Abstracts

ASABA, YUIKO

Across ‘East Asia’ and ‘Latin America’: The Transoceanic Circulations of Tango and the Bandoneón, 1930s-1940s

The bandoneón has been considered the “star” instrument of Argentine tango since the early twentieth century. An instrument of the concertina family, the sounds and the performance mechanism of the instrument have become central in shaping the aesthetics of tango and the iconic image of Argentina itself. This key instrument of tango, the bandoneón, reached China in the early twentieth century through various transoceanic routes, brought in by travelling musicians of diverse national backgrounds and through importation. Performed during the 1930s-1940s at the modern Chinese dance halls where high-quality jazz and tango orchestras were considered to mark the prestige of each dance hall, it was at these venues in the cosmopolitan cities of China that many Japanese tango musicians encountered and learnt to play the bandoneón for the first time. The China-Japan tango nexus, thus, brought one of the first exposures of the bandoneón in Japan at this time, as returnee Japanese tango musicians brought home not only the instrument but the knowledge of performing tango from China, becoming critical figures in cultivating Japan’s sonic imaginations surrounding the distant Latin American continent. 

Through the lens of colonial modernity, migration, circulations of commodity and personal narratives, this paper seeks to go beyond the sonic and visual representations of the much-debated political notion of “continents (tairiku)” in Japan at this time, to reveal the ways in which human interactions through a musical instrument became a central motivating factor in the Japanese migration to some of the Latin American countries at this time.

CHEN, YUHAO

Sinophonic Mouth

The mouth underlies the physical articulation of all languages—or so thought the nineteenth-century elocutionist Alexander Melville Bell. In his “visible speech,” Bell devised a system of phonetic symbols to capture various positions of the vocal organs in human speech. For him, such a written system functioned like a “score” that would notate speech production, facilitate language learning, and bring together different tongues and speaking bodies. This paper investigates the applications of visible speech to the Chinese languages in the 1870s and 1880s, where Protestant missionaries from England and America used Bell’s system to transcribe Sinophone words for literacy and curriculum development. I examine a constellation of disability educators and students in Peking, Chefoo, Rochester, and Washington, DC who, irrespective of the language they knew, managed to reproduce Chinese sounds with the aid of corresponding symbols in visible speech. These speakers, in approximating Chinese sounds through the choreography of vocal organs, formed a translingual network around the principle of elocution. This principle prioritizes the production of speech over the aural reception of sound, encapsulating an oralist acoustemology which focuses on finding a way to visualize thought in vocalizable form. The mouth, as an agent validating knowledge production in sound, offers a framework for reconceptualizing the spatio-temporal connection between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds on the grounds of embodiment. By scaling these intersecting sound worlds into the oral space, this paper illustrates how the mouth helped to concretize a link between sound and sense via a group of visible speech users in the late nineteenth century, who worked to write language primers and translate ideas by inscribing Chinese sounds onto the mouth.

CHOI, HYE EUN

 A Minor Transpacific Engagement in the Making of the Japanese Record Industry

The history of the Japanese record industry in its formative period in the early twentieth century can be divided into three stages. In the first, Japanese records were produced as part of international recording expeditions by the major global record companies. The second stage saw the emergence of record companies on Japanese soil, and the third began with the larger of these domestic companies affiliating with the major global record labels and becoming dominant players in East Asia from the late 1920s. Although this trajectory shows that the Japanese record industry grew in close engagement with the multinational record companies, the process by which the Japanese labels acquired technology to record and manufacture discs for their own market in the second stage still needs to be explained. This paper investigates the history of the Nipponophone Company (Nihon Chikuonki Shōkai 日本畜音機商會), which was the first and most representative Japanese record company until it became Nippon Columbia in 1928. Based on a study of the US trade magazine The Talking Machine World, the paper reveals that Nipponophone hired several pioneers of the American recording industry not only for technological support but also for PR purposes in the US market, demonstrating the significance of locally driven minor transpacific engagements in the formation of the Japanese record industry.

HARKNESS, NICHOLAS

The Transpacific Matter of Sound; or, The Religious Media of Korean War Debris - Keynote Lecture

A broken oxygen tank. A punctured military tent. A throat in pain. These are some of the sound-making media of Protestant Christianity in post-war South Korea. On the eve of the 70th anniversaries of the signing of the armistice agreement (July 27, 1953) and the ROK-US mutual defense treaty (October 1, 1953), this paper considers some transpacific trajectories of sound through some of sound’s historically mediating matter. I focus on the creative incorporation of Korean war debris into the aesthetics of postwar Protestantism. I do so in the broader context of such mediating matter’s historical presence on the Korean peninsula, and in relation to some of the now global phonosonic practices that have arisen from that violent encounter. 

