Conference Agenda

The linearity of time in Chinese historical storytelling is unsettled by overhearing a bell at a temple ruin in Xi’an, a well-known Chinese ancient capital. Along with other heritage legacies in Xi’an, the ruined Jian Fu Temple has served a nationalism-centered historiography by/for symbolizing a Longue durée “the greatest Chinese Civilization.” The bell inside the temple, with its affective ringing and material fragments, is assimilated into the historical continuity and deployed as a sonic imaginary for recent national ceremonies. Nonetheless, as a response to dissonance, the bell’s presence echoes historical fragments and discontinuous temporality itself. Accidentally excavated and relocated to the current temple in the Qing Dynasty, the bell non-linearly functions as a time-marker, religious object, life-rhythm regulator, scenic spot, national blessing, and tourism souvenir—or just a being—bearing with war, occupation, ruination, urban heritagization and gentrification in Chinese history. The shattered bell was then repaired at the request of the government of Toyama-ken and reconstructed for the handover of Hong Kong in the late 20th century, sounding out an unexpected transregional order. Still further, how to hear the presence and fragments of the bell, and its echoes, both in archive and fieldwork, without essentializing another historical narrative? Overhearing—contrary to the intention of listeners’ ears as “something else being present” (LaBelle 2018)—might unsettle the linearity with cacophonic and relational temporalities and realities, and help to rethink the boundaries and conjunctions of ethnographic presence and historical work when an ethnographer listens to the past.

This paper explores how music partakes in the affective infrastructure across Sinophone communities with the potentiality to engender and unsettle relationalities across musicking bodies. It uses “Glory to Hong Kong” (2019)—a protest song in Cantonese sung during a protest movement from 2019 to 2020—as a case study to examine how music, as a device for political expression, was mobilized by different peoples. GtHK, whose lyrics call for democratic freedom and justice, was deemed separatist and thus banned by the Hong Kong government. The song’s life, however, did not end there; it traveled to places such as Taiwan and mainland China, where supporters of the protests continued chanting it in other languages. Building on recent works that call for an affective approach to Sinophone studies (Wong 2024), the paper argues that the song functioned as an affective infrastructure for peoples to express translocal solidarity and local anti-authoritarian feelings (Bosworth 2023). It analyzes how the Mandarin version of GtHK—circulated online during the 2022 demonstrations in mainland China against COVID-19 lockdown policies—fosters intimacies between Sinophone communities with similar antiauthoritarian sentiments. Evoking the concept of “transgressive community,” an idea that accentuates solidarity among translocal demographics with the common belief of resisting domination and hegemony (Zhang 2024), the paper concludes by turning to the mixed reception of GtHK’s Mandarin adaptation in Cantonese-speaking communities, throwing into relief how disagreements between ideologies, refracted through such musical exchange, may potentially be overlooked in advocating Sinophonic intimacies and solidarity.

Current musicological scholarship on congregational music remains predominantly North Atlantic-centric, often leaving the multi-directional flows of Sinophone music under-researched. This presentation introduces a Digital Humanities dynamic map prototype designed to track the historical trajectories of Cantonese Contemporary Christian Music (CCCM). To lower technical barriers, the project explores the practical application of Generative AI (Google AI Studio) to streamline the transition from qualitative archival research to quantitative mapping. By utilizing “Natural Language Prompting,” researchers can efficiently extract circulation routes from unstructured texts into standardized formats, creating lightweight geospatial visualizations. Theoretically, this methodology empowers musicologists to visualize the complex transregional identities and frictions within Global Chinese communities. While CCCM is heavily shaped by North Atlantic models, it is not a passive reception; instead, Hong Kong practitioners actively translate and re-engineer these sounds. Mapping these routes reveals an “outbound” impact often ignored by Western scholarship, highlighting an ethical imperative to recognize the West’s pervasive sonic footprint. Furthermore, the post-2019 diaspora has brought CCCM directly back into North Atlantic borders—specifically the UK, Canada, and Australia—disrupting local church ecologies and forcing a dialogue between the “source” and its Sinophone transformations. Ultimately, these tailor-made dynamic maps demonstrate how emerging technologies can foster a more equitable engagement between local case studies and global musicological discourse.

Every day in a community health center in Alhambra, California, various forms of Sinophone music—from Mandopop and Cantopop to Chinese opera and revolutionary “red songs”—fill the space, sometimes simultaneously. These musical forms are selectively listened to and performed by aging Chinese immigrants with diverse socio-cultural and political backgrounds. Drawing on my applied ethnographic fieldwork as a recreational therapist intern (2025–26), this paper examines everyday musical activities and the sonic environment within a community-based organization serving marginalized elderly Chinese in Los Angeles. It explores how aging Chinese communities are shaped through a multidimensional Sino-soundscape (Rao 2024), reflecting diverse transnational migration trajectories of ethnic Chinese immigrants from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Thailand. More specifically, I investigate dissonances in music making among elderly participants, including conflicting repertoire preferences, strong attachments to linguistic forms (Mandarin vs. Cantonese), and divergent political stances embodied through musical participation. Meanwhile, due to shared cultural experiences, these dissonances of politics, language, and identity often coexist with—and at times constitute—forms of musical consonance. I further document moments of musical consonance under multiculturalism in the Sinophone context (Wang 2018), such as shared repertoires of early Mandopop and cheerful musical accompaniments for group exercises, which function as generational touchstones that underpin a sense of collective belonging within the aging Sino-soundscape. I argue that aging Chinese communities in the U.S. are constituted through musical practices within the Sinophone soundscape, where socio-political and linguistic differences are negotiated, and collective bonds are cultivated through both dissonance and consonance.