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East Asian Voices in Global Music Stories

East Asian Voices in Global Music Stories

A Hybrid Conference

This symposium brings together emerging and converging strands of activity and critical thinking around transnational East Asian presences in unevenly globalised music and sounded scenes around the world.

Building on a recent spate of academic meets and performances/ workshops themed on East Asian voices, including multiple panels on the theme at annual conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology and American Musicological Association, as well as recent work in in the UK on Transpacific East AsiaRacialised Performance in Western Classical Music and Cultural Imperialism and the “New Yellow Peril”, we seek to make meaningful community together once more in expanding and intersecting scenes within musicology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, composition, and sound studies. We locate ourselves strategically beyond the scopes of Western art music and delve into shared global sounded histories, presences, communities, practices and futures. 

Conference booklet

To view the conference booklet, please visit this webpage (link embedded)

With thanks

With thanks to Royal Holloway School of Performing & Digital Arts, Open University and Music&Letters for funding contributions towards this event

Join us

Limited spaces are available for in-person attendance on Wednesday 7th August 2024 at Bedford Square. Please contact shzree.tan@rhul.ac.uk to secure a place.

About our symposium

We ask challenging questions of ourselves and our friends/ colleagues and allies: 

How are East Asian voices represented and co-presented in performance, academic and listening spaces in discourses and activities around sound and music, today?

How have stereotypes about East Asian performers/ scholars (eg as ‘automatons and robots’; as ‘model minorities’; as ‘rich international students paying high fees’; as ‘creative overachievers’; as 'mystical' Shakuhachi players; as ‘Violin/Tiger Mums’; as ‘'nerd-cool violinists'; as anime-styled zither players, and more) changed over the past few decades?   

Looking deeper into historical presences, how have East Asian voices been ‘hiding in plain sight’, or ‘invisibilized’, or ‘refashioned’ and ‘re-launched’ , locally and globally, over time?

Drawing from the work of Koichi Iwabuchi (2002) and Chen Kuan-Hsing’s Asia As Method (2013), what does a recentering of globalisation look like from East Asian eyes and ears in 2023, given the asynchronous, layered and complex transnational experiences of different (and intergenerational) East Asian individuals and communities within and beyond East Asian territories and various diaspora?

How do East Asian music practitioners and researchers construct vastly-different identities of the Self, and identities of the Other in multiple scenes? How do East Asian musicians make sense of “the rest of the world”? What is the value in looking at a view of the sounded and musical world from exceptionalist standpoints of (for example) transnational China, Japan and Korea?

In changing politico-economic climates where East Asian constituents are now often seen as bearing new forms of privilege even as they remain minoritized in structurally-unequal systems, how is intersectionality understood and practised? 

What are the inter-East Asian relationships and hierarchies in different (for example) transnational/ transpacific Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander worlds, and where do these interactions play out in sounded and musical worlds within unevenly globalised contexts? How is musical solidarity enacted/ compromised in East Asian negotiations with, and responsibilities towards communities in the wider Black & Global Majority? 

Expanding the intersectional scope even further, where do different East Asian voices figure in fast-changing debates on intergenerational notions of academic/ musical “progressivity”, “postcolonial trauma/anxiety”, current “hopes and fears”, musical decolonisation, and also debates on new minoritisations caused by environmental change and economic precarity?

9.30am - 11.00am Keynote Panel Room 1: Plenary – Inter-East Asian perspectives
11.00am - 12.30pm

Break-out rooms

Room 1a: Sinophone Diversities

Room 2a: Representations/ Institutional Affordances

Room 3a: Contemporary/ New Sonic Articulations

Room 4a: Old/New Histories

12.30pm - 13.30pm Lunch
13.30pm - 15.00pm

Room 1b: Systemic and Real-life Challenges Today

Room 2b: Transnational Politics, ‘Authenticity’ & Race

15.00pm - 15.30pm Tea Break
15.30pm - 17.00pm Keynote Panel Room 1c: New Musical Intersectionalities
17.00pm - 18.00pm Wrap Room 1c: Paths Forward

Alexander M. Cannon is an ethnomusicologist with research expertise in Vietnamese music and creativity studies. He is Associate Professor of Music in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham and Principal Investigator of the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded project SoundDecisions. His monograph Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) won the RMA/CUP Outstanding Monograph Book Prize in 2023. He has further publications in EthnomusicologyEthnomusicology ForumAsian Music, and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

