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Chapter 1 Imagining China Early Nineteenth-Century Writings and Musical Productions By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans and Europeans struggled with how to understand Chinese music and how to portray the Chinese in their own traditions. The majority of Western visitors to China drew on a long and relatively stable practice that described Chinese music as “noise” and, more broadly, saw this particular aspect of China’s culture as inferior to that of Europe. Industrialization, contact with Chinese people (including performers), and the rise of scientific racism reinforced how these commentators understood the distinction between music and noise and between European and Chinese culture in general. Although travelers and other observers were clear about their opinions of Chinese music, the situation was different for composers and librettists. Songwriters were primarily concerned with entertaining and bringing in audiences, and to do this they relied on more exotic aspects of Chinese culture that went well with staged spectacles. It was both the descriptions of Chinese music and the depictions of China on the stage and in music that influenced attitudes toward Chinese culture . More importantly, however, these developments created a musical vocabulary of race that shaped, and would be reshaped, by further American contact with Chinese abroad and Chinese immigrants in North America. As argued by Jacques Attali, sound, despite its ephemeral qualities, participates in the organization of human relations.1 Specifically, the division of sound into two categories—music and noise—signifies the organization of social hierarchies and formulations of power. The boundaries between these two categories were frequently the subject of debate, depending on the listener ’s worldview and relationship to the subject. Nineteenth-century distinctions between music and noise arose out of a combination of forces tied to class tensions, gender relations, and intercultural contact. In previous centuries, composers and philosophers had developed a set of rules for music based on harmonic movement, which they saw as tied to the rationality and universality of the natural world.2 Eighteenth-century writers, however, soon realized 10 through information gathered primarily by French Jesuit missionaries that the traditions of non-Western peoples whom they saw as either closer to nature or, in a few instances, more refined (such as the Chinese, who were often seen as both) did not follow these rules. In response, Europeans and Americans did not alter their attitudes to allow for the coexistence of a variety of sophisticated musical traditions based on different sets of principles but instead chose to see their own practices as the pinnacle of human development and all others as inferior. This attitude, in turn, worked together with other racist ideas that emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The language that developed in response to these experiences was inextricably tied to what Edward Said has called Orientalism, and it helped to delineate China as Other. There were material differences between Chinese and Western traditions—musical notation, instrument construction, scales, vocal techniques, intellectual interests, orchestration, use of percussion, social organization of musicians and actors, theatrical traditions, and the social context of performances—but it was the way in which Westerners interpreted Chinese music that supported their more generalized belief in Chinese inferiority . In many cases, because Chinese traditions did not conform to the values of these writers, they were perceived to be lacking in “musical” qualities and therefore in need of containment and reform. Questions also arose about the ability of the Chinese to produce and understand what Westerners believed was a more complicated and sophisticated form of music. Unlike American and European commentators on Chinese culture, composers and librettists had different inspirations and goals. During this same period, musicians, hoping to create more alluring and exotic images that would appeal to audiences, turned to the Chinese vogue of the time known as chinoiserie.3 Although mainly associated with the decorative arts and landscape design, chinoiserie also informed the aesthetic sensibilities of the theater arts. Musical and theatrical producers were primarily concerned with the spectacle of what they were creating and only loosely borrowed from what limited information there was on Chinese clothing, objects, and architecture. As with the visual aspects of these productions, librettists recycled a limited number of previously published stories based on Western fascination with China and translations of Chinese and other Asian texts. These plotlines were also a conflation of “Chinese” and “Oriental” signifiers that librettists believed were marketable to European and Americans audiences and worked well with Chinese-stylized stage trappings. Musically...

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