The Korean War (1950-53) marked the first appearance of People’s Republic of China on the international stage and a special turning point of the history of East Asia in the twentieth-century. This war also witnessed the creation of one of the most popular Chinese traditional opera repertoires called Hua Mulan (1951) belonging to the regional operatic style of the province of Henan. As a well-known Chinese legendary heroine, Mulan and her story have been portrayed through literature, drama, film and other artistic forms in China. However, despite its being a regional opera from central China, Hua Mulan enjoyed national favor during the war, remained the most performed and most influential interpretation of Mulan on stage in the post-war era, and continued to convey a strong message of patriotism among Chinese people in the early years of the People’s Republic.

Drawing upon the literature from the discourse of Korean War and Chinese Communist social policy, as well as recently published and translated writings of Chinese women studies, this paper highlights how the newly founded Chinese State utilized artistic work as an essential part of wartime propaganda to cultivate a collective spirit of self-sacrifice, and how individual Chinese artists followed the political climate and reacted in favor of the State’s calling. More specifically, it explores the social environment for the creation of the Henan opera Hua Mulan and the essential reason for its notable popularity – the theme of patriotism closely associated with the theme of gender equality. As an ideology, how patriotism superseded gender boundaries during the war and was best embodied by Mulan? How was the specific notion of “gender equality” reflected in the wartime policy and sociopolitical events of “New China”? Meanwhile, through examining Mulan as a female symbol (in the form of stage performances by the well-known “patriotic” actress Chang Xiangyu) revealing the wartime political culture, I hope to broaden an understanding of how artistic work negotiates its content to coordinate a particular historical/war period.

In 2001, Kunqu Opera was proclaimed by UNESCO as one of the “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH),” a status which immensely increased the exposure of Kunqu Opera in China. As part of the safeguarding measures, the Chinese government promotes commodification and marketization as a means of revitalizing and popularizing this ancient theatrical art. This paper presents a case study of Jiangsu Provincial Kunqu Opera Troupe (JPKOT). In 2004, JPKOT, one of the seven state-sponsored Kunqu troupes founded in 1977, was turned into a branch of Jiangsu Performing Arts Group Limited Company. Using fieldwork data collected in Jiangsu province, I analyze the marketing strategies of JPKOT, and explore how the Chinese government’s “cultural system reform (wenhua tizhi gaige),” which aims at transforming stated-supported cultural public agencies into profit-making businesses, has impacted this genre of theater. In this paper, I argue that ICH status functions as an external factor that accelerated the marketization of Kunqu Opera as a product of what I will call the “cultural heritage industry.” This commercialization process has had major impacts for repertoire and performance style of Kunqu Opera, approaches to cultural transmission, and discourses about tradition of Kunqu Opera. Moreover, this paper sheds light on the complexity of cultural heritage that relies on market force to survive in the negotiations between traditionalism and modernity in an increasingly capitalistic and neoliberal Chinese society.

Among the many contributions Oguchi Daihachi made to the development of contemporary taiko – including creating the first contemporary taiko group, Osuwa Daiko, and helping to form the Nippon Taiko Foundation – the repertoire and performance practices he and Osuwa Daiko created are perhaps his strongest legacy. Combining techniques both Japanese and Western, traditional and modern, he created a new style of performance that has spread across the world. His compositions are a reflection of his approach to the art form, demonstrating how he viewed tradition, innovation, and the compatibility of Japanese folk festival music with Western musics such as jazz. They have not only affected the development of the art form but also the discourses that surround it.

In this paper, I shall examine how the repertoire of Osuwa Daiko and Oguchi Daihachi’s has impacted both conceptions of tradition within contemporary taiko performance and the development of the art form as a transnational entity. Focusing upon three pieces – “Suwa Ikazuchi,” “Hiryu San Dan Gaeshi” and “Ashura” – I will demonstrate how contemporary taiko has from the very beginning of its existence been a transnational art form that combines traditional and modern musical elements while at the same time fostering a complex view of “tradition,” one influenced by Oguchi himself.

One of the most persistent concerns throughout Charles Seeger’s writings is the relationship between speech and music, particularly, the “linguocentric predicament”. Meanwhile, the source of inspirations for Seeger’s arguments and systematic constructions on this topic remains largely undeclared by Seeger himself, and unexplored by subsequent scholars. While Seeger has never known to label himself as a semiologist/semiotitian, or to be explicitly linked to the later development of studies in music semiotics, my current research suggests a close connection between the two. This paper specifically addresses Seeger's covert connections with the study of semiotics. The paper is organized into two parts: (1) the influence of Swiss/French semiologist F.Saussure on Seeger's writings, and (2) re-interpretation of Seeger's view on musical meaning and its implications, in conjunction with music semiotitian Jean-Jacque Nattiez's book: Music and Discourse, Towards a Semiology of Music. Important ideas and notions of Seeger's that are explored in this new light include: the systematic and historic orientations of musicology, the linguocentric predicament, music as a function in a nest of functions, and the nature of musical meaning.