 

Jocelyn Clark is an assistant professor at Pai Chai University in South Korea. She has published in academic journals such as The World of Music, Asian Musicology, and Perspectives on Korean Music. Her research interests include orality, music of place, contemporary ‘national music’ performance practices in Korea, China, and Japan, and how these practices are coming into the age of AI. She s engaged in long-term field research on sanjo and byeongchang. Korean traditional genres of which she is also an official government-licensed (in the Intangible Cultural Heritage System) practitioner. She commissioned and/or premiered over 30 new works for Korean gayageum.

 

Kiku Day is a shakuhachi player and ethnomusicologist – and a world traveller from Copenhagen, Denmark, who is working at the intersections of performance of traditional shakuhachi music, contemporary music, composition and improvisation, ethnomusicology, history, politics, meditation and writing. She is a founding member of the European Shakuhachi Society (ESS) for which she served as a chairperson 2009-2019. Together with Michael Soumei Coxall, she initiated the European Shakuhachi Summer School and Festival in 2006 – a festival which is held in a new country every year.

 

Hannah Hyun kyong Chang is a Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include transpacific and global music history; early Protestant music in Korea; and musical modernity and modernism in East Asia. 

 

Alexander Douglas
A lecturer at both King’s College London and the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Alexander’s research identity began with music and theology before expanding to multiple issues constellating around philosophical and theological anthropology, aesthetics, epistemology, the critical medical humanities and race.

 

Amanda Hsieh is Assistant Professor in Musicology at Durham University. She is the winner of the 2021 Jerome Roche Prize and the 2023 Kurt Weil Prize. Her ongoing monograph project is tentatively entitled ‘The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music, 1910–1945’.

 

Eric Hung is a musicologist with extensive experience in non-profit management, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His academic research focuses on Asian American music and public musicology. Current projects include a book on trauma and cultural trauma in Asian American music and an edited volume on public musicology.  His pedagogical project, “Incorporating Local Musics in the Undergraduate Music History Curriculum,” won the Teaching Award from the American Musicological Society. Hung is also an active pianist and conductor who has performed in Germany, Austria, Hong Kong, and Australia and throughout North America. Prior to joining the nonprofit world full-time, he was a tenured professor at Westminster Choir College of Rider University.

 

Hee-sun Kim has a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a former ICTMMEA chair and the Director of Division of Music Research at the National Gugak Center, and currently professor of ethnomusicology and Korean Studies at Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea and Executive Director of Jeonju International Sori Festival.

 

Maiko Kawabata is an award-winning musicologist and violinist educated at Cambridge University (B.A.) and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D.). She joined the Royal College of Music in 2017 having previously held positions on the faculties of the University of Edinburgh, University of East Anglia, and the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her main research interest is in the history of musical performance, with a focus on extremes of solo violin playing – convention-breaking styles and ideas such as virtuosity and unplayability.

 

Roe-Min Kok is a music historian with wide-ranging, interdisciplinary interests. She studies the history of the European family and domesticity, nineteenth-century notions of childhood and children’s music, the family of Robert and Clara Schumann, and music colonialism in global history (western art music in non-western/ postcolonial/ colonial settings, imperial music educational systems and decolonizing initiatives). Underlying her work is a fundamental curiosity about socio-cultural frameworks through which music is created, received, understood, and discussed. She employs a wide assortment of methods ranging from philology and autoethnography to critical cultural theories on race, gender, and class in pursuing answers to the query: “To what questions can this musical work (or music phenomena) provide answers?”

 

 

Hedy Law is Associate Professor of Musicology and Acting Director of the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include eighteenth-century French spectacle, the French Enlightenment, music with Cantonese lyrics, and global music history.

 

Frederick Lau is an ethnomusicologist, flutist, and conductor whose scholarly interests include a broad range of topics in Chinese, Western, and Asian music and cultures.  He has published widely on issues related to music and identity, nationalism, modernization, politics, globalization, diaspora, musical hybridity as well as Western avant-garde music. Lau has received numerous research grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Scholarly Communication with the PRC, Freeman Grants, and the German Academic Exchange (D.A.A.D.).  He served as the former book review editor of the Yearbook for Traditional Music and is editor of a book series entitled Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press.

