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Chapter 4 The Sounds of Chinese Otherness and American Popular Music, 1880s–1920s By the 1880s, with the number of opportunities for Americans to hear Chinese music, American songwriters began to incorporate Chinese-inspired sounds into their music. To some extent this development was a continuation of the racist discourse that saw the Chinese as foreign and inferior, with the American composer, through the use of musical notation and instrumentation, becoming just another mechanism in the marginalizing of a group of people.Yet the borrowing of Chinese musical traditions allowed songwriters to expand their understanding of music and break down the rules of music composition that many found restricting. Some composers believed that, as with other traditions from the non-Western world, Chinese culture contained remedies for what they saw as the West’s cultural stagnation. Although still tied to debates on the progress of Western civilization, Chinese music for these musicians had become a source of inspiration and innovation, and it impacted the development of American music in ways that have not been widely acknowledged. At this time, much of the source material for Chinese music came from missionaries, civil servants, traders, and music experts, all of whom worked in Chinese communities at home and abroad. As accurate as they tried to be, these writers were not only Euro-centric in almost every aspect of their work, but they framed their findings as authoritative texts on “authentic” Chinese music. Thus, their actions were located somewhere between ethnomusicology , which emerged in the post–World War II era and emphasized cultural sensitivity, and comparative musicology, the late nineteenth-century precursor to ethnomusicology that compared Western and non-Western traditions in ways that reaffirmed racist attitudes. In spite of the prevailing belief that Chinese music was noise and therefore beyond notational description, these visitors attempted to bridge this gap and published analyses and examples of Chinese music for American and European readers.What was perhaps unfore86 seen was how these texts would also become a resource for American popular songwriters. Beginning in the 1880s, a noticeable shift occurred in American music that paralleled a shift in American attitudes on race and the practice of seeing Asia as monolithic. Up to this time, only a few songwriters had incorporated Orientalist sounds, as Charles Towner had in “Heathen Chinee.” By the 1880s, American songwriters began to follow the European practice of using sound to mark the Chinese as Other. Since the eighteenth century, European composers had used certain aural cues to demarcate the “Orient”—especially the Ottoman Empire, a major source of intercultural contact and anxiety— from Europe. By the following century, Americans too had turned to sound to define the American “race” through music. By the use of certain melodies and instrumentation, composers and music experts hoped to find a way to embody an American identity separate from a European one without losing a sense of whiteness. To do this, musicians relied on their training in Western music (both art and popular), which they combined with transcriptions and writings on folk traditions. Interestingly, the music of certain groups (Appalachian whites, Native Americans, and African Americans) was seen as unique to the United States and was appropriated by composers to help fashion an American sound. Chinese music, however, helped shape the definition of what it meant to be American in other ways—by acting as a foil. To create a Chinese sound, American songwriters turned to another set of sonic devices that were associated with non-Western and non-art music— blackface minstrelsy and African American musical traditions. As musical representations of difference, African American signifiers were well known to American art and popular composers since at least the 1830s, when the first blackface minstrels appeared. By combining African American traditions with European Orientalism and transcriptions of Chinese music, they again played to notions of difference and inferiority and expanded on the conflation of the non-Western world.1 Ironically, in contrast to the popular perception of Chinese music as noise, American songwriters created a sonic middle ground that was somewhere between art music and unorganized sound. There were also a few songwriters who turned to non-Western musical traditions for reasons that did not necessarily reinforce American racism. These musicians were frustrated by Victorian values and the commercialization of the arts and so looked to China in their quest for alternative forms of expression. These individuals, called antimodernists by T. J. Jackson Lears, specifically examined cultures and societies that they believed were more...

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