Music

posts on music in Greater China

Mass arrests in Xinjiang continue (1)

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Follow-up on my post about the targeted arrests of Uighur musicians:

Today the Concerned Scholars of Xinjiang, @XJscholars reminds us [https://twitter.com/XJscholars/status/1078636936162492416] about the pop singer ABLAJAN AWUT AYUP, 33, disappeared into the camps since Feb 2018. He is especially prominent for his Uyghur language songs for children. They give a fabulous example from Youtube:

Uyghur Song 2016 | Soyvmlvk Muellim | By : Ablajan Awut Ayup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFRolBeXHEc

The reason Chinese authorities is cracking down on indigenous musicians like this, is they want to destroy the culture. This is a figure that inspires pride and joy in being Uyghur and happy — and BTW, perfectly happy to include Han Chinese “pengyou” and foreign English, in the images.

And a viable, healthy, confident, strong Uighur identity is precisely what can’t be allowed now under the ultra-extremist Chinese regime. Harrassing cultural icons and disappearing them goes with the mass arresting of parents and grandparents and hauling the “orphaned” children off to Chinese-only orphanages.

–cf. also today, another article about how as one small part of the state terror campaign, they’re painting over all bilingual signs in Uighur on university campuses, so that there will be CHINESE ONLY. See pictures:

https://bitterwinter.org/the-orwellian-life-in-xinjiang-campuses/

Magnus Fiskesjö <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>

Chthonic live streams to HK after visa rejection

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Source: Focus Taiwan (12/26/18)
Taiwan band Chthonic live streams to HK after visa rejection
By William Yen

Image taken from www.facebook.com/HOCCHOCC

Taipei, Dec. 26 (CNA) A Taiwanese heavy metal band performed for their fans in Hong Kong by live video streaming a performance Tuesday, after their frontman, a pro-Taiwan independence lawmaker, was denied a work visa to perform in the special administrative region.

Freddy Lim (林昶佐), a legislator from Taiwan’s New Power Party and his band Chthonic jammed over Facebook Live with Canto-pop star Denise Ho on the second to last day of a music festival the band was invited to perform at. Continue reading Chthonic live streams to HK after visa rejection →

Memes of 2018

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Source: Sup China (12/19/18)
‘Men Are All Pig’s Feet’ — And Other Chinese Memes Of 2018 That Reflect Our Times
A year in which online users saw through the BS and women said “Enough.”
By Frankie Huang

Memes have become a way to appreciate and participate in popular culture, a way to find solidarity, construct identity, and communicate with precision.

Memes like Distracted Boyfriend and BBQ Becky are products of their times, and when people look back on them, they’ll be seen as more than just clever tools of satire: they are snapshots of what captured the public consciousness at the moment of their inception. Continue reading Memes of 2018 →

An evening of East Asian vocal arts

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Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to let you know about an upcoming East Asian vocal concert at Swarthmore College on Nov. 3, 8-9:30PM. Guest artists from Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul will deliver the world’s greatest cultural treasures—Kunqu, Noh and Pansori—in one evening, with selection of the most canonical compositions: Tanci (The Ballad from Palace of Lasting Life), Kiyotsune and Hagomoro (The Feather Mantle), and Ch’unhyanga (The Song of a Faithful Wife). This concert highlights these seamlessly merged, musically invaluable arts. The concert is free and open to the public. If you are in Philadelphia area during the next weekend, please let me know and I will reserve seats for you.

I myself will be the vocalist in the Kunqu performance. While both the Noh and Pansori singers are in the lineage of UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” in their native soils, respectively, as a Kunqu singer I will represent the branch of the Chinese heritage that has almost been forgotten–my master of Kunqu, Mr. ZHU Fu, studied Kunqu under a disciple of Aisin Gioro Putong, the brother of China’s last emperor, in the last few years of the Cultural Revolution, and passed on all that he learned from Ye to me in 2002, before I came to the US to pursue my Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago.

There will also be a reception after the concert, which offers opportunities to mingle and communicate with guest artists.

