Conference Agenda

The emergence of the modern discipline of musicology in Republican Shanghai (1911-1949) has been bound to German-educated reformer Xiao Youmei (1884-1940), cofounder of China’s first music conservatory in 1927. Unsurprisingly, the historiography of Chinese musicology is dominated by narratives of Westernization. Yet such narratives miss a major countercurrent in Chinese music-historical thought which has exploded in significance in the 21st century.

This countercurrent found its clearest early expression in Shanghai pipa master Shen Haochu’s (1889-1953) Yangzhengxuan of 1929. This paper makes the case that the Yangzhengxuan, heretofore read primarily as a record of a pipa performance tradition, was also a pioneering music-historiographical text. Shen broke with tradition to claim that historical music could not be transmitted textually unless its texts adequately notated bodily gesture. In habituating itself with such notation, the musicking body could cultivate a competency through which to re-discover historical music in performance. This is diametrically opposed to Xiao’s understanding of Chinese music history as lamentably “mute,” reparable only through the adoption of staff notation to fix historical works as sonic structures. Shen’s historiography was inherently embodied, rather than cognitive; his music made up not of sonic structures, but gestures.

I contend that the Yangzhengxuan laid out a program for musical modernization, overshadowed in scholarship by that of Xiao, which has nonetheless birthed a genealogy of historiographical thought integral to Chinese musicology. Inasmuch as the discipline consolidated in Shanghai in the 1920s, it did so not solely as an offshoot of German musicology but rather between and across two contrastive genealogies, neither of which has completely subsumed the other during the intervening century. What appears as radical difference between the music historiography of the late 20th century and that of the past decade is neither the internal development of Western-derived inquiry nor the emergence of an entirely novel paradigm; rather, it is the claiming of greater discourse power by heirs to Shen’s genealogy. As historiographical discourse has rapidly decentralized following shifts in China’s media economy, it is the musicking body, and not the notated work, which is poised to re-mediate China’s musical past.