Nikki Moran is a Senior Lecturer in Music. Her work examines the social situation of musical performance and spans critical, theoretical and empirical research involving elite North Indian instrumentalists, jazz and free improvisers, and western classical ensembles and conductors. Her latest publications include articles on musical mind and imagination for Music & Science (SAGE) and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (Cambridge Core), and a forthcoming co-authored chapter, ‘Interaction in Indian music: Connections and critical reflection’.  Her current research addresses the function and nature of 'accompaniment' as a creative form of social interaction, based on detailed musical ethnographies of expert accompanists. 

 

Qian Mu is an editor at RILM International Centre. Born in Tianjin, China, Mu received his PhD in ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London, with a dissertation on music and meaning in Uyghur Sufism. His publications appeared in Central Asian SurveyEuropean Journal of Musicology, and The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in EthnomusicologyEveryone listen close—Wanp-wanp jangl kap, a CD he recorded and produced of the polyphonic songs of southwestern China’s Dong/Kam people, was selected by the Transglobal World Music Chart as the Best Asia & Pacific album of the 2019–2020 season. Mu also organizes international tours for Chinese musicians and hosts serial radio shows on BBC to introduce Chinese music.

 

Meng Ren is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and lecturer of ethnomusicology at the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University. Meng received his PhD degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree in international higher education from New York University. 

 

Nancy Yunhwa Rao has produced award-winning research on a range of topics, including gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans. Her publications have provided innovative analytical approaches to cross-cultural music, and enhanced public discussions about cultural encounter in music. Through her scholarship, as well as teaching, she has promoted diversity and advanced knowledge and dialogue about the complexity of diversity issues in music scholarship.

 

Shzr Ee Tan is a Reader and ethnomusicologist/performance studies researcher (with a specialism in Sinophone, Southeast Asian and Indigenous geocultures) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is committed to decolonial work and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) practice in sound studies and the performing arts, with interests in how race discourses intersects with new digitalities, geopolitical shifts in power, and recent debates on climate awareness, multispecies thinking, changemaking, and precarity. Shzr Ee is also Vice Dean of EDI for the School of Performing and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway

 

Ken Ueno, is a composer, vocalist, improviser, and sound artist.  His music celebrates artistic possibilities which are liberated through a Whitmanesque consideration of the embodied practice of unique musical personalities. Much of Ueno’s music is “person-specific” wherein the intricacies of performance practice is brought into focus in the technical achievements of a specific individual fused, inextricably, with that performer’s aura. His artistic mission is to champion sounds that have been overlooked or denied so that audiences reevaluate their musical potential. Ueno’s artistic mission is to push the boundaries of perception and challenges traditional paradigms of beauty, and champion the talents of specific performers.

 

Xiao Mei is a professor and director of the Research Institute of Ritual Music and the Asian-European Music Research Centre at Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She is president of the Association for Traditional Music in China, EB member f the Institute of China Uyghur Classical Literature and Muqam and editor of Asian European Music Research Journal and was an International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Executive Board member (2011-2019). Her research encompasses minority music in China ecomusicology, shamanic music, organology, audiovisual archiving, and intangible cultural heritage.

 

Mari Yoshihara  is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi and Professor at the Center for Global Education at the University of Tokyo. She is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford, 2003), Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (Temple, 2007), Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro (Oxford, 2019), as well as numerous books in Japanese. She is currently working on a follow-up research on Asians and Asian American in classical music and also on a social and cultural history of piano lessons in Japan. From 2014 to 2024, she served as the editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association.

 

Shelley Zhang is a musician, creative writer, President of the Association for Chinese Music Research, and Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Rutgers University. Her scholarly work examines issues of migration, citizenship, and race, with a particular focus on the transnational careers of Chinese musicians in Western art music within the context of the one-child policy. Her interdisciplinary work explores the potentially intimate relationships between late capitalism and the performing arts, and seeks to illumine understudied histories through ethnographic and archival methods. She has received funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Wolf Humanities Center, amongst others. 

 

East Asian Musicians In Global Music Stories

Artwork generated using 'East Asian Music' prompt on deepai.org

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