Best wishes,
Peng Xu <pxu1@swarthmore.edu>

Sinophone Musical Worlds–call for contributions

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Call for contributions China Perspectives / Perspectives chinoises
Sinophone Musical Worlds and their Publics
Guest editor: Dr Nathanel Amar, postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong

Download PDF File here:  Call for abstracts CP China musical worlds

http://www.cefc.com.hk/china-perspectives/submissions/call-sinophone-musical-worlds-publics/

Recent success of Chinese reality television singing competitions broadcasted on national television or streamed directly on the internet, has shown the extent of musical genres represented in the Chinese world, from pop to folk via hip-hop or rock ’n’ roll. The popularity of new musical styles up to then considered as deviant as well as the recent attempts of the State to intervene directly on musical contents, tend to blur the distinctions between “mainstream” (流行) music, “popular” (民间) music as non-official, “underground” (地下) music or even “alternative” (另类) music. This call for papers aims at promoting a better understanding of the transformations of Chinese “musical worlds”, in the sense that Becker gave to “art worlds”, which stresses the role of cooperation and interactions between the different actors of the artistic sphere. As Becker wrote, “all artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the artwork we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation” (Becker, 2008: 1). We thus welcome contributions which take into consideration the necessary cooperation between individuals, allowing the constitution of musical worlds. Continue reading Sinophone Musical Worlds–call for contributions →

Chengdu hip hop

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Source: Guernica (8/29/18)
Chengdu Cool: The Rise of Sichuan’s Homegrown Hip Hop
The city of Chengdu is raising China’s new generation of rappers. They are playful, provocative and boldly assert a distinct regional sound that the public has not heard before. But under the tightening grip of the government censor, can Chengdu’s hip-hop artists keep their cool?
By 

Photo by Yi-Ling Liu

The moment the elevator doors opened, Pema Tenzin found the party that he’d been looking for. He just hadn’t expected to find it here.

From the outside, Poly Center appears to be one of many dull, nondescript office buildings lining the streets of the Chinese city of Chengdu. But inside, on the twenty-first floor that autumn night in 2016, the air was thick with laughter, strobing multicolored light, and the muscular thud thud thud of the bass was booming from the speakers. Young people leaned against the walls of the cramped corridors, taking hits of laughing gas from candy-colored balloons before diving back into one of three clubs in the vicinity. At the end of the hall was his destination, the experience he’d been anticipating since he left Gansu: NASA, Chengdu’s hottest hip-hop club, where an MC that Pema had long admired from afar freestyled for the sweaty crowd. Continue reading Chengdu hip hop →

Song King

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New Publication
Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China
Author: Gibbs, Levi S.
University of Hawai’i Press, 2018

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: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China, Levi S. 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. Continue reading Song King →

Underground club music thriving against the odds

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Source: Fact Magazine (3/4/18)
How underground club music in China is thriving against the odds
By APRIL CLARE WELSH

Image via: Arkham Shanghai

Underground club music in China is faced with a number of unique challenges, from internet censorship to police crackdowns and rising rents. But thanks to a dedicated and diverse range of artists, promoters, broadcasters and DJs, alternative culture is thriving in 2018. April Clare Welshspeaks to some of the hard-working movers and shakers keeping the scene alive against the odds. Scroll down to the end for a SoundCloud playlist.

It’s not easy being an underground club music fan in communist China. Internet censorship blocks access to major western music sites including SoundCloud, YouTube and Spotify and the live scene is up against escalating rents, strict building regulations and police raids. But since its beginnings in the late ‘90s, clubbing in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan has provided plenty of alternative spaces for electronic music adventurers, with a constant stream of artists, producers, broadcasters and label heads pushing things forward. Continue reading Underground club music thriving against the odds →

Seeking sources for Sound Ethnographies class

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Hello Colleagues,

A artist/filmmaker friend and I are creating a new class, “Sound Ethnographies of China” here at NYU Shanghai, and we’d love your suggestions for reading and listening assignments for our students as they collect sounds and interviews and edit them into audio ethnographies. Possible themes include salvage ethnography, form/content, structures of feeling experienced through sound, and STS. Are you familiar with (accessible) sound archives, good folklore studies, or writings on sound culture on China? Please get in touch. We are particularly interested in sound art: early recordings of music or theater, or writings on any period focusing on sound art (music, theater, film/TV, sound-based installation and performance art).

Thanks for thinking with us!

Leksa Lee
Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow, NYU Shanghai
leksa.lee@nyu.edu

Tan Dun’s Passacaglia

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Source: CBC Radio (2/8/18)
Why this Toronto conductor wants you to keep your cellphone on during the show

Toronto Esprit Orchestra music director Alex Pauk will conduct both the musicians and the audience during an interactive performance called Plug In.

Toronto Esprit Orchestra music director Alex Pauk will conduct both the musicians and the audience during an interactive performance called Plug In. ( Bo Huang/Toronto Esprit Orchestra)

When Alex Pauk appears on stage to conduct an orchestra on Sunday evening, he’ll turn to face the audience instead of the musicians.

