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Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:54am EDT

Daily Overview

Session

Buddhist Music Through the Ages
Session Chair: Jingyi Zhang, James Madison University

Presentation 3

Popularizing and Politicizing Buddhist Music in the Communist PRC

Wenzhuo Zhang

State University of New York at Fredonia

In the contemporary PRC, there are two major categories of Buddhist music. The first includes the traditional Buddhist chants and ensembles preserved in temples and performed by monks or nuns for ceremonies. The second, which is the subject of this paper, involves a body of modern songs and instrumental music which presents clear programmatic themes resonating with Chinese Han Buddhist teaching, history, and literature, but remains separate from the strictures of its ceremonies. Pitch in these contemporary works relies mainly on traditional Chinese pentatonicism, but the overall instrumentation is strongly influenced by Western popular music. This cross-cultural blend has reached beyond the Buddhist temple to be popularized in secular settings and embraced by Han Buddhist followers and ordinary people alike. The result is a thriving genre that has intersected with many aspects of Chinese popular culture and social life during the latter 20^th century and beyond.

To examine the conceptual meanings, musical characteristics and social implications of this contemporary genre, this paper uses the methodologies of historiography, archive studies, and digital ethnography. Based on the theory of progressive authenticity (Zhang, 2020) and the theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977) this essay interprets the formation and development of popular Buddhist music and its progressively established cultural authenticity, not as a static product, but as a fluid, ongoing social process. This process has incorporated Chinese Buddhist ideologies, Han cultural traditions, and a rich blend of musical influences that have converged under a rigorous communist regime to create this unique genre. Meanwhile, the agents, including the artists and Buddhist followers, constantly negotiate their collective identity and attempt to maintain spirituality within the multi-dimensional field of power. Such a field of power is composed of predominant Han cultural capitals, communist orthodoxy, as well as religious, cultural, and ethnic policies issued by the central government of the PRC.

This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on popular music and cultural studies beyond the West, the secularization of religious music in China’s social life, and the PRC’s political impact on Chinese musical activities.