Performing Modernity Otherwise: Asian Interventions and Reimaginations of the Western Canon
Chair(s): Anne Monique Pace (University of Chicago)
Discussant(s): Emerson Morgan (Oberlin College and Conservatory)
This panel examines how Asian musicians and theatrical practitioners engage with and subvert the frameworks of Western classical music and opera, destabilizing long-held notions of performance, interpretation, and canon formation. From nineteenth-century operatic productions in colonial Bengal to contemporary directorial interventions in Madama Butterfly, and the racialized virtuosity of Yuja Wang’s performance of Beethoven, this session argues that Asian artists have long been central to shaping musical modernity, even as they have been marginalized within the historiography of Western music.
This panel responds to recent calls in musicology and performance studies that interrogate the fluidity, racialization, and transcultural dynamics of the Western canon and reconstructions of that canon. As Linda Hutcheon (2006) argues in A Theory of Adaptation, adaptation is not a passive reproduction but an active process of reinterpretation, shaped by cultural and historical contexts. Meanwhile, Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019) highlights how listening is socially conditioned, exposing the ways in which racialized sonic expectations shape the reception of non-Western musicians. Finally, as Kunio Hara and Mari Yoshihara recently argued in their American Quarterly article (2024), productions of canonical works that center Asian perspectives have the potential to free Asian performance “from the white gaze and [shed] light on the racial injustice” that haunts the Western canon. Drawing on these insights, we argue that such reconstructions operate as embodied critiques of the Western canon, challenging its exclusionary logic and redefining its boundaries through transcultural dialogue. By centering Asian perspectives, these practices challenge exclusionary historiography, revealing opera and classical music as evolving sites of cultural negotiation rather than static traditions.
The panel ultimately reimagines the Western canon as a palimpsest shaped by unacknowledged transcultural exchange. Examining the translation of European opera into nineteenth-century Bengali performance culture, the critical reinscription of orientalist tropes in opera production today, and the deconstruction of racialized musical critique, we explain how these practices have the potential of reframing the canon as a site of critically ignored contestation around the very concept of Western modernity.
Presentations of the Symposium
Staging Cultural Crossings: Opera, Translation, and Musical Modernity in 19th-Century Bengal
Pramantha Tagore
University of Chicago
This paper examines the development of operatic performance in nineteenth-century Bengal, focusing on Satī ki kalaṅkinī (1876), a mythological opera that blends Bengali and European musical systems. Composed by Modan Mohan Barmana with a libretto by Nāgendranath Bandyopādhyāẏ, this was one of the first attempts to stage an operatic work in Bengali, incorporating both Hindustani rāga-based melodies and Western musical notation. The manuscript—preserved at the Harvard Loeb Music Library—reveals a fascinating moment of cross-cultural adaptation, where European operatic influences were filtered through the theatrical, religious, and literary traditions of Bengal.
Drawing on archival research, music analysis, and postcolonial theory, this paper explores how Bengali musicians engaged with European musical forms not simply as passive recipients but as active agents of transformation. The bilingual nature of Satī ki kalaṅkinī—with text in both Bengali script and Roman transliteration, and music in both Indian and European notation—raises critical questions about musical identity, translation, and the politics of operatic performance in colonial South Asia.
Situating Satī ki kalaṅkinī within the broader context of nineteenth-century Bengali theatre, I argue that the work complicates dominant narratives of European musical hegemony in the subcontinent, revealing opera’s much more fluid and dialogic history. By tracing how Bengali opera-makers negotiated their place within global musical modernity, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions about coloniality, hybridity, and the historiography of opera.
A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies: Reimagining Madama Butterfly through an Asian-American Lens
Anne Monique Pace
University of Chicago
In the 2023-2024 opera season, stage directors Matthew Ozawa and Phil Chan premiered two radically new productions of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly that productively met the problematic social politics of this stalwart repertory work with innovation. These retellings, only two of many, represent an important shift in regional opera companies towards programming new works and featuring undervalued voices, while also contending with a centuries-long shadow of racist representations in repertory works (Hara/Yoshihara 2024). Chan and Ozawa’s Butterflys both present the opera from a uniquely Asian-American perspective, critiquing the American racial imaginary specifically by centering the opera’s tension between American imperialism and Japanese subservience.
To that end, these reimaginings deconstruct the opera’s orientalist tropes through altering or completely withholding the most traumatic reenactments of racial violence: the statutory assault of Butterfly, the seisure of her child, and her eventual onstage suicide. Chan’s September 2023 production at the Boston Lyric Opera built upon the work of his book Final Bow for Yellowface (2020) and was developed through “the Butterfly Process,” a project that strove to reexamine the history and legacy of the anti-Asian stereotypes in the opera. Set in the United States during World War II, his Butterfly navigates both a nightclub and an internment camp, or as Cio-Cio San chillingly calls it in Act II: “an American home.” Mere months earlier, in July 2023, Cincinnati Opera premiered Matthew Ozawa’s production, which circumscribes the action of the opera within a orientalist fantasy sprung from the mind of a white male gamer, aggressively foregrounding the inherent exoticism of the opera’s material and the artificiality of Butterfluy’s character.
Chan and Ozawa have created productions that tackle larger power structures rather than retreat inside the opera’s particularity (Hara 2023), animating a deep-seated ambivalence towards an opera that represents opportunity for Asian artists but also a legacy of orientalist stereotypes. Madama Butterfly expands from the story of a single exploited girl destroyed by an immoral adult to a larger indictment of representations of Asians onstage, their long exclusion from the operatic canon, and their systematic erasure from discourses of musical modernity.
Deep Critic, Surface Critique? Yuja Wang’s “Superficial” Beethoven and Subversion of History
Hiro Cho
University of Chicago
Yuja Wang performed Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata in 2016. Critics were puzzled by Yuja’s performance of the composer’s late, monumental sonata in Santa Barbara, where Murray Perahia played the same piece a week before. Critics heard Yuja’s performance as “uncanny,” “colorful,” “electric,” but crucially, never “probing or profound.” Asian, technological, monstrous, feminine, and superficial, these gendered and racialized characterizations of Yuja squarely fit what literary critic Anne Anlin Cheng (2018) called “ornamentalism.” But Yuja’s performance refuses to be confined to the fixing gaze of whiteness. Instead, she mobilizes this ornamental superficiality—especially manifest in fashion, movement, and interviews—to confound and challenge listeners and critics who rely on the naturalized metaphor of depth.
Interpreting Yuja’s performances and interviews through the lenses of poststructuralism, Hepokoski & Darcy’s sonata theory, and black radical aesthetics, I argue that she exposes classical musical performance as a shallow surface that simultaneously underpins and undermines the presupposed depth of Beethoven’s late piano sonata. In this light, critics’ perplexity against Yuja’s performance can be understood as the anxiety about this surface onto which everything depends. Following Holly Watkins, I further argue that this insecurity about shallowness and performance dominates German musical thought, an anxiety especially manifest in Adorno’s writing on Beethoven’s piano pieces. Moreover, Yuja breaks apart the genealogical chain of a performance network that starts from composers and ends in performers, interrupting the neat temporal lineage of The Music History even—or especially—while performing works by canonical composers. This talk suggests and enacts “surface critique” as a new methodology to interrupt the fetishization of depths committed by musicologists and critics alike.
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