Addendum: A Response to Kagan's Review of Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai

Repeated errors of fact and misquotations appear in Alan Kagan's review of my book Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai (Oxford, 2003) as printed in Asian Music (37/1). The following listing is a very partial cross-section of the errors and misrepresentations in that review.

1. 1. Kagan claims that I misquote comments on Chinese urban musics by Stephen Jones, which Jones describes as "sanitized," "imposed from above," and as musics that "developed out of traditional music." This is not true; page references to all these expressions can be found in my writing, and none is taken out of context.

2. 2. Kagan supports Jones's perspectives on urban musics by citing Su Zheng and an article by Witzleben published in 1997 (Kagan mistakenly writes 1995). Su Zheng's words are taken out of context by Kagan and Witzleben's article, which makes no reference to Jones's book and focuses instead on the teaching of ethnomusicology to Chinese students in Hong Kong.

3. 3. Kagan claims that I write that rural research is "easier to accomplish" than urban research. This (unlikely) claim is not to be found in my book.

4. 4. Kagan states that I argue we should study individual, historically situated works as opposed to performance events. No such imperative occurs in my discussion of different kinds of ethnomusicological research.

5. 5. Kagan states that in my model for urban study I prefer "less dependence on participant-observation and more attention to formal interviews." This, too, is not a position taken in my book.

6. 6. Kagan claims I take "a dim view of self-reflexivity as a theoretical approach." Again, no blunt disavowal of that approach will be found in my book; I argue instead for multiple, complementary approaches to a complex subject.

7. 7. Kagan claims to find certain key signatures "irksome," stating that in seven of the music examples "an accidental has no reference to any pitch in the transcription" and adding that I leave scales "undefined." I find less than seven, but those familiar with Chinese music know that many Chinese musicians presently use Western-derived key designations. When they use staff notation, they employ key signatures accordingly. To alter the key signature when the seventh or fourth degree of a scale is temporarily unused in an extract, as Kagan wishes, is to place the music into a different key altogether and so quite incorrect.

8. 8. Kagan mentions critically that I make no reference to Chinese "pentatonic and modal theory." There are actually several Chinese pentatonic and modal theories, new and old; several are mentioned in the book.

9. 9. Kagan complains that at no point "does the reader have a sense of a full dramatic production and how the music proceeds through a complete act, at least." Several dramatic productions are described, as are several long stretches of music extending over multiple scenes.

10. 10. Kagan claims that an opera recreated in the early 1950s on a theme of the 1930s would have reflected "a radically changed political and social environment." In fact, my book presents testimony from some of those who lived through these decades to show that this was not the case at all.

11. 11. Kagan states that I am "not reluctant" to give the names of some of those huju performers who died during the Cultural Revolution, an odd turn of phrase, as if the Cultural Revolution remains an event approached with hushed discretion. In reality, people in China have largely moved on. The names of those killed were already published in Shanghai in 1984.

12. 12. Kagan states that there is only one transcription of a male voice other than those immediately used as foils for comparison with female voices. This statement is simply untrue: examples of male and female voices are evenly balanced overall. Several male-role songs appear in their own right.

13. 13. Kagan asserts that I do not comment on the clear relationship between the fiddle accompaniment parts transcribed as figures 2.3 and 2.4. I do in fact comment on that relationship in the discussion of those figures.

14. 14. Kagan...