Conference Agenda

This paper poses to music studies what Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel have recently raised in literary studies: “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” (2021). Noting the metaphorical inflation of “extractions” in the humanities amid the looming climate crisis, Szeman and Wenzel warn that equating the “extraction […] of meaning via the reading of literary text” with “mining coal, drilling for oil, and harvesting timber” obfuscates the materiality of resource extractions that “gives extractivism its conceptual bite.” As music scholars have been using the term “extractive” figuratively in advocating for epistemological decolonization, this paper asks how “extractive listening” can be not just a materialist metaphor for hegemony or appropriation but a concrete analytics of power. Because “natural resources” only exist as such in relation to human activities, resource extractions imply a “cultural and ideological rationale” that turns stuff into depletable resources. Instead of the generic “taking something out” of its own context, extractivism entails resource-making as a form of relation-making: positing the existence of stuff out there that teleologically awaits extraction.

This paper tests this resource-making heuristic with two cases from the high Qing’s frontiers—eighteenth-century China being the canonic “Other” in the Eurocentric historiography of resource and colonial capitalism. The first follows the official Yu Honghe's 1697 mining of gunpowder-grade sulfur in Taiwan, highlighting how his disacousmatizing trek to locate the sulfur spring’s mysterious rumblings and his experience of indigenous songs undergirded his portrayal of the island as primed for Confucian assimilation. The second examines the Qianlong Emperor’s 1761 excavation of Xinjiang’s jade to make sounding stones and rebuke Neo-Confucian weariness of the corruptive sounds of foreign raw materials. In neither case did the exploitation of indigenous knowledge or labor effect ecological transformations or surplus-value accumulations paradigmatic of resource capitalism. Nonetheless, both cases of listening through resource extractions conceptualized newly incorporated territories (Taiwan and Xinjiang) as destined toward assimilation. These illustrate how “extractive listening” exerts power not by removing or misinterpreting the cultural, epistemological, or ontological contexts of “proper listening” but by tethering the object to the subject of listening with a teleological bond.

After being unjustly incarcerated during the Cultural Revolution, Wang Xilin intensively studied the music of formerly censored twentieth-century European composers during the 1980s. Finding his distinctive voice as a composer did not occur until 1989-90, when Wang composed his first work reflecting his new understanding of music since 1900 after intensively studying the music of such composers as Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Penderecki. Wang’s Symphony no. 3 is a monumental four-movement symphony, and his first composition based on the concept of human suffering; the profound mood prevailing throughout reflects Wang’s concern for China’s history, and for the entire destiny of humankind.

The opening movement of Symphony no. 3 represents the prisoner and his fate in life. After this movement’s completion on May 29th of 1989, the trajectory of the entire symphony was forever changed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre six days later, and the latter three movements of the symphony were composed in direct response to this tragic event. Movement two depicts the massacre itself, invoking images of the grotesque, rudeness, and arrogance, while the third movement depicts a long, dark night after the killing at Tiananmen Square. Wang discovered Harmonielehre by John Adams around 1989, assimilating the principles of Western minimalism into his concluding movement as he depicts the entire country of China as one big jail, with its people all being prisoners. It is only after the premiere performance in 1991 that Wang revealed the meaning of each movement, thus ensuring that the chances of hearing one of his most impressive symphonies in China again would be pretty much nonexistent. Yet rather surprisingly, Symphony no. 3 did receive two performances during the new millennium in Shanghai (2017) and Beijing (2018), although the program notes were carefully written to hide the true meaning of each movement. Wang Xilin’s first work on the theme of human suffering has received critical acclaim from Chinese and Russian musicologists, deserving a place as one of the most impressive symphonies of the late twentieth century.

Zheng Xiaoying (1929–), the first female conductor in China, has been a staunch advocate for yangxizhongchang—chanting Western works in Chinese—since the 1980s, when she was the chief conductor of the China National Opera. In 1981, she worked with French director Rene Terrasson, conductor Jean Périsson, and soprano Jacqueline Brumaire on rehearsing for the Mandarin rendition of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. This experience led Zheng to take on the task of re-translating Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) since 1985, a cultural history that has yet been understood not only in the Anglo-American academy, but also in the Chinese scholarly community.

This paper draws on the author’s interview with Zheng in January 2024 in Xiamen, China, and the study of Zheng’s personal notes, study scores, and translations on which Zheng based her work, to reconstruct such a history. This reconstruction re-presents Zheng’s own narrative of the history and is pitched against the author’s post/de-colonial reading thereof (Nagar 2019; Apter 2006). The objectives of this investigation are twofold: first, to showcase that a critical examination of this history enables us to perceive Das Lied through a non-Western linguistic and cognitive framework that significantly impacts the relationship between music and text (Bhabha 2016); and second, to emphasize the importance of resisting the enchantment of transnationality and interculturality that translation often entails, and instead recognizing the performative sovereignty that layers of translation confess through music. As Zheng repeatedly emphasized: “Music is for the people.”

Jokar graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music as China's first Tibetan composer with a doctorate, but is chronically undervalued because of the remoteness of his location in Lhasa, Tibet from the cosmopolitan centers of China. This paper examines Jokar’s symphonic poem Gendun Chophel. Born in 1903, Gendun Chophel was a Tibetan Buddhist poet and philosopher. A scholar who pursued Buddhist learning in his sojourn to India in 1934-1946, he was the author of voluminous writings. Because of this, Gendun Chophel was targeted by British colonial forces which had set up Tibet as a buffer zone from China, and which influenced Tibetan authorities to imprison him upon his return to Tibet. This history is typically erased in official PRC narratives that cast Gendun Chophel as a PRC nationalist, whereas historical research has cast doubt on the veracity of that narrative. This paper presents an interpretation of Jokar’s Gendun Chophel, which is highly understudied, with one sole article interpreting the work in terms of the fact that the 48 years of Gendun Chophel’s life (1903-1951) coincided with 4 cycles of the 12-year zodiac that has an animal assigned to each year; Gendun Chophel was born and died in the year of the hare. In place of this superficial reading, I reinterpret Jokar’s Gendun Chophel in terms of the philosopher’s biography, from his flourishing in India to the injustice of his eventual imprisonment, discerning a palindromic structure that expresses the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation.