Chinese Music Modernities

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the formation and logic of modern Chinese music in the early twentieth century, when China began to adopt Western knowledge, science, and technology to modernize its culture. It focuses on five groundbreaking musical moments of modernist formation that have produced long-lasting effects. They include the emergence of school songs, the music conservatory, the field of composition, musical individualism, and commercial and pop music. In this chapter, Chinese music modernity is viewed as a condition, a dynamic process, and an indigenous practice of musical transformation and development rather than a teleology with a goal and point of arrival. As a practice subjected to the push and pull of historical conditions and dynamics of contexts, modernity in Chinese music is an ongoing project that is shaped by constantly shifting sociocultural terrains, premises, and imaginations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.