Andrew F. Jones is Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music.

Yellow Music – CL

By Andrew F. Jones

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Andrew F. Jones
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326854

Chapter One

The Orchestration of Chinese Musical Life

As to the Chinaman’s voice, nothing so strange had ever struck my ear. Imagine a series of nasal, guttural, moaning, hideous tones, which I may without too great exaggeration compare to the sounds a dog makes when after a long sleep it stretches its limbs and yawns … to give the name of music to what they produce by this sort of vocal and instrumental noise is, in my opinion, a strange abuse of the term.-Hector Berlioz

A full-scale orchestra is another thing altogether. It comes at you with all the grand bombast of a May Fourth Movement, transforming each individual’s voice into something quite different from what it was at the start. The whistling and scraping on every side becomes one’s own voice, and you are shocked by the depth, volume, and resonance of the sound you are making. It’s a little like the moment after you wake up in the morning: someone calls your name, and unsure whether the voice is someone else’s or your own, you feel a vague kind of terror.-Eileen Chang [Zhang Ailing], “On Music”

Imagine tuning the streamlined Bakelite knobs of a wireless radio to the ether above Shanghai circa 1937. As the vacuum tubes begin to amplify signals broadcast from that distant world, what sorts of sounds emerge? What would you hear as you move up and down the dial, sampling from the sonic world of Republican China? The crash of gongs, the plucked strings of a sanxian, the rhythmic recitation of drum song, the hypnotic drone of chanted sutras, the sharply nasal syllables of Peking opera? The warble of a Chinese sing-song girl? The lilt of Hawaiian steel guitar? The propulsive swing of big band jazz? Advertisements? Anthems? String quartets? Scholarly lectures? Official pronouncements? Symphony orchestras? In the cacophony of a multiply colonized metropolis of more than 3 million inhabitants, in which well above sixty radio stations operated by the mid-1930s, the answer would surely be all of the above, and much more.

How would we go about not simply listening but making sense of these diverse sounds? For a contemporary Chinese listener in Shanghai, this tour across the dial would almost certainly have evoked a complex cluster of associations, with each snippet of sound triggering a seemingly instinctive knowledge of both its particular historical, demographic, and ideological significance-Chinese or foreign? High class or low? Conservative, decadent, or progressive?-and the musical and extramusical codes governing its production and consumption. Our imaginary listener, in short, would have understood what kinds of pleasures each sort of music afforded, what those pleasures might mean, and what place each station occupied in relation to the musical field as a whole. As later born listeners, we are not as immediately privy to such knowledge (or to the sounds themselves), and our grasp of the ways in which this sonic tapestry mattered to people living at that time will of necessity remain fragmentary and incomplete.

We can, however, begin to reconstruct the historical and ideological contours of the Republican musical field. In this chapter, I set out to do just that by way of two parallel analytical motions across the dial of the Republican sound world. The first motion is diachronic in nature. I begin by tracing the historical trajectory that lies between the mid-nineteenth-century world of Berlioz-in which a yawning gap still remains between Chinese and Western musical practice-and that of the early twentieth, when reformist intellectuals attempt an unprecedented orchestration of Chinese musical life in the wake of the May 4th movement-an orchestration dedicated to harnessing music to the imperatives of nation-building. What links these two end points is a complex and variegated series of encounters between indigenous, Euro-American, and Japanese musical practices that will forever alter the status, the function, and the meaning of Chinese music in the modern age.

My second motion across the dial involves a synchronic look at the Republican musical field in the wake of that historic transformation. This survey is conducted through a set of interrelated questions. What were the political and cultural stakes of musical modernization? Which sorts of music were valorized, and which sorts were devalued? How did the institutional arrangements for the production and dissemination of music and musical knowledge set in place by May 4th reformers function, and what purposes did they serve? How did contemporary musicians and critics discuss music, and what do their writings tell us about the world (musical and extramusical) in which they lived? I conclude the chapter by “listening in” on a 1933 radio broadcast, “The Power of Music” (Yinyue de shili), delivered by one of the primary architects of China’s musical modernization and a central figure in the history recounted here, Xiao Youmei-that, in positing music as a means of constructing a powerful nation-state, throws these questions into sharp relief.

