Communist base areas. Their work for the New Fourth Route and Eighth Route Armies, along with Communist propaganda organizations, enabled their songs to spread throughout the ranks.]

Hung, Chang-tai. “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937-1949.” Modern Asian Studies 30, 4 (Oct. 1996): 901-29.

Krauss, Richard. “The East is Red.” In Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China: Middle Class Ambitions and the Struggle Over Western Music. NY: Oxford University Press, 1989, 119-20.

Liang, Mingyue. Music of the Billion: An Introduction to Chinese Musical Culture. New York: Heinrichshofen Edition, 1985.

Ludden, Yawen. “Making Politics Serve Music: Yu Huiyong, Composer and Minister of Culture.” TDR: The Drama Review  56,  2 (Summer 2012): 152-68.

Mittler, Barbara. “Cultural Revolution Model Works and the Politics of Modernization in China: An Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.” The World of Music. Special Issue, Traditional Music and Composition 2 (2003): 53-81.

—–. “‘Eight Stage Works for 800 Million People’: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Music–A View from Revolutionary Opera.” The Opera Quarterly 26, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2010): 377-401.

Ouyang, Lei X. Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022.

[Abstract: China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) produced propaganda music that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. Lei X. Ouyang uses selections from revolutionary songbooks to untangle the complex interactions between memory, trauma, and generational imprinting among those who survived the period of extremes. Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork and surveys to explore both the Cultural Revolution’s effect on those who lived through it as children and contemporary remembrance of the music created to serve the Maoist regime. As Ouyang shows, the weaponization of music served an ideological revolution but also revolutionized the senses. She examines essential questions raised by this phenomenon: What did the revolutionization look, sound, and feel like? What does it take for individuals and groups to engage with such music? And what is the impact of such an experience over time?]

Pang, Laikwan. “Dialects as Untamable: How to Revolutionize Cantonese Opera?” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 129-46.

Pease, Rowan. “The Dragon River Reachers the Borders: The Rehabilitation of Ethnic Music in the Model Opera.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 167-87.

Perris, Arnold. “Music as Propaganda: Art at the Command of Doctrine in the People’s Republic of China.” Ethnomusicology 17, 1 (1983): 1-28.

Perris, Arnold. Music as Propaganda: Art to Persuade and to Control. Westport: Greenwood, 1983.

Steen Andreas (2017). “Propaganda on Shellac, Vinyl and Plastic: The Politics of Record Production during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76).” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, 2–3 (2017): 221–41.

Tsai, Tsan-Huang. “From Confucianist Meditative Tool to Maoist Revolutionary Weapon: The Seven-Stringed Zither (Qin) in the Cultural Revolution.” In Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, eds. Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, 37-64.

Wagner, Vivian. “Songs of the Red Guards: Keywords Set to Music.” Paper #9 in the Indiana East Asian Working Paper Series on Language and Politics in Modern China. Ed. Jeff Wasserstrom and Sue Tuohy. Bloomington: East Asian Studies Center, Indiana University, 1996.

Wong, Isabelle F.K. “Geming Gequ: Songs for the Education of the Masses.” In McDougall, ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 112-43

Xu, Chuan. “From Sonic Models to Sonic Hooligans: Magnetic Tape and the Unraveling of the Mao-era Sound Regime, 1958–1983.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 13, 3 (2019): 391–412.

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Opera

Chabrowski, Igor Iwo. Ruling the Stage: Social and Cultural History of Opera in Sichuan from the Qing to the People’s Republic of China. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

[Abstract: Through an innovative interdisciplinary reading and field research, Igor Chabrowski analyses the history of the development of opera in Sichuan, arguing that opera serves as a microcosm of the profound transformation of modern Chinese culture between the 18th century and 1950s. He investigates the complex path of opera over this course of history: exiting the temple festivals, becoming a public obsession on commercial stages, and finally being harnessed to partisan propaganda work. The book analyzes the process of cross-regional integration of Chinese culture and the emergence of the national opera genre. Moreover, opera is shown as an example of the culture wars that raged inside China’s popular culture.]

Goldstein, Joshua. “Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of the Peking Opera, 1912-1930.” positions: east asia cultures critique 7, 2 (Fall 1999): 377-420.

—–. Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. [press blurb]

Guy, Nancy. Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. [press blurb]

Jiang, Jin. Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Seattle: University of Washington Press, Spring 2009.

Lam, Joseph S. C. Kunqu: A Classical Opera of Twenty-First-Century China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.