Then he’ll do something even stranger — ask the spectators to take out their phones and turn them on.

Continue reading Tan Dun’s Passacaglia →

Hip hop ban not about hip hop

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Like so many things in China, the trouble with hip hop is its popularity–its ability to draw a crowd.–Anne Henochowicz  <annemh2@gmail.com>

Source: Magpie Digest (1/25/18)
China’s Hip Hop Ban is Not Really About Hip Hop
This is issue #9 of the Magpie Digest newsletter, originally sent on 1/25/2018

Co-champions of Rap of China, GAI and PG One

On January 18th, Rap of China co-champion GAI was abruptly pulled from the celebrity-studded entertainment reality TV show 歌手 (“The Singer”) right before the second episode aired, despite a wildly successful performance the week before. The next day, Sina Entertainment reported that his hasty removal from the show was likely due to a broader governmental crackdown on “countercultural content” on television. Continue reading Hip hop ban not about hip hop →

Hip-hop culture faces crackdown

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Source: BBC News (1/24/18)
China’s fledgling hip-hop culture faces official crackdown
By Beijing bureau, BBC News

Rap of China poster

Image copyrightIQIYI. PG One was the first of China’s A-list rappers to fall from grace

Last summer, a reality show called The Rap of China took the country by storm.

The show brought hip-hop music from the underground into the limelight and made it a multi-million dollar business. Several of the top contestants shot to stardom.

In the past few weeks, however, things took a surprising turn and the buzzing hip-hop scene was quickly muzzled.

It all started with PG One, one of the two rappers who won The Rap of China. He was accused of having an affair with a married celebrity. Continue reading Hip-hop culture faces crackdown →

Chinese composers with an ear to the world

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Source: NYT (1/12/18)
Chinese Composers With an Ear to the World
By JACOB DREYER

Joel Sachs conducting the New Juilliard Ensemble. Mr. Sachs is the founder and organizer of Juilliard’s annual Focus! festival, concentrating this year on contemporary Chinese music. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

What makes Chinese music Chinese? After a century of revolution and change, how do contemporary Chinese composers understand and reflect their heritage, even as they try to connect with global audiences?

These are questions that get to the heart of a musical culture that remains largely veiled to American listeners. The Juilliard School’s annual Focus! festival of new composition is trying to pull aside that veil, to make the world of music a bit smaller. With “China Today,” a series of six free concerts from Jan. 19 to 26, the school is avoiding traditional Chinese instruments and foreign-based composers, choosing instead to concentrate on Chinese artists living and working in their own country, and using the same instrumental forces as those in the United States and Europe. Continue reading Chinese composers with an ear to the world →

PG One under fire

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Source: Sup China (1/4/18)
PG One Under Fire For Lyrics Glorifying Drugs, Sex, And The Pursuit Of Wealth
Rapper’s song “Christmas Eve” is denounced by the Communist Youth League for promoting drug use and insulting women.
By Jiayun Feng

Wang Hao 王昊, aka PG One, one of China’s best-known rappers, who rose to fame this year on the hit show The Rap of China, issued an apology on January 4 after one of his old songs, “Christmas Eve,” was criticized for its dark lyrics.

The backlash started when some internet users complained on Weibo that the song contains “degrading and out of line” lyrics. The Communist Youth League made a post (in Chinese) on its official Weibo account to criticize the song for “encouraging teenagers to use drugs” and “insulting women.”

https://youtu.be/hKLHznBvGRM

Read the rest of the essay, with its many images and video clips, here.

Spending on music in China

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Source: Sup China (9/14/17)
China’s per capita spending on music is $0.15, only 0.7 percent that of Japan’s
By Jiayun Feng

“We didn’t pay for music, but we watched ads. I think it’s quite fair.”

“I am appalled by those comments questioning why we should pay for the music we listen to. I know most Chinese have a low level of intellectual property consciousness, but it’s still sad to see that many people have zero respect for musicians and their works. They are not obliged to provide free music for you. Today, you enjoy pirated music and generations after us will have no good Chinese songs to listen to as a result.”

Music tastes of Chinese individuals are very alike — primarily cheesy and insubstantial love songs with hook-laden melodies. Yet as the two comments above indicate, opinions are significantly divided (in Chinese) as to whether music listeners should pay for the products they consume, a poignant question raised by a recent report (in Chinese) from the Communication University of China in Beijing, which reveals the alarming status of China’s digital music industry. Continue reading Spending on music in China →