Keynote
2023 “Global Musicology and Epistemic Transculturation: The Sinophone View,” Musicological Society of Australia conference (Nov 29-Dec 2, University of Adelaide). There is a contradiction between the concept of global musicology which has largely circulated in English-language discourse, versus the practice of global musicology, which I argue is best instantiated in music research circles that use other languages, thus necessitating translations as a central practice of global musicology. I discuss the process of epistemic transculturation that occurs when Western music disciplines flow across Sinophone borders, highlighting various cases such as the different reactions to the death of US musicologist Richard Taruskin, with Chinese scholars launching half a year’s worth of weekly online symposia, versus the ambiguous reaction of US scholars; and the emphasis on epistemic location in the work of Ye Songrong, who argues for the interpretation of Western music history through Chinese philosophy.
2023 “My Queer Chinese Ear.” “Queer Chinese Voices” forum, Western Sydney University and University of Sydney (Mar 14, online). The paper explores the author's queer Chinese ear as a musicologist and listener, highlighting the ear's agential capacity to construct voices that it hears as well as personalized musical worlds. It criticizes the prejudiced filters through which queer and Chinese voices are often heard, including queer and Chinese academic voices, and advocates for a more compassionate and open way of listening to break down stereotypes.
Guest lectures series
2022 “Sinophone Musicology: 7 Theses and Anti-Theses on Western Method,” National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan), Department of Music (Dec 19, online). The methodological landscape of the West, including its ethical tenets, is a product of colonial history and designed to address oppression as seen from the perspective of the colonial-imperial epicenter; e.g. the centrality of countering stereotypes in Western method ultimately addresses how global people are seen through Eurocentric lenses. This paper presents Sinophone musicology as an alternative approach to Western methods in music research. It highlights the emergence of scholarly voices from various Sinophone-related research circles, which produce knowledge from an epistemic location otherwise, and thereby delinks from Western discourses.
2022 “Taruskin in China: A Conversation with Susan McClary,” Shanghai Conservatory of Music (Dec 2, online). In this conversation based on my article “Taruskin is Dead!” (published on Shanghai Conservatory’s Wechat account for its weekly Taruskin symposia that took place in the second half of 2022), I asked McClary a series of pointed questions designed to lead the Chinese audience to interrogate Taruskin’s impressive oeuvre, an approach that led McClary to describe Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music as “a final monument to Old Musicology, with its blinkered attention only to the musics of Europeans and North Americans”—but also a “triumph of New Musicology” in that it integrated issues of gender and sexuality that were important to others of Taruskin’s generation such as McClary herself.
2022 “Self-Alienation in Sinophone Music,” Western Sydney University, Institute of Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (Oct 7, online). Colonization has left behind racial stereotypes, and this paper examines how Chinese composers and listeners find themselves in the position of refuting their ethnic identity because of the association with slitty eyes, kungfu panda, or even just noodles. I discuss different responses to self-alienation in Singapore where listeners accept a newly constructed neocolonial identity of “banana” to explain their preference for Western pop music, versus in China where listeners enact what I call “ethnic re-affiliation,” overcoming self-alienation through discourses that Sinicize music which has absorbed Western-originating elements.
2022 “Alienation and Marginality in Music: Race, Gender, Sexuality,” Ohio State University, School of Music (Mar 7, online). Alienation is painful and is caused by marginalizing forces often intertwined with race, gender, and sexuality. Yet alienation can also be a form of agential subjective expression that protects the subject. Drawing from a range of case studies spanning the past millennium and the globe (including Beatriz de Dia, Bach, and contemporary Chinese Singaporean composer Joyce Koh), I show how rather than being shaped by and subject to oppressive forces, musical subjects self-alienate themselves from stereotypes and from violent reality.
2021 “More Difference! Epistemic Delinking from European-US Discourse,” University of California – Irvine, Department of Music (Jan 14, online). Difference has become the key signifier of ethics in music studies, with race, gender, and sexuality treated as evidence of ethical scholarly commitments, and with related identities parsed through the nuanced framework of the social construction and negotiation of complex and intersectional identities. However, this talk identifies multiple instances where difference goes awry because of a variety of reasons, such as the lack of consideration of alternative contexts outside of the US (e.g. the 2000-plus-year-old Chinese pentatonic scale is part of the musical vernacular in China; in contrast, European-US anti-racist discourse rarely looks beyond the pentatonic cliché familiar from “Kungfu Fighting” and as a result argues that “Chinese music is not pentatonic”). In place of difference, I propose multiplicity as a conceptual anchor can serve as a corrective to restore social and global complexities that have been flattened.
2020 “Provincializing Western Modernism, Ping-Ponging the New Universality,” University of Oregon School of Music and Dance (Jan 31). Focusing on Sinophone musical modernity and modernism in Singapore and China as case studies, this talk reassesses comparative frameworks and redefines universality as outsized, really-existing multiplicities, e.g. musical creativity and human affect that are culturally specific but universally-existing and all-encompassing. I demonstrate how resistance, rather than being exclusive to “difference,” can actually be exerted through the recognition of both difference and universals (e.g. all-encompassing, eclectic playlists compiled by minority listeners). The combination of difference and universality gives rise to a productive epistemic ambiguity that I propose as a framework for ethical analysis.
Invited conference/course presentations (with honoraria)
2022 “Decolonizing Music Education” undergraduate course, Santa Clara University (May 5, online). The assumption that decolonizing music curricula requires expanding ethnomusicological offerings is positive but incomplete, as it neglects music history and theory. This presentation argues for the inclusion of global music history and world music theory to truly decolonize music education, distinguishing between real-world music-makers taking decolonial action (often the subject of ethnomusicological research) and the need to decolonize higher music education itself.
2021 “Self-Alienation in Joyce Koh’s TAI,” Women in Global Music Network launch (Jun 18, online). Like many avant-garde composers of color, Chinese Singaporean composer Joyce Koh is caught between the pincers of having to establish herself professionally by achieving recognition within European modernist circles, on the one hand, and constantly being pigeonholed as “Asian” by audiences, on the other—resulting in accusations of either being too European (not Asian enough) or too Asian (not European enough). Through close analysis of her post-spectralist orchestral work TAI (1998/2002), which sounds out the spatial movement of the Chinese calligraphic strokes of the logogram 泰 (after which the work is named), this paper shows how that hostile structure of judgement leads Koh to oscillate between desiring recognition within the European avant-garde framework and asserting her unique Asian perspective. Rather than leading to stable intercultural hybridity, the outcome is constant ambivalence.