From the Editor

Aloha kākou! The five articles in this issue reflect diversity of different kinds. Geographically the first three focus upon East Asia—Japan, Korea, and China, respectively. Southeast Asia is represented by a technical discussion of Thai singing and South Asia is referenced by the examination of Indian traditions in the Caribbean diaspora. I comment on each contribution in order of appearance.

David Pacun examines yōgaku as the encounter of Japanese composition with “the West” during the era of relative calm between the two World Wars. The yōgaku movement was a conscious effort to create a contemporary Japanese musical identity informed by a growing awareness of the globalizing nature of elite music production. He discusses the musical materials that were invoked in this effort. He also suggests ways in which the movement “allowed an easy mapping of the music onto the demands of empire”; it was both appropriated by and became complicit in Japan’s adventurism that led to the Pacific War. The essay constitutes a historical examination of one period in Japan’s musical development.

The article on Korean Rock by Min-Jung Son also engages history, but at a different time and in a very different way. The narrative intertwines the politics of South Korea’s post-Pacific War nationhood with the rock genre reflecting American spheres of influence and marking Korea as a playing field for foreigners in a Cold War not of its making. Korean voices, both the empowered and the disempowered, document the twists and turns of a fascinating musikpolitik that both condemned and celebrated rock for the good of the nation. These twists and turns center upon three critical, historical events: the marijuana scandals of the 1970s, a government-sponsored youth festival in the 1980s, and the World Cup soccer match of 2002. As “an experiential and reflexive ethnography” the essay describes state attempts to engineer its own civil society.

The state is further problematized in Boxi Chen’s account of Chinese American (or American Chinese) successes in the Chinese Rock industry. As she convincingly argues, “Chinese Rock” does not equate with a specific nation-state; its loci of production and consumption encompass such entities as Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and the American “ABC” diaspora, implying that Chinese Rock constitutes a taste culture (heavily mediated per Herbert Gans) rather than a national expression. Chen attempts to tease out “what is Chinese” and “what is American” in the sound and image of two Chinese American males popular in Chinese Rock. According to her analysis, these artists are purveyors of a gesamtkunstwerk, in which sound, sight, movement, language, and the body are all signifiers of belonging and of alienation. Further, the artists have generated a distinctive aesthetic, which includes hair dyed orange and the faintly disturbing descriptor “chinked out.”

The aesthetic of Thai classical singing includes the sophisticated concept of uan, a nonsemantic vocalization for which timbre constitutes a distinctive feature. John Latartara points out that the aesthetic is about the sound only; there is no appeal to sight, movement, language, or body. He accepts the indigenous claim for a “Thai sound” in vocalization as reality, and undertakes to describe and quantify that reality through spectrographic analysis. His technical protocol, which has potential for the study of timbre writ large, confirms that the five basic sounds of uan are recognizable, identifiable, and consistent throughout the sample. Interestingly the state has intervened in the aesthetic of Thai sound by developing a standardized set of categories for tertiary instruction. The spectrographic data provide fascinating but partial correlation for these cateogories. The study includes discussions of contemporary pedagogy, its effectiveness as cultural transmission, and lineage as a determinant of variation for a Thai sound.

The final contribution revisits the theme of diaspora, examining survival and nonsurvival of vocal genres among North Indian populations in the Caribbean. Unlike the Chinese Rock case, diasporic performers in the Caribbean do not reenter the South Asian homeland practice. Peter Manuel compares the development of genres in the homeland and in the diaspora (Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad), where at present the language of Bhojpuri Hindi competes in an anglophone and patois environment...