Chinese music has a different pedagogy when it approaches theory and practice. In China, most music universities as well as conservatories of music offer Western music theory classes for theory pedagogy, but not Chinese music theory classes during the undergraduate period. The knowledge of traditional Chinese music theory is only mentioned in the music history classes instead. The extant literature has discussed the difficulties Chinese music teaching faces in Chinese universities and colleges today during the teaching process, however, it hardly touches Chinese music theory pedagogy. This raises the question that does the Western music theory helps with traditional Chinese music practice. And why is Chinese music pedagogy limited to practice instead of having a Chinese music theory course separately? To answer these questions, I did ethnographic research by interviewing students and teachers about how they understand music theory and practice. From their interview, I speculate what works as a theory for Chinese music, and how it helps with bringing Chinese music to the future.

Recent trends in teaching and the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed many traditional music teachers to move their studio online. Through applications like Skype, Zoom, or YouTube, music practitioners interact, share information, and create community online. The move online allows for greater access to the tradition but also means teachers and students must adapt to the medium. The shakuhachi honkyoku tradition, an instrumental practice in which ritual, custom, and longevity are valued, has undergone dramatic changes as it has moved online. This study aims to better understand what happens when the two seemingly opposite ideas of tradition and digital innovation collide and how practitioners reconcile the two. Through the use of participant observation, interviews, and netnography, I conclude that innovation in digital pedagogy and community building in the shakuhachi world has bolstered the tradition by locating it in a liminal space that both requires adaptation of traditional in-person lessons as well as providing a space for teachers and students to digitally embody the tradition, connecting physical bodies with the digital world. Throughout this project, I aim to show how current methods and methodologies of teaching shakuhachi have both shaped and been shaped by the prevalent online means of transmission and how innovations in pedagogy have helped to both grow the tradition as well as make it more accessible to a wider range of practitioners than ever before.

I begin with a brief critical assessment of common uses of musical improvisation in Brazilian education. Based on the issues that arise, I present a pedagogical proposition for musical improvisation in higher musical education in Brazil. This proposition stems from materials and practices organized during my doctoral research at Universidade Estadual de São Paulo, with field works at three other Brazilian universities. The research received a Fulbright Doctoral award and I was also able to spend nine months at UCSD, California, further enriching the cross-cultural repertoire of improvisational experiences that amount to this proposal of creative self-investigation. One of the main challenges so far has been the common understanding that improvisation can be non-idiomatic. This trope, championed by Derek Bailey’s classic publication, was however already present in John Cage’s blatant dismissal of the term “improvisation”. I contend that, in the effort of distancing themselves from jazz they inevitably fell back on the other sounds they knew, i.e., those of a eurological perspective, as coined by George Lewis. Another issue pertains to the idea that collective improvisation must be free of restraint and should never serve another purpose other than sound itself. Moreover, the author and musician John Corbett, in his preface to Improvisation and Transcultural Difference, denounces another recurring motif in the world of improvisation whereby practitioners merely demonstrate each other’s cultural stereotypes. My attempt is to navigate this scenario and offer a trail that reflects and contributes to local realities, avoiding cultural stereotypes, while creating singular musical assemblages.

This presentation attempts to show how Bengali song registers the effects of the 1947 Partition of Bengal and the resultant traffic between West and East Bengal by focusing on the early decades of Bengali radio. With the help of archival interviews from Calcutta Radio Station and published memoirs of important figures associated with Calcutta and Dhaka radio, this presentation argues that select radio music programs such as Anuradher Āsar chart a practice of what I call ‘ mediatized aural pedagogy’ for the lay listener in Calcutta and the aspiring/professional studio composer in East Bengal. I show how pedagogy through radio negotiates issues of musical memory, nostalgia, affect, technique, and exchange that would become important tools in bringing about a process of standardization- in scoring, arrangement, and vocal artistry- in Bengali musical modernity across Calcutta and Bangladesh. I theorize the concept of ‘mishearing’ in this presentation that adds a new and overlooked dimension, I argue, to standard notions of aural transmission regularly invoked in the context of radio/aural pedagogy. By deploying a deconstructive reading of archival sources on radio, I show how radiophonic listening becomes a compnesatory pathway, as it were, to register and rework vectors of post-partition trauma and forges a space of care, ethics, and community that complicates separatist histories of nation and state formation.I think through Bengali radio as an ethnographic site rather than a media apparatus and consider possibilities of radiophonic listening and space as marking a decolonial moment in histories of Bengali nationalism.