[Abstract: Lam offers a holistic and interdisciplinary view on kunqu, a 600-year-old genre of Chinese opera that is being fashionably performed inside and outside of China. He explains how and why the genre charms and signifies Chinese culture, history, and personhood. As the first comprehensive and scholarly book on kunqu written in English, the book not only discusses the genre in cultural and historical terms but also analyzes its shows as performative, cultural, social, and political communications. It approaches the genre from several perspectives, ranging from those of performers and producers to those of casual audience, dedicated connoisseurs, and scholarly critics. Lam also employs a judicious blend of Chinese and international theories and methods. Through this comprehensive study of kunqu, Lam has established the significance of the genre not only in the sphere of Chinese music, but also among the cultural heritage and performing arts at a global level.]

Lee, Tong Soon. “Grace Liu and Cantonese Opera in England: Becoming Chinese Oversees.” In Helen Rees, ed., Lives in Chinese Music. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 119-144.

Luo, Liang. “The Digital Classicism of the Cantonese Opera Film White Snake.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 442-61.

[Abstract: This article examines the 2019 Cantonese opera film White Snake as an important case of an evolving “digital classicism,” making use of audience-based digitally produced and transmitted Chinese-language materials, among other sources. The article contextualizes the Cantonese opera film as continuing the tradition of experimenting with the White Snake theme, using the genres of local opera and opera film, and special and visual effects enabled by the newest technology. It then moves to a close reading of a series of danmu, anonymous live comments on the Cantonese opera film trailer posted on Bilibili, as important entry points for the study of audience participation in digital times. The digitally produced “ink painting–style Chinese aesthetics” of the film, its digital breakthrough as a “musical with Chinese characteristics,” as well as various forms of fan and anti-fan digital labor triggered by the film, provide further evidence on the importance of “the digital” as “processes of sense making.” The article concludes with thoughts on what difference “the digital” might be able to make in this long history of representing what has become a “classical” Chinese legend.]

Mittler, Barbara. “Mit Geschick den Tigerberg erobern–Zur Interpretation einer multiplen Quelle.” In Lesarten eines globalen Prozesses. Quellen und Interpretationen zur Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, Festschrift für Dietmar Rothermund, (Andreas Eckert Hrsg.). Münster: LIT (Parerga), 1998, 35-51.

Ng, Wing Chung. The Rise of Cantonese Opera: From Village Art Form to Global Phenomenon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

[Abstract: Defined by its distinct performance style, stage practices, and regional- and dialect-based identities, Cantonese opera originated as a traditional art form performed by itinerant companies in temple courtyards and rural market fairs. In the early 1900s, however, Cantonese opera began to capture mass audiences in the commercial theaters of Hong Kong and Guangzhou–and changed forever. Wing Chung Ng charts Cantonese opera’s confrontations with state power, nationalist discourses, and its challenge to the ascendancy of Peking opera as the country’s preeminent “national theatre.” Mining vivid oral histories and heretofore untapped archival sources, Ng relates how Cantonese opera evolved from a fundamentally rural tradition into a form of urbanized entertainment distinguished by a reliance on capitalization and celebrity performers. He also expands his analysis to the transnational level, showing how massive waves of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia and North America further re-shaped Cantonese opera into a vibrant part of the ethnic Chinese social life and cultural landscape in the many corners of a sprawling diaspora. An engaging examination of a global phenomenon, The Rise of Cantonese Opera rewrites the political, artistic, and economic history of an art form and an industry.]

Rao, Nancy Yunhwa. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2017.

[Abstract: The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown’s sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.]

—–. “Transnationalism and Everyday Practice: Chinatown Theatres of North America in the 1920s.” Ethnomusicology Forum 26/1 (2016): 107-130.

—–. “From Chinatown Opera to The First Emperor: Racial Imagination, the Trope of “Chinese opera,” and New Hybridity.” In Mary Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley, eds., Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance. New York: Routledge, 2015, 50-67.

—–. “Cantonese Opera in Turn-of-the Century Canada: Local History and Transnational Circulation.” 19th Century Music Review 11/2 (2014): 291-310.

—–. “Asian-American Music: Chinese-American.” In Charles Garret, ed., New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, vol. 1: 221-24.

—–. “Musical theater—Ethnic Traditions, Asian, Chinatown Theater.” In Charles Garrett, ed., New Grove Dictionary of American Music. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, vol. 5: 634-36.

—–. “The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco of the 1920s.” Journal of the Society for American Music 5/2 (2011): 235-270.

—–. “The Color of Music Heritage: Chinese America in American Ultra-Modern Music.” Journal of Asian American Studies 12/1 (2009): 83-119.

—–. “Racial Essence and Historical Invisibility: Chinese Opera in New York, 1930.” Cambridge Opera Journal 12/2 (2000): 135-62.

Wichmann, Elizabeth. Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimensions of Beijing Opera. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

Yung, Bell. “Model Opera as Model: From Shajiabang to Sagabong.” In McDougall, ed. Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979. Berkeley: UCP, 1984, 144-64.

—–. Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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