Hearing the Chinese Spirit: Nationalist Legacies and Racialization in Contemporary Chinese American Music

Abstract

Xinchao composers, a group of Chinese composers who were born in the 1950s, grew up as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and entered leading music conservatories right after they reopened have been recognized internationally as highly creative and successful in blending cultures from East and West in their works. Four of them, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and Zhou Long, studied at Columbia University and eventually settled in different parts of the United States enjoying prestigious careers as both composers for various media and university faculty members. Their musical success, I argue, is built on their ability to apply Chinese stereotypes to their highly Westernized musical styles and construct appealing narratives that concurrently reinforce their cultural hybridity and authenticity.Composers’ lived experience in rural regions during the Cultural Revolution and ethnographic field trips in collegiate years have been utilized frequently as proof of their affiliation with authentic Chinese musical cultures. However, by applying musical analysis to works that directly relate to the use of folk music materials, I illustrate that the composers are more likely to use folk music that was recorded and published in folk song collections in the early days of Communist China, meaning that the tunes have been mediated in both melody and musical treatment. Furthermore, they often reproduce the ethnic flavors prescribed in folk song publications and treatises on Chinese folk music. This shows that their Chinese musical knowledge comes from mediated sources, which were written by earlier musicians who received Western music education and had very limited knowledge about Chinese musical practice. In the same vein, their lives in New York also enable the composers to claim authenticity in their Western musical expressions, and their use of post-tonal, modern, and Western musical techniques is seen as successfully blending into the contemporary music community by illustrating their individuality and non-stereotypical Chineseness. Yet, some of their techniques are well discussed in Chinese folk music literature, and they share various common musical processes such as juxtaposing rather than blending melodic motives, heavy use of repeating patterns, and a non-pitched-based conclusion of their multi-movement works. The shared musicality suggests the presence of a generational musical style that resulted from their training and the process of Internal Orientalism, whereby (mostly) Han intellectuals and musicians exoticize and essentialize rural and minority cultures for their nationalist and Orientalist agendas.Therefore, the Chinese-Western cultural boundary that is perceived by Western music audiences or composers themselves as rigid and polarizing is much more nuanced and difficult to define in reality. Using language that emphasizes the differences between the Orientalized, “traditional” Chinese culture and “contemporary,” “universal” Western cultural ideals, and that claims they have crossed boundaries and brought Chinese culture to modernity, the composers are nonetheless reinforcing a Eurocentric worldview that they have inherited from modern Chinese society.