HSIEH, AMANDA

Japan’s German Opera in 1920s’ Taiwan

Forming part of a larger transnational study of Japanese adaptation of German opera, this exploratory paper examines Japanese articulation of its imperial ambitions as manifested through the Nippon Phonograph Company’s penetration in Taiwan (Nagahara 2017; Yasar 2018; Wang 2021). While the Company had already set up its Taipei branch in 1911, it was in the 1920s that both the phonograph players and records became affordable enough for middle-class professionals such as schoolteachers to own (Lin 2022). I will still need to consult the recently available 78 rpm recording collections in both Taiwan and Japan to properly determine the extent of European—and specifically German—opera on Japanese records. However, personal recollections available through Taiwanese local history projects evidence a generation of young Taiwanese, including Ke Ming-Chu, Lin He-Nien, and Lin Ch’iu-Mien, inspired by the recordings to travel to Japan to study opera in the 1920s, raising questions about how boundaries between the metropole and the colony might be shaped by musical culture.

This work will weave together a larger transnational narrative spanning imperial Japan, colonial Taiwan, and Weimar Germany, participating in musicology’s current ‘global’ turn as reflected in the emerging field of ‘global music history’ (Irving 2010; Strohm 2018; Bloechl 2020; Takao 2022). Instead of perpetuating a Saidian narrative of a permanent Western hegemony and a fixed East-West opposition, it resists a simple East-West binary by approaching Japanese-German relations – a growing area of scholarly enquiry (Spang and Wippich 2006; Cho, Roberts, and Spang 2016; Saaler, Akira, and Nobuo 2017; Law 2019) – with an eye to their complex and shifting history of entanglement. It looks to postcolonial studies for tools to consider complex dynamics of localisation and hybridisation. Ultimately, this transpacific case study aims to produce a history of ‘Western art music’ decentred from the ‘West’.

LAW, HEDY

Operatic Archipelago: Cantonese Opera in the Inter-Oceanic Sinophone Region in 1923

This paper examines a playbill printed to promote a Cantonese opera performance on October 13, 1923, in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was first discussed by Nancy Yunhwa Rao in her monograph, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (2017; Chinese translation, 2021). Based on Rao’s work, I argue that the playbill, in Chinese, discloses the construction of what Ann Laura Stoller calls in Duress (2015) transnational “filiations” among Sinophone diaspora communities in the 1920s. Scholars have long noted the “playbill” as an important primary source in Cantonese opera research. In this case, it interpellated a Sinophone community active in Chinatown in Honolulu and reinforced a sense of cross-national Chinese identity outside China. The English translation of this playbill would reveal that two registers are employed in the text: colloquial Cantonese and literary Chinese. The juxtaposition of these two registers in one playbill illustrates how Cantonese opera sustained a Cantonese-speaking community within the broader Sinophone sphere. In addition, my analysis of this playbill focuses on the term “South China Sea” that emphasizes Southeast Asia as an archipelago (i.e., a group of islands including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Siam). With the translation of this playbill, I contest the more recent, land-based designation of “Southeast Asia” by highlighting the interconnectedness between South China Sea and the North Pacific Ocean. The disclosure of the archipelagic meaning can replace what global historian Sebastian Conrad calls the “container” framework with an inter-oceanic framework. The translated keyword illustrates the conception of a malleable, modular, expandable, and interconnectable Sinophone region formed by communities from the Chinese diaspora. The inter-oceanic framework de-territorialized the Pacific Northwest Region (Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle) by following the transpacific sea route to Honolulu, which interconnects the South China Sea with the North Pacific Ocean through steam vessels, and re-territorialized an international archipelago Sinophone region in the 1920s. 

MACBAIN, ABIGAIL I.

Celebration and Celebrants: The Multicultural Spectacle of Tōdaiji Temple’s Eye-Opening Ceremony

On May 26, 752, Japan’s political, military, and monastic forces gathered to witness the eye-opening ceremony of the Great Buddha at Tōdaiji Temple in the capital city of Heijō. On this occasion, the Great Buddha’s pupils were painted in, thereby enlivening the statue and transforming it into a religious icon. This activation ceremony comprised local and overseas religious specialists, as well as music and dance troupes specializing in performing arts from mainland Asia. Through the ceremony and the multicultural festivities that followed, the Japanese court announced its presence as a cosmopolitan Buddhist country with comparable technological prowess, Buddhist legitimation enterprises, and cultural capital as its East Asian neighbours.

