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.

Based on the metaphor of the Pythagorean veil, the notion of acousmaticity has often been used to highlight the separation of sound from its visible source in disembodied form. Departing from this ocular framing of acousmatic listening and its perceived audio-visual stratification, this paper considers the transmission of “sound unseen” in a different curtain-inspired scenario: braille instructions in late nineteenth-century Beijing. The sound media in question was Numeral Type, a syllable-based Chinese braille code developed by Scottish missionary William Hill Murray in the late 1870s. This tactile reading system relied on braille numbers to convey Mandarin sounds for the use of blind and visually impaired readers in Beijing, while purporting to transcribe all variations of Chinese tongues by numerically abstracting them beyond their regions of origin. When teaching sound-based braille literacy, Murray installed a curtain to separate himself from female Chinese students. The curtain, understood as a metaphor for the tactile negotiation of bodily and phonic differences, complicates ocular assumptions of veiled and coded communication, where touch preceded visual considerations in apprehending braille sounds.

Drawing on missionary descriptions of Numeral Type's technical and instructional details, I examine Murray's acousmatic numbers and vignettes of braille reading from the vantage of sensory history and disability media studies. Building on the works by Rey Chow, Pooja Rangan, and Brian Kane, I reframe the acousmatic veil from a visual barrier to a haptic threshold amenable to localizing Numeral Type’s seemingly abstract sounds in moments of touching. Through the vernacular of the flesh, the braille-reading hand restages the acousmatic by centering touch along a curtained physical border. In tactually stitching together braille numbers and Chinese syllables, the hand gestures toward a more capacious historiography of “sound reading” that includes multimodal interactions with inscriptions, such as the braille code, beyond a vision-defined acousmatic media paradigm.

This paper will examine the work of Fred Frith and Christian Marclay, both of whom have used photographs as scores for their music. In his work Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire (1996), Frith uses photographs as prompts for guided improvisation. Some photographs have overlays and annotations which performative prompts relate to, whilst in some photographs the prompts relate to the images’ unedited quality. When writing about his approach to music and improvisation, Frith quoted photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, implying he was aware of his work (2000: 320). Cartier-Bresson is best known for his concept of the ‘decisive moment’ in street photography and photojournalism (published/elaborated upon in 1952), and I argue that Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire constitutes a musical equivalent to this concept.

Christian Marclay’s mixed-media work has received a reasonable amount of scholarly and critical coverage, particularly in the influence of the sonic in his visual art works. For this study, I will focus initially on two works, Shuffle (2007) and Ephemera (2009) to assess commentaries offered by existing scholarship, notably that of Christoph Cox in his short reflection in Sonic Flux (2018: 68-70), and expand outwardsextend the analysis to consider how the mobile qualities of the camera, combined with the hyper-saturation of vernacular images in urban environments has created the potential for a critical reassessment of public and private art/music performance spaces, touching also on the aspect of ‘audiation’ in such images (Redgate (2018), Gordon (1999,) etc.). This will situate Marclay’s work in the photographic approach of Robert Rauschenberg in the assimilation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art cultures, arguing that critic Brian O’Doherty’s ‘vernacular glance’ (1973) can be embodied in a sonic sense through Marclay’s work..

Finally, I will offer an analysis of Marclay’s Investigations (2018) for multiple pianos. In this work, Marclay uses photographs of pianist’s hands (both still and in motion) as a means of constructing a musical performance. In my analysis, I will draw upon Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, using his concepts of the ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ to explore the paradoxical iconography of the piano, and the personal, transcription-focussed implications of the notations.