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Abstract
Chinese music has received considerable attention in recent scholarship due to the success of the ‘New Wave’ generation of composers. Despite this apparent bloom in interest, some writers feel that the discourse suffers from a lack of close reading, in favor of identity politics and meta-cultural issues. Using Tan Dun's Ghost Opera as a case study, this article suggests that the issue is less about ‘appropriate balance’, and has more to do with the type of question technical analysis has traditionally been employed to answer in the scholarship of contemporary Chinese music. Instead of focusing on the degree to which a signifier is ‘Chinese’ or ‘contemporary’, analysts should ask why ethnicity is performed when it is not always necessary, and potentially even distracts from the music itself.
Notes
[1] The ‘picturesque’ (literally meaning ‘in the manner of a picture’) is an aesthetic category that first came to prominence in England through the treatises of such writers as William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. Picturesque is obsessed with the dispossessed, the destitute and the aged over the young and the heroic. The picturesque is also fascinated with the exotic other, gazing upon images of a mystified Orient through reports of travellers, missionaries, traders and soldiers.
[2] ‘New Wave’ (xinchao) refers to a group of young composers who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and emerged out of China in the politically volatile early 1980s. Collectively, they reflected the social, economic and political changes at the time, and the impact of such changes on music.
[3] The new musicology debate first came to prominence in the 1980s, though the philosophical grounding of the discourse has been around for much longer. According to Ellen Rosand (Citation1995, p. 10), new musicology is informed by ‘semiotics, response and reception theory, narratology, gender theory, cultural criticism’. Often inherent in the discussion is a suspicion of analytical methods and marginalization of formalist positions.
[4] The imaginary nature of Chinese-ness as a fluid construct has been dealt with extensively in recent literature, most notably in a collection of essays In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today edited by Tu Wei-Ming (Citation1994).
[5] The Chinese character xi can be used interchangeably to signify drama, play or theatre, such as in xi ju; or games, such as in you xi; or used to represent regional opera when a stylistic or sub-genre prefix is attached, such as in jingxi, Beijing opera. At the time of writing, no consented-to English translation exists for the term ‘guixi’.
[6] An adequate definition of the genre of opera will no doubt require a book of its own; I am by no means suggesting that there even exists a normative understanding of opera, even within the confines of the concert hall tradition. It is a fluid concept that is open to repeated contestation and redefinition—Tan Dun's very own effort here included.
[7] Xiaobaicai is sometimes also referred to as ‘Xiaobaitsai’. More than seven versions of this folk tune are currently documented in different dialects. The version that exists in Ghost Opera, also the most widely circulated version of the tune, comes from the Hebei province, home to more than 50 minority ethnic groups.
[8] Model minorities are defined by their economic exceptionalism, upward class mobility, educational excellence and minimal contribution to their host nation-state's social problems. Asian Americans in particular are often portrayed by popular press as an exemplarity ethnic group. Model minorities are also more readily absorbed into the culture that is dominant or perceived as more desirable in the expense of denying their ethnic identity, ultimately aspiring to become ‘more white than white’ (Puar & Rai, Citation2004; Wong et al., Citation1998).
[9] In my opinion, this is an important question that is best dealt with in reference to cultural expectation and audience reception.