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

Western musicologists, by and large, study and interpret a literature of written texts—manuscripts, scores, letters, or other such documents—in shaping or contesting the narratives in classical music history. These narratives often position the composer and his masterworks at the center of discussion, and around him (and it has been mostly white, European men) revolve the worlds of discourse that animate disciplinary practice. Somewhere near the very periphery of this galaxy, performers and non-Western subjects linger tenuously and marginally. Mari Yoshihara's Musicians from a Different Shore comes as an invaluable corrective to this dilemma by exploring the lives and experiences of Asian and Asian American performers to show how the flow of classical music between the West and Asian countries has been transdirectional. Yoshihara's book illuminates the often-ignored and hidden dimensions of classical music's political economy through extensive interviews with musicians and will be of interest to scholars of oral history eager to understand how unwritten narratives unfold at angles oblique to the written canon of classical music scholarship.

Yoshihara compiled ethnographic data over a fourteen-month period in which she interviewed approximately seventy Asian classical musicians in the New York City area, attended over one hundred concerts and recitals, and even took up piano lessons at Julliard (where many of her research subjects studied) as part of the immersive participant-observation process. The author readily acknowledges the limited value of interviews as sources of raw data, being isolated, and sometimes formal events which take her informants out of their everyday lives (8-9), and her research benefits from a broad and organic methodological framework. What emerges is a complex picture told largely through oral narrative, where Asian musicians navigate issues of race, class, gender, and identity as part of the everyday experience of professional and semi-professional music making in America and the West.

Chapter 1 contextualizes classical music as being an "intrinsic part" (15) of East-West encounters in the second half of the nineteenth century, and indeed much of the first half of the twentieth, as Western art music becomes a mainstay of life in Asia as a marker of upward middle-class mobility (33). Yoshihara's goal here is to challenge the notion that the West exported music unidirectionally and that Asian countries were passive receivers of high European culture brought to them via imperialist European movement. Chapter 2 explores constructions of identity vis-à-vis race and ethnicity, and how Asian musicians negotiate this identity through the medium of classical music (99). Chapter 3 considers the issue of gender and how the "sexual economy" (103) of the profession is driven by stereotypes of submissive and infantilized female performers. In the most theoretically intriguing section of the book, chapter 4, the author employs sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's notions of taste and distinction in breaking open the discussion on class. Classical music's cultural capital, the author argues, translates in complex ways from the prestige economy to the labor market, where employment and job security for professional musicians can be scarce. The incline of social and economic mobility is especially precarious for Asian musicians lacking the skills to strategically maneuver in social and professional networks of the American job market. The last chapter deals with the spectre of authenticity, and the author problematizes its utility in a globalized classical music market: ". . . to think of musical understanding as geographically and culturally bound is not only provincial but also racist' (200).

Oral historians will find many parts of this book noteworthy, such as the author's two sections titled "Voices," which separate chapters 1 and 2 from chapters 3 and 4. They function as narrative interludes, pacing the chapters in which Yoshihara's subtle and balanced analyses unfold, and open a space for lengthy transcriptions of interviews with her research subjects. As well, the author analyzes the globalization of the Suzuki Method during the 1970s, a teaching program developed in...