Introduction: Contesting China’s New “National” Music

Despite widespread recognition that music both constitutes and reflects culture, the study of Chinese music and its development has been marginalized from mainstream topics of historical inquiry. In most English-language Chinese history textbooks, for instance, the subject of music in twentieth-century China is conspicuous only by its absence. Twentieth-Century China seeks to redress this historiographical lacuna by devoting a special issue to music, especially the development of “New Music,” defined by one of its leading scholars as, “music composed by Chinese using European compositional techniques and musical idioms.”¹ Given that the new music was largely a product of semi-colonial, cosmopolitan Shanghai, it is appropriate that all four articles consider musicians and musical developments in Shanghai, where Chinese-foreign interaction and experimentation in modern art forms were most visible and audible. Each author examines how members of China’s music community struggled for national transformation in a highly contested process of defining the new “national” music, whether that meant defending elements of pre-existing Chinese music, adopting European stylistic elements, composing Chinese-Western fusion works, or creating a socialist realist style directed towards a new mass audience.

In “The Shanghai Conservatory, Chinese Musical Life, and the Russian Diaspora, 1927–1949,” Hon-Lun Yang brings to life a forgotten chapter in the development of China’s “new music.” Although Russian pedagogues constituted almost half of all full-time faculty at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and influenced an entire generation of Chinese musicians that came to the fore during the Maoist era, such as composer He Luting, pianist Ding Shande, and conductor Li Delun, the question of how Western musicians, and Russian musicians in particular, contributed to the development of Chinese music was largely avoided during the Maoist era for its sensitive political implications. Yang suggests that Russian musicians, because of their own marginalized status in Shanghai’s expatriate community, may have been uniquely positioned to influence their Chinese counterparts. Yang’s use of memoirs reveals that Chinese graduates from the Shanghai Conservatory remember a time of intense musical exchange with their Russian teachers, during which a transculturation of the nation’s musical practices occurred that facilitated China’s musical modernity.

John Winzenburg’s “Aaron Avshalomov and New Chinese Music in Shanghai, 1931–1947” reveals how this Russian-Jewish immigrant’s hybrid identity as a Chinese acculturated foreigner facilitated his experimental work as conductor, composer, and pedagogue that defied rigid traditional-modern, Chinese-Western dichotomies and contributed to the development of a new “national” Chinese music. Analyzing Avshalomov’s compositional style and influence on musicians, the author demonstrates how Avshalomov inspired burgeoning composers to experiment with Chinese stylistic elements while using Western musical techniques. Moreover, Avshalomov’s compositions have contemporary relevance as they have foreshadowed an important genre of Chinese-Western fusion compositions during the ongoing reform era.

Contestation over participation in China’s musical modernity is the subject of Joys Cheung’s article, “Divide and Connections in Chinese Musical Modernity: Cases of Musical Networks Emerging in Colonial Shanghai, 1919–1937.” Cheung argues that previous interpretations of Chinese musical modernity have privileged the reform-oriented Shanghai Conservatory over the nativist Great Unity Music Society. Whereas the former advocated Western classical music as the foundation for a new Chinese music, the latter sought to defend preexisting Chinese music practices while incorporating them into modern developments. By the early 1930s these two organizations had developed an antagonistic relationship with each other. Prominent reformers, for instance, criticized Chinese musical instruments for being technologically obsolete and lacking expressive power. Perhaps as a consequence of accepting these criticisms at face value, musicologists have often treated the Great Unity Music Society as peripheral to China’s musical modernity, or, at best, an organization “on the verge” of musical modernity. By contrast, Cheung reveals that musicians from the two organizations overlapped in significant ways. Employing the concept of “weak ties,” derived from social network theory, Cheung argues that the two organizations shared a commitment to the nation-building project and that both “reformers” and “defenders” “embraced a greater openness to a bi-musical—albeit loosely defined—approach in pursuing Chinese modernity...