MUSIC AS TECHNOLOGY

In the course of our efforts to reconstruct the Republican musical field, many of our commonplace assumptions about the nature of music obscure more than they reveal. The first, and perhaps most dangerous of these assumptions is that music is a universal language. Strictly speaking, it is neither universal nor a language. In this context, however, I am less interested in the philosophical or musicological truth-value of this claim than its ideological function, with the way in which it obscures the mutual imbrication of music, imperialism, and modernity not only in China, but in every place in which local musical practices were transformed by encounters with Euro-American militarists, merchants, and missionaries in modern times. In an era when Western music gradually supplanted indigenous forms on a global scale, as Richard Kraus notes, “the international-language metaphor proved comforting to both conquerors and subjects alike.” The forcible translation of indigenous musical idioms into universal terms-a process that began in China in the early nineteenth century with the advent of Western imperialist encroachment into China and that continues to the present day-is an inescapable component of the musical field to be explored in this chapter.

A second misconception is that of music as a pure form, which floats unfettered above the realm of political struggle. The provenance of this claim to autonomy, of course, is distinctly modern, arising from the dialectical tension between romantic individualism and the rise of bourgeois economic control over musical production in nineteenth-century Europe. In China, the historical and political context of music was fundamentally different. That context-here termed colonial modernity-rendered these sorts of claims beside the point. As early as the late nineteenth century, music was explicitly and inextricably tied to the imperatives and exigencies of China’s nation-building project. Musicians, cultural critics, and educators promoted music as a means of national mobilization, resisting Western imperialism, and fighting Japanese aggression. Musical modernization, moreover, was conducted not under the auspices of the bourgeoisie, but of the nationalist state. Even the group of urban professional musicians who were responsible for constructing China’s modern musical establishment-whose story is the focus of this chapter-were far less concerned with the artistic autonomy of music than its political and social instrumentality.

For this reason, the notion of music as technology becomes an extremely useful interpretive frame, one that sheds new light on the role of both imperialism and nationalism in the formation of the modern Chinese musical field. By technology, I indicate several different analytical trajectories. Perhaps the most straightforward sense is that of music as a technology of power, a practical tool with which different groups and classes at different times have sought to demarcate real and ideological territory, mobilize support, and silence dissenting voices. In the words of Jacques Attali, a French political economist and theorist of the intertwining of music and power, “the technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise … is the ability to interpret and control history, to manipulate the culture of a people, to channel its violence and hopes.”

Attali’s critique is largely restricted to the role of music in European societies, especially with the deployment of music as a form of social control in modern states. As such, his work might have benefited from closer attention to how music has been implicated in the power dynamics of transcultural contact. The history of imperialist encroachment into China (and many other places) is littered with examples of the deployment of music as a technology of power. Lord Macartney’s notorious diplomatic mission to the Qianlong emperor in 1793 included an ensemble of five German musicians, presumably intended as a means of overawing their Chinese hosts. Soldiers of the imperial armies in China were inevitably accompanied by brass bands. The hymns and harmoniums of Protestant missionaries in China’s interior were as much a part of the colonial enterprise as gunboats or printing presses.

These technologies for the “appropriation and control” of noise, in turn, were adopted by Chinese insurgents, warlords, educators, and nationalists. In the 1850s, Hong Xiuquan used Protestant hymns (with new Chinese lyrics) as a means of rallying support for his millennial Taiping rebellion. By the 1860s, choral singing and brass bands, introduced by foreign military advisers, had become a standard means of drill instruction and morale-building in the Qing army. These practices were later adopted by warlord armies, nationalist military units, and Communist guerrillas in the 1920s and 1930s. In the years preceding the 1911 overthrow of the Qing, finally, choral singing was incorporated into the curriculum of new-style schools as a means of propagating a variety of revolutionary and nationalist ideologies and enforcing collective discipline.

The second way in which the notion of technology comes into play is bound up with the colonial diffusion of Western music. With the coming of the May 4th Movement of 1919, a new generation of musicians and educators, many of whom had either been exposed to Western music in China or studied it in Europe and Japan, began to build a modern musical infrastructure in China. For these musical reformers-who shared with their May 4th counterparts an iconoclastic faith in science and Social Darwinism -European music represented both an alternative musical culture and a set of manifestly superior technologies for the organization and use of sound. Musicians and critics like Xiao Youmei and Wang Guangqi believed that Chinese music was an outmoded product of “a thousand years of stagnation,” a tradition “at a standstill,” defined primarily in terms of what it ostensibly lacked: a tempered scale, functional harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, standardized notation, and the engineering prowess embodied by Western instruments like the piano.