In recent decades, younger performers of Korea’s indigenous music have made various attempts to counteract this music’s image as outdated and, ironically, foreign on its native soil. They have been spurred by what they see as the homogenization of musical taste among Koreans, nearly all of whom now devote almost all of their listening to Western-style popular music. Traditional musicians recognize clearly the domination of Western musical genres and Korea’s self-orientalizing view of indigenous music as exotic. While some merely lament, others have been working in the realm of Korean “fusion” music to offer new alternatives in the musical landscape, providing Korean listeners with music that is not simply an imitation of Western pop, but draws on various indigenous musical elements. Initiated by the group Seulgidung in the mid 1980s, Korean fusion music attempts to achieve several goals at once: (1) to provide a more positive image of indigenous music as fun, exuberant, easy to enjoy, listener-friendly, and “modern”; and (2) to demonstrate that indigenous musical style and musical instruments are compatible with international popular music. Although many fusion groups have tried to distinguish their music by promoting its uniqueness, for example through their choice of particular musical genres and instruments, combining different performative practices (story telling, theater, dancing--including break-dancing), it is increasingly apparent that most fusion groups draw on similar elements from Western popular music (instruments, melodic contours, harmonic progressions, standard rhythmic patterns, and stage performance styles). In short, what began as de-homogenizing efforts have often resulted ironically in a new genre that market forces and personal musical tastes have rendered increasingly homogenized--based less on their Korean roots than on the very Western popular music that earlier efforts sought to resist.

Japanese Taiko Drumming is a dynamic performance art at the heart of the Asian American experience. Daihachi Oguchi first developed the style in Japan in the 1950s by combining traditional Japanese instruments with contemporary Jazz drumming. In the 1960s Seiichi Tanaka established the first North American Taiko drumming group (San Francisco Taiko Dojo) and soon after Taiko groups formed across California, and throughout Asian American communities on the West and East Coasts of the United States.

In 1997 Rick Shiomi founded MuDaiko, a Japanese Taiko drumming group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The group is well known for their emphasis on movement and theatricality and has developed their own unique style over the years. Previous scholarship on Taiko in North America has focused largely on the East Coast (Yoon 2001) and West Coast (Wong 2004); though very little research has focused on the American Midwest (see Wong 2006). My study explores how MuDaiko continues the tradition of Taiko drumming while simultaneously innovating and pushing the movement in new directions. Furthermore, I examine how MuDaiko operates within the larger North American Taiko movement. Additional topics I explore include the role of race and ethnicity within North American Taiko drumming and how the art form engages with the larger Asian American movement.

World music is the transnational production and consumption of local musics, transcending the barriers of language, location, and culture, through the emergence of twentieth-century popular music and its intensification in the twenty-first century. The process of globalization of world music, through development of technology and mass media, makes possible the global distribution of musics from remote places which had been difficult before. This has been strengthened by various relationships among “dimensions of global cultural flows” (Appadurai 1996), such as weakened national boundaries and migration, diaspora, and the emergence of world-wide media.

In the West, world music has been appreciated as music from remote and exotic places, and existed for western tastes and markets. Now, world music is spreading and brings with it various issues concerning the music industry, post-capitalism, globalization, and the relationship between the West and the rest, and between global and local.

This paper, noting the various problems and discourses of world music, will examine how these are now taking place in Korea by tracing the process of the recent growth of world music and its diverse social, cultural, and political backgrounds. World music in Korea took root among a few enthusiasts since its appearance there after 2000, and is becoming more and more visible through channels such as the mass media, festivals and concerts. Interestingly, this period coincides with changes in the music industry, the emergence of intercultural discourses, and globalization projects for Korean culture in Korea. This makes world music in Korea much more than a mere transplantation of Western hybrid popular music into a non-Western soil. This paper will thus attempt to understand the multi-layered and multi-dimensional meanings of world music as an important site where cultural-political codes (cultural globalization, international relations, governmental multicultural policy), and different subjectivities (fragmented musicians, audiences, and music industries) are encountered, constructed, signified and transformed at a specific time-space in contemporary South Korea.

