Afterall we want you to know something about Chinese music culture and history by the time you leave the class. Please read the following excerpt from "Yellow Music." It is written by Andrew Jones, one of the Chinese professors at Berkeley. To submit homework, please print the questions and answer them.
However, the period began with a serious setback. In 1927 the Institute for the Promotion and Practice of Music at Beijing University was closed because of a lack of financial support from the warlord government of Zhang Zuolin. At roughly the same time (November 1927), the Shanghai National Conservatory of Music (Guoli yinyue yuan) was opened at the behest of Cai Yuanpei (who had become a KMT offlcial in Nanjing) with generous government funding. Xiao Youmei was installed as the director of the new school, and its curriculum and teaching methods were largely modeled on those of his alma mater, the Leipzig Conservatory of Music. The Shanghai faculty included many of the leading Western and Japanese-trained musicians and composers of the day (including Xiao himself, Huang Zi, and Qingzhu) as well as faculty members drawn from Shanghai's European community and visiting professors from as far afield as Russia and France. The conservatory overwhelmingly emphasized Western music; of 110 advanced students in 1937, just two chose to study traditional Chinese instrumental music! This figure is even more significant when we realize that the Shanghai Conservatory was far and away the most prestigious and influential institution for music education in Republican China. As such, its graduates “came to dominate the musical life of the intelligentsia of the treaty ports and to be regarded as authorities for acceptable musical standards and behavior” throughout the country.
In addition to classes, the conservatory sponsored twenty-seven books on music published by the Commerical Press as well as two separate periodicals: an academic journal, Sounds: The Bulletin of the National Conservatory of Music, and a more popular Music Magazine, published in collaboration with the Liangyou (Young Companion) publishing company. The school also sponsored a number of concerts, recitals, and other musical activities throughout Shanghai. These diverse events were patronized by the class from which the school also drew many of its students: Shanghai’s petit bourgeoisie. For this elite group, Western musical culture and its accoutrements (for instance, pianos in the domestic parlor) were markers of modernity and class privilege. Chinese music, in turn, was seen as lowclass and vulgar.
The celebrated Shanghai author Eileen Chang in her 1942 essay “On Music” provides an illuminating window into the affective dimensions of this particular set of power relations. Recalling her childhood experience of Western orchestral music in the Shanghai of the 1930s, she writes: “When my mother took me to concerts, she would admonish me over and over again before we arrived, ‘You absolutely cