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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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:09am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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China and the West | |
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Listening to Symphonic Music with Resistance and Fear: The Case of Eileen Chang’s “On Music” (Tan Yinyue) University of Pittsburgh How has symphonic music been received outside Euro-American societies? In the Chinese context, the first symphony orchestra was founded in 1907 on the basis of the Shanghai Public Band, renamed as the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra in 1922. Initially only foreigners could attend the concerts; however, after the orchestra’s conductor (1919–1942), Mario Paci, successfully pressured the colonial Shanghai Municipal Council to abandon this discriminatory policy in 1925, “Chinese accounted for over 20 percent of the audience at the indoor concerts” by “1931” (Yang 2017, 52; see also Yang 2021 and Liao 2019). Meanwhile, phonographic records provided another important avenue for the local Chinese with the economic means to listen to symphonic music. How did those Chinese listeners perceive the symphonic music they heard? The existing literature has mainly focused on accounts of positive reception, which was mainstream among the progressive elites. The grandiose sounds of the symphony orchestra were heard by many of the Chinese music reformers, political reformers, and intellectuals as both civilizationally advanced and morally uplifting (e.g., Cheung 2015 and Tang 2017). But what about the others who listened and thought otherwise, such as someone listening to symphonic music with resistance, suspicion, and even fear? This paper looks into precisely such a case, namely, the influential novelist and essayist Eileen Chang’s (1920-1995) description of and opinion about symphonic music as presented in her magazine article “On Music” (1944, 10–13). Her critique of symphonic music boils down to four main points: 1) that it blurs the boundary between oneself and others in such a way that individual selves risk being subsumed into a larger social collective, 2) that it is overly complicated and formulaic, 3) that its overwhelming sonic force creates discomfort among the audience, and 4) that its calculated, even conspiratorial buildup of tension and climax makes her “fear” (11). By comparatively analysing Chang’s text in relation to her contemporaries’ glorifying descriptions of symphonic music, I show how her somewhat idiosyncratic critique of the genre also amounts to a critique of the elite Chinese nationalist musical discourse, one underpinned by Eurocentric notions of musical Progress and Modernity. | |