Conference Agenda

This talk is about how Chicago's early 20th-century Race women (i.e., Black women intellectuals and creatives committed to the entwined tasks of racial uplift and gendered progress) operated out of their South Side base and shaped a new vision for classical music that transformed the city and beyond.

This talk offers reflections on what it might mean for a music historian to think about layers of connected history in the place we now call Chicago and how this kind of global history can inform the work of imagining futures we can live with.

In 1937, with the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the government of the Republic of China moved its capital from Nanjing, a river port in eastern China, to Chongqing, an inland city surrounded by mountains in the southwest. The new capital immediately became the Republic’s cultural center. In 1940, China Symphony Orchestra (中华交响乐团) was set up, bringing together conductor Ma Sicong, violinist Wang Renyi and other musicians from the newly established QingMuGuan National Conservatory of Music. The orchestra is China's first symphony orchestra, which was composed entirely of Chinese citizens. Since its founders were important officials of the government and the presidents of Chinese foreign cultural associations, it frequently performed at diplomatic events.

This paper focuses on the "Sunday Concerts" implemented by China Symphony Orchestra since 1943. It takes the reports and comments published in mainstream newspapers such as Xinhua Daily and Yinyue DaoBao as objects. I demonstrate that despite the harsh conditions of wartime and the government's ambiguous attitude, China Symphony Orchestra’s musicians insisted on promoting Western music. Based on the research by Tang Runming (2020) and Cai Yonghong (2019), I provide in-depth observation of the orchestra’s performances and its acceptance by people from all walks of life. The research will also contribute to studying how music shapes the globality of non-port cities and the history of musical exchange between China and the Western world in the early twentieth century.

Despite the influx of Chinese immigrants to the central United States during the mid-nineteenth century, drawn by its relative political stability and increased economic opportunities via the Transcontinental Railroad project, there is little known about their private musical tastes before the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike their counterparts on the coasts, whose more sizable populations were able to sponsor their own Chinese Opera companies throughout the 1850s-60s, such as the Hong Fook Tong Chinese Dramatic Company in San Francisco, the Midwest’s first large-scale exposure to East Asian music was the 1893 World Fair: the event featured both touring artists from overseas as well as Gustav Leuders’ pastiche “The Chinese Temple” within his larger souvenir album An Afternoon in Midway Plaisance commemorating the festival. Chinese-Illinoisans have since persisted through periods of mass immigration, xenophobia, and displacement in search of a sound authentic to their experience. From the residence of the composer/activist Chou Wen-Chung at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1957-59) to the establishment of Chicago Chinatown’s Annual Summer Fair (1979-present), the community has largely prioritized merging musical elements of their heritage with Western forms in a spirit of culture-sharing over “preservation.” Emerging from the collective trauma inflicted by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and despite the introduction of contemporary cultural exports such as Falun Dafa’s “Shen Yun,” this paper traces the history of endemic Chinese-American music-making as a means of establishing its hybrid identity.

The music of the American West has been painted with a broad brush: whether it be Copland’s open fifths or a lone Cowboy on a guitar (Levy 2012). In reality, the musical accounts of the historic American West reflect the deep globality of a region built on migrant labor. In this talk, I argue for an ear turned further inland to those mountainous rural areas whose unique small-town size and geographic isolation forced cultural traditions from across the globe to come together in burning friction. I’m talking about boomtowns.

For a case study, I explore Deadwood, South Dakota’s earliest years. Founded illegally on Lakota land the boomtown roared to life in a matter of days, filled with prospectors and businesspeople from across the world. From probate court records and historical newspapers, I pull out two musical incidents with radical consequences on the lives of those involved: one, where Di Lee, owner of a theatre cum brothel and recent Chinese immigrant, stakes a musical claim to Deadwood’s aural territory, and two, where Julia Francis, a local madam and formerly enslaved woman, violates a noise ordinance to save her business.

While the nineteenth-century American West has long served as a stand-in for white masculinity, and the music written about the region has since amplified this popular belief, studying the musical materiality of rural boomtowns reveals an entirely new understanding of what the music of the American West was. Here, in the rural West, music was a tool savvily leveraged by migrant workers to evade the universalizing force of white American cultural supremacy.

Tbilisi, the capital of the country of Georgia, is often likened to a gateway between West and East. Situated near the ancient city of Mtskheta at the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers, Tbilisi has long served as a vital node in the administrative and commercial networks of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In recent decades, Tbilisi’s history as a multilingual, multiethnic city—especially in the nineteenth century, when Armenian merchants formed a dominant urban class—has been elided in favor of an ethnonational narrative emphasizing the city’s Georgian identity. While images of a tolerant, cosmopolitan “Old Tiflis” may be the stuff of romantic projection, musical life in the early twentieth century, as documented in early gramophone recordings, was indeed remarkably varied, drawing from South Caucasian courtly and folk traditions, and incorporating opera and popular song from western Europe. In this paper, I focus on a pivotal moment in Tbilisi’s history: the brief period of national independence from 1918 to 1921, between imperial and Soviet occupation. These years saw the establishment of two conservatories, the flourishing of Georgian-language opera, and the temporary sojourns of many artists and performers escaping the Bolshevik regime, notably the religious mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and his disciple--the composer Thomas de Hartmann. At the same time, nationalist fervor increasingly prioritized the study and performance of Georgian vocal music—the polyphonic tradition associated with rural, Orthodox Christian communities—to the exclusion of urban styles increasingly denigrated, with evident racialization, as Eastern, hybrid, or otherwise backward.

How does one stage an opera with a main soprano role in a country where woman’s solo voice is prohibited? The dilemma, alongside Khomeini’s call for de-westernisation and de-colonisation of Iran’s culture, resulted in the effective disappearance of opera from the public stage for over twenty-five years.

One solution, developed since 2005 and centred on Tehran, has been the phenomenon of puppet opera, in which the female voice can be tolerated, given that the singer is not visible to the public. A series of newly-commissioned operas has brought together a new generation of composers (many Western-educated), with subject matter exclusively derived from the national literary and religious heritage and a musical language that combines Persian traditional mode-based and improvisatory music with Western compositional style and instrumentation.

The outcome is what has come to be considered "Iran’s National Opera." This reconfiguration of the genre neatly fits the dual narrative that has shaped the country’s history: Iran as the continuation of the ancient Persian Empire and a symbol of progress and global superiority versus Iran as a cradle of Shiitism and Islamic power.

Compared to the pre-Revolutionary practice of performing the Western operatic canon for elite audiences, the new Iranian "opera" is arguably more indigenous than Western, more democratic than elitist, and more accessible than exclusive. As a result, it is also well suited to placing Iran as a potential major player in the Global musical scene.