Music and Modernisation in China

Abstract

Abstract This chapter offers a narrative of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernisation of China in the parallel domains of music and politics, showing how different genres and traditions of music acquired symbolic value in the construction of national identity. Following an introductory discussion of the agenda for the modernisation of traditional music set out at the Congress of Arab Music in Cairo (1932), the chapter traces competing visions of Chinese musical modernity during the period up to 1949; the establishment of a new, officially sanctioned ‘national music’, epitomised by the works of Nie Er and Xian Xinghai (both of whom died before the Communist victory); the relationship of notation and ontological change in the modernisation of traditional music; and the processes by which the Western classical tradition achieved its extraordinarily high profile in present-day. China. The chapter concludes by setting ‘modernity with Chinese characteristics’ into the context of modernisation theory.