In this chapter, I argue that these musicians’ and critics’ work was technocratic in nature. On the one hand, they labored to disseminate Western musical techniques, institutionalize music education, and set standards for musical practice and performance. On the other, they strove to study, catalog, and ultimately rationalize (along scientific lines suggested by the West) Chinese traditions. For example, efforts were made to re-engineer Chinese instruments to specifications demanded by the formal logic of Western harmony and notation.

To what end were these technocratic reforms carried out? Techne in service of what sort of kratos? Perhaps the single most important goal was to place musical activity in service to the construction of a modern nation-state. In reviving Chinese musical culture, reformers like Xiao Youmei (the president of the Shanghai National Conservatory of Music) believed they also would revitalize its citizenry. “Good music” was to be used as a means of mobilizing nationalist sentiment; “bad music” was to be silenced for the good of the nation. Indeed, in Xiao’s 1933 broadcast, “The Power of Music,” music becomes a technology through which specialists work to channel the affective life of the masses in directions beneficial to the nationalist cause. Music, in effect, is posited as a powerful form of micropolitics, a disciplinary regime with which the state might minister to the emotional lives of its subjects. This “sonic regime,” in turn, would be implemented and presided over by elite technocrats like Xiao himself, with the financial support of the Nationalist (KMT) government.

At the same time, Xiao and his contemporaries argued, the institution of such a modern sonic regime would allow for the creation of a distinctly Chinese musical idiom, a national school that would represent (and even enact) China’s emergence as a modern nation on the international stage. This effort, of course, was influenced by the emergence of avowedly nationalist idioms in Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and other nations and regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by a conviction that “unless a school has a national character, it cannot be of international value.” Although the precise form of China’s contribution to world music remained a matter of considerable debate, it was generally agreed that China’s representative on the world musical stage must of necessity feature the insertion of carefully selected elements of indigenous musical culture into European-derived harmonic structures. Unsurprisingly, however, this project was beset by a familiar postcolonial predicament: How do you attain the universal while at the same time preserving what is distinct about local culture?

There is another sense in which these efforts were tangled in the snares of postcoloniality. It is no secret that musical taste and musical attainments often serve as markers of class distinction and as a form of symbolic capital. This particular form of cultural capital was caught up in colonial economies of status and power in the treaty ports of Republican China. May 4th era musicians lived in a social world in which these economies ensured that Western European art music was both hegemonic and “high-class.” Inasmuch as the cultural capital and institutional power of this “native elite” derived from its members’ specialized training in Western musical techniques, their efforts to establish a modern sonic regime were characterized by an agonistic relationship to both “native” and popular cultural forms.

This antipathy was further justified by way of the elite’s nationalist politics. While certain elements of rural folk music could be rehabilitated and used as essentialized markers of local difference in a new national school, the modern songs of the urban petit bourgeoisie were thought to be tainted by both their commercial vulgarity and their cultural hybridity. And although certain forms of mass music (anthems, military marches, and the like) could be harnessed to the task of national mobilization at political rallies and on parade grounds, the decadent sounds that filled the record stores, the airwaves, and the dance halls were seen as incitements to political indiscipline. As is argued in this chapter and throughout the book, this conflict-between a polyvocal culture of consumption and a univocal sonic regime, between music as a medium of social control and a commodified popular culture expedited by new media for the dissemination of music (the gramophone, the wireless, and the cinema)-plays a profound role in shaping the contours of the musical field in the Republican era.

DIVERGENT TRADITIONS

By 1937, the sort of “vocal and instrumental noise” that the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz derides in the epigraph to this chapter had been drowned out by the orchestral salvos of Western music. This inundation was already well under way in 1852, the year in which Berlioz described his impressions of a concert of Chinese music he had attended one night in London. But as his refusal to even dignify the foreign sounds he had heard that evening as music indicates, a seemingly insurmountable divide still separated European and Chinese musical practices.

Continues…
Excerpted from Yellow Music – CLby Andrew F. Jones Copyright © 2001 by Andrew F. Jones. Excerpted by permission.
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