Peranakan refers to a locally-born community in the Malay Archipelago whose cultural practices, customs, and beliefs draw on Malay and Chinese heritage. The Peranakans in Singapore and Malaysia are further rooted in their historical association with British colonialism, specifically with the establishment of the Straits Settlement in 1826 that comprises Singapore, Penang and Malacca. During the first two decades after independence (1965), Singaporean Peranakans were largely excluded from the nation-building process primarily because their syncretic cultural practices could not be compartmentalized into the State’s concept of multiculturalism. Beginning in the 1980s, however, there was a systematic revival of Peranakan cultures that intensified after 2000, when the Peranakans are not only present in State events, but have also come to represent Singapore internationally.

Peranakan musical practices in Singapore are markedly syncretic, particularly in their popular cultures. Forms of music practiced by the Peranakan community include Catholic hymns sung in the Peranakan patois, English and Malay popular tunes, Indonesian kroncong and ronggeng, and the traditional Malay dondang sayang vocal genre, and new tunes composed for the Peranakan theatre in the style of British-American musicals. Much of the State’s current representations of Peranakan cultures are still inclined towards nostalgic and reified perspectives of “authentic” Peranakan identities. Such representation, on the one hand, may deemphasize their hybrid cultural practices, but on the other, may be indicative of a gradual change in notions of identity in postnational Singapore.

Environmental issues have long become a central topic in public discourse in China, and in recent years this topic has also penetrated the domain of popular music. A look at China's contemporary pop and rock scene reveals that environmental protection features in quite a few songs, and that many of which are written and performed by musicians from ethnic minority background. My paper will examine several examples of minority "environmental songs" in order to explore the reasons why this theme has been embraced so enthusiastically by minority musicians. I also explore how the meanings embodied in these ethnic artistic expressions differ from the meanings embodied in "environmental songs" written and performed by musicians belonging to the Han majority. Focusing particularly on songs by Mongol, Tibetan and Uyghur musicians, I propose that the theme of environmental protection is used by minority musicians as a powerful discursive and symbolic resource which allows them to express and affirm their ethnic identities, to mobilize ethnic emotions, and at times also to convey ethnic anxieties, protest and demands in a way that is politically safer.

As part of my current book project on the artistry and appeal of American opera singer Beverly Sills (1929-2007), I explore the experience of being in the moment during a live operatic performance. I take the New York City Opera's 1973 production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena, directed by Tito Capobianco with Beverly Sills in the title role as the focus of my presentation. There is no known video footage of Sills in this production. Central to my work is a copy of Sills' heavily annotated personal score and pirated recordings of six live performances. Other vital sources are written and verbal accounts of the production in preparation and performance as well as still photos. This constellation of sources allows me to know in specific instances what Sills intended, to hear what she did in performance, and, in a few cases, to hear her audience's reaction. My aim is not only to recover aspects of mise-en-scène's structure and form, but also to capture something of the ineffable emotion that Sills' performance provoked in its moment of presence.

Diarists discussed their personal “resolve” to win the war in many ways, using terms such as kakugo (Ch. juewu) and juexin (Jp. Kakushin); while this often reflected mobilizational rhetoric utilized by the mass media, it also was linked to the diarists’ sense of self. For soldiers, in particular, resolve was discussed as a consequence of personal discipline (shūyō / xiuyang), but this was true for some civilians as well.  For many civilians, the struggle of the nation to “resolve” the war was personalized through diary writing, even in accounts by children and adolescents. An examination of wartime diary writing reveals the extent to which the political struggle for dominance over China became a personal struggle for the individual citizen / subject; grasping the mechanics of subjectivity, thus, is critical to understanding how “the people” could become, in the era of mass politics, a powerful weapon for total war, and even an obstacle to peaceful negotiation.

TLong the quintessential instrument of China's literatus class, the seven-string zither qin is widely recognized for its iconic cultural status, its profusion of Ming and Qing dynasty scores, and its lengthy, well-documented history. This paper steps outside the usual realm of qin studies to investigate an almost complete lacuna: the story of the qin tradition's arrival in the southwestern frontier province of Yunnan during the Ming and Qing periods, its semi-dormancy there for much of the late 20th century, and its sudden and quite surprising efflorescence in the provincial capital of Kunming in the last ten years. Migration by educated Han Chinese first brought the tradition to this remote colonial backwater; patterns of national patronage, expressed today through the intangible cultural heritage craze, have sparked the current surge of interest in Kunming; and the new communications empowerment enjoyed by Chinese citizens is tying Yunnanese qin musicians to the mainstream qin milieu as never before.

Yet this is only half the story. The other half concerns the difficulty in writing the story at all: evidence for the pre-1949 era is tantalizingly scanty, appearing like wisps of mountain mist in the form of passing reference by 17th-century traveler Xu Xiake, pictorial depictions in temples, one or two old instruments, and a handful of scores and oral histories. The sudden flowering of interest in the qin in Yunnan today, with several hundred people now involved in its performance and transmission, is documented by my personal observation and participation in the scene since 2008.