Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (review)

The myth of the "model minority" and the image of the whiz kid continue to shape the perception of Asian Americans, even as critical paradigms shift from conceiving Asians as immigrants to transnational models that account for complex circuits of migration and two-way cultural flow. The musical virtuoso is an especially intriguing "whiz": like mathematics, music's specialized discourse allows those who are still learning the English language as well as U.S. social skills to compete on a level playing field. But while numerical genius may provoke U.S. anxieties about national security, discourses about Asian musical virtuosity are more akin to "model minority" representations: Asians succeed by embracing Western cultural values, even as their ability to perform at the highest levels is ultimately constrained by a supposedly innate inability to absorb Western aesthetic sensibilities. Mari Yoshihara's latest book aims to deconstruct the cultural significance of the Asian musician and to give voice to the musicians themselves.

The core of the book is based on ethnographic fieldwork: in addition to interviewing a diverse range of professional musicians and teachers, Yoshihara attended lessons, rehearsals, and performances. This fieldwork was concentrated in New York City, but Yoshihara also interacted with musicians in Hawaii and Japan (and elsewhere by telephone). She presents some of this material in the form of oral histories interjected between the main chapters.

Chapter 1, "Early Lessons in Globalization," offers a fascinating historical overview of the ways that Western music has been mobilized in East Asia, beginning with the roles that the military, churches, and schools played in conveying discourses of Westernization and modernization in Japan, China, and Korea. Music's role changed as power relations shifted: for example, in the 1930s some Chinese musicians contributed to anti-Japanese resistance by composing songs in Western styles, while the influx of Russian exiles (both Russian Jews and White Russians), displaced further by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, transformed Shanghai's French Concession. Yoshihara also takes up two extended case studies in this chapter, examining the careers of Tamaki Miura and Shinichi Suzuki. Miura was an internationally renowned singer who negotiated numerous productions of Madame Butterfly, simultaneously engaging and revising the opera's representation of Japan. The Suzuki Method's pedagogical approach sought to bring out a child's unique expression (Suzuki was opposed to educational philosophies that stressed conformity), while his expectation that mothers would coordinate musical study revealed his conviction that a mother's primary duty was to attend to her children's development. The spread of the Suzuki Method beyond Japan, beginning in the late 1950s, represents a significant "reverse flow" of musical ideas but also reveals Western stereotypes about Japanese education as "a regime of imitation and repetition" (43), attitudes that persist in the music world and beyond. In sum, this chapter discusses a variety of ways that meanings are assigned to music (and to the performance of music) by governments, educators, audiences, and musicians.

The core of the book is Yoshihara's analysis of the racial and cultural meanings conveyed by music as perceived by musicians and audiences. Yoshihara always begins with the words of the musicians themselves: when they decline to connect identity politics to their experiences of the art and profession of music, as many (but not all) of them do, Yoshihara is respectful of their positions. After all, a musical composition might be fruitfully understood as representing a time period, an artistic school, a national identity, or as pure sound unfettered by sociocultural concerns. Yoshihara acknowledges these ambiguities and ambivalences as she focuses a critical eye on these testimonies, pointing out rhetorical contradictions that reveal the fault lines of cultural identity. In her conclusion, Yoshihara observes that music fascinates us "because it both expresses and transcends the social and cultural" (234). She notes that Asian and Asian...