Music of Asia

Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections

The Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections introduces Asian music as a way to ask questions about what happens when cultures converge and how readers may evaluate cultural junctures through expressive forms. The volume's thirteen original chapters cover musical practices in historical and modern contexts from Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, including art music traditions, folk music and composition, religious and ritual music, as well as popular music. These chapters showcase the diversity of Asian music, requiring readers to constantly reconsider their understanding of this vibrant and complex area. The book is divided into three sections: Locating meanings Boundaries and difference Cultural flows Contributors to the book offer a multidisciplinary portfolio of methods, ranging from archival research and field ethnography to biographical studies and music analysis. In addition to rich illustrations, numerous samples of notation and sheet music are featured as insightful study resources. Readers are invited to study individuals, music-makers, listeners, and viewers to learn about their concerns, their musical choices, and their lives through a combination of humanistic and social-scientific approaches. Demonstrating how transformative cultural differences can become in intercultural encounters, this book will appeal to students and scholars of musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.

Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts

In an age of globalization, performance is increasingly drawn from intercultural creativity and located in multicultural settings. This volume is the first to focus on the performing arts of Asian diasporas in the context of modernity and multiculturalism. The essays locate the contemporary performing arts as a discursive field in which the boundaries between tradition and translation, and authenticity and hybridity are redefined and negotiated to create a multitude of meaning and aesthetics in global and local contexts. With contributions from scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, anthropology, cultural studies, dance ethnology and musicology, this truly interdisciplinary work covers every aspect of the sociology of performance of the Asian diasporas.

Electroacoustic Music in East Asia

This book illuminates the development of electronic and computer music in East Asia, presented by authors from these countries and territories (China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan). The scholars bring forward the cultural complexities and conflicts involved in their diverse encounters with new music technology and modern aesthetics. How electronic music attracted the interest of composers from East Asia is quite varied - while composers and artists in Japan delved into new sounds and music techniques and fostered electronic music quite early on; political, sociological, and artistic conditions pre-empted the adoption of electronic music techniques in China until the last two decades of the twentieth century. Korean and Taiwanese perspectives contribute to this rare opportunity to re-examine, under a radically different set of cultural preconditions, the sweeping musical transformation that similarly consumed the West. Special light is shed on prominent composers, such as Sukhi Kang, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Toru Takemitsu, and Xiaofu Zhang. Recent trends and new directions which are observed in these countries are also addressed, and the volume shows how the modern fusion of music and technology is triangulated by a depth of culture and other social forces. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Music Review.

Locating East Asia in Western Art Music

How does a piece of music embody the sound of a different culture? The traditional musics of China, Japan and Korea have been an important source of inspiration for many Western composers. Some, like Chou Wen-chung and John Cage, have moved beyond superficial borrowing of "Eastern" musical elements in earnest attempts to understand non-Western principles of composition. At the same time, many Asian composers, often trained in the West or in Western music traditions, have been using Asian elements to create works of unique musical synthesis. As a result of such cultural interpenetrations, the landscape of Western art music has been irreversably altered. Locating East Asia in Western Art Music is a comparative study of Asian-influenced Western composers and Western-influenced Asian composers, and the first sustained exploration of this cross cultural exchange. Bringing together work by music theorists, musicologists and ethnomusicologists, this book explores how musical notions of East and West are constructed and utilized by composers, and reevaluates the many ways East Asian composers have contributed to developments in twentieth century music. Composers discussed include John Cage, Toru Takemitsu, Chou Wen-chung, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Isang Yun, Tan Dun, John Zorn, and Henry Cowell. CONTRIBUTORS: Hugh De Ferranti, Yayoi U. Everett, Judith Herd, Ellie Hisama, Eric Lai, Frederic Lau, Fredric Lieberman, Steven Nuss, Nancy Rao, and Yu Siuwah.

New Music in the Orient: Essays on Composition in Asia since World War II