Performing Studies of Music in Asian Cultures: Some Personal Reflections on What We Have Been and Are Up To

Preface to Readers

This article was conceived as an oral presentation for an easily imagined audience of fellow Asianists, both professorial and student, as well as others drawn to the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Asian Music in New Orleans. It was a singular honor to be invited to present a keynote address before such an audience, and I wish again to thank the board of directors of the society for the opportunity. Since an oral presentation is a different creation from an article that the author knows will be experienced by reading, I was able to position my written text, a copious number of visual slides, and some recordings to be entirely complementary, with all permitting me the flexibility to embellish the content in a somewhat improvisatory manner in interaction with the audience. In turning the performed presentation into written form, I have tried to retain some sense of the oral presentation by reproducing a few visual slides and deriving section headings from the content of the PowerPoint slides. To get started, I spoke to the title of the talk and here I do the same, commenting on the words and phrases in the order in which they appear.

Introduction

First, with regard to “Performing Studies” in the main title: I use the word “performing” because it seems to me that that is what we do. In the process both of conducting research and of “disseminating results,” we are attentive to matters that are constituent of what is more normally thought of as performing: consideration of the audience being addressed, programmatic content, modes of presentation—in this case oral, aural, and visual. I also want to encompass the studies both by those of us for whom performing music with a high level of expertise is central to the scholarly endeavor and those of us—including myself—for whom the making of the music is a basis for understanding but not something on which I want to be evaluated. The word “music” I use in a flexible sense to encompass not only what I have selected to study but choices of others as well.

As for “Asian cultures” in the title, credit goes to the initial editor of Asian Music, Mark Slobin, who established the principle that “Asia” as represented in the journal of the Society for Asian Music would be a massively encompassing rubric. Even from the first three volumes between 1969 and 1972, musics from the span of continental and insular Asia have been addressed in articles—in those years alone, Turkey, Iraq, the Red Sea area, India, Khorasan, Uzbekistan, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, and Cambodia. Those of you familiar with the subdivision of Asia in other multidisciplinary organizations in the United States will recognize that this is distinctive. The Association for Asian Studies encompasses scholars from East Asia primarily, and also South and Southeast Asia; scholars of West Asia, on the other hand, share research through the Middle Eastern Studies Association. In terms of my own research, “Asia” has meant specifically India and Japan. The word “culture” I put in the plural in order to avoid suggesting that “culture” means something clear or discrete.

As for the “Some Personal Reflections” in the subtitle, I would like to assure you that normally I leave my personal reflections to conversations and the classroom. For some reason still unclear to me, however, I wanted from the first moment to focus on my own trajectory of research and teaching—an option given by Fred Lau as president of the society, along with the invitation to speak. Put in more proper ethnomusicological terms for that public venue and this publication, my personal reflections in effect “situate myself.” In this instance, I set out to situate myself within a community of sorts, such as those who gathered in that room through the auspices of the Society for Asian Music, hence the pronoun “we” in the subtitle.

“Situating myself” personally turned out to be a matter of addressing a certain flow and...