Music in a Cosmopolitan World

Abstract

Abstract Mario Paci (Mei Baiqi) conducted the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra during the 1920s and 1930s, and this chapter begins with his diversification of its repertory and reaching out to the Chinese community. The semi-colonial context of interwar Shanghai shows up some of the limitations of postcolonial theory, and Nicholas Cook argues that cosmopolitanism offers a more inclusive framework for understanding cross-cultural interaction – and one that allows more space for individual or collective agency. The chapter develops a model of cosmopolitanism centred on Levinas’s idea of openness to the other, but also taking in the consumerist values of ‘lifestyle cosmopolitanism’. Ultimately racist conceptions of cultural difference are deeply entrenched in music, yet its combination of malleability and perceived naturalness makes it a powerful vehicle for agency and identity construction. As illustrated by the modern Chinese culture of Western classical music, however, this raises questions of how firmly music may be tied to other dimensions of culture with which it is commonly associated.