In this presentation, I argue that this event’s multicultural flavour demonstrated Emperor Shōmu’s (701-756) perception that Japan needed to highlight this very sort of interregional blending and multicultural expression to broadcast its position as both a Buddhist country and an empire comparable to Tang China. I highlight the degree to which the Japanese court relied upon its population of monks and kinship groups with overseas origins. Additionally, I consider what these multicultural performances demonstrate about the roles of music, ritual, and performance in Buddhism’s circulation at this time. To that end, I compare accounts of this event in the eighth-century court history Shoku nihongi and the Tōdaiji collection of temple records Tōdaiji yōroku. I place these descriptions in context with remaining instruments, costumes, and tools from the Shōsōin Repository that were either used or donated during this event. By amplifying this access to and mastery of continental Asian culture, I argue that Shōmu was not merely offering entertainment, but he was also demonstrating Japan’s cultural sophistication and familiarity with Buddhism’s position as a pan-Asian religion. 

PETRULIS, JASON

Banjo on the Black Ships: a Transpacific History of Black Performance on the Perry Expedition to Japan

This paper traces the travels of two Black-coded and -connected instruments, the banjo and jawbone, to tell a story about the mid-19th century Black Pacific. In March 1854, as the US Navy’s “Perry expedition” to Japan anchored in Yokohama waters, White crew members celebrated their new trade treaty by staging a blackface minstrel show for Japanese officials. A Japanese artist sketched vivid images of the musicians and their instruments, which were copied and circulated around Japan and beyond. Historians have since used these images and other sources to tell a story of White race-making for Japanese audiences.

This paper tells a different story by centering Black musicians and their instruments, especially the banjo and jawbone. It analyzes how the Perry expedition brought Black music, instruments, dance, and recitation to Asia; and suggests that as Black musicians performed in oceans, littorals, and ports across Asia, they helped to construct the Black Pacific. It uses underexamined archives and sources to understand the Black performers who sailed Asian waters. And it argues that Black shipboard performances preceded, transformed, and recast the expedition’s better-known (White-performed) blackface minstrel shows.

Evidence suggests that Black performers mostly played minstrel music, in ensembles that included voice, banjo, jawbone, bones, tambourine, and triangle. Such performances connected these ensembles to the other side of the Black Pacific and the Caribbean: to Afro-Peru and Afro-Mexico, to Jamaican Maroon communities and New Orleans’s Congo Square. To tell this story, this paper thus follows Black performers throughout their interAsian oceanic passages, especially during sailors’ end-of-day timespaces of freedom; and sails with them into the harbors of Canton (Guangzhou), Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. In examining Black oceanic performances, it traces the Asian circulation of Black Caribbean/Pacific instruments, and the cultures that attended them, to expand our understanding of transpacific musical exchange.

SON, MINGYEONG 

Intercultural Bridges to the 'Other': Listening to the Unheard Memories of Korean Diasporic Composers Jin Hi Kim and Texu Kim

This presentation explores the musical representation of intercultural experiences by Korean diasporic composers and the aesthetic implications of international communication. Korea has been influenced by Western music, but as Korean composers advance onto the international stage in the global era, they are attempting to uncover their cultural heritage in their homeland and reflect it in their creations while considering their cultural identity (C. Utz, 2021). Previous memory studies have focused on cultural representations revealed in musical works (A. Assmann, 2011), now it is necessary to concentrate on the practical process of finding cultural legacies. This study focuses on two Korean composers, Jin Hi Kim (b. 1957) and Texu Kim (b. 1980), who were educated in Korea and currently live in the United States. J. Kimactively expresses the idiomatic playing techniques of the geomungo with her memory of traditional Korean music on top of improvisation, multimedia, and experiments in her One Sky for String Chamber Orchestra and Electric Geomungo (2005). The work reflects the pain of division and the desire for reconciliation between North and South Korea through the use of bicultural instrumentation and entangled heterogenous sounds. T. Kim combines Western music with indigenous Korean music and expresses his experiences of Westernized Korean acoustics through musical references to jazz, pop, and rock and roll in his piece K-fantasy for Orchestra (2018). He also caricatures the remnants of Japanese colonial rule through childhood memories of indigenous musical traditions. This research argues that by exploring the roots of their diasporic travel, conflicts as cultural others, and methods of tracing and transmitting cultural memories, the voice of others is expanded to be heard by an international community. The study ultimately proposes new intercultural aesthetic paradigms in twenty-first century Korean contemporary music and considers its historical significance in the context of trans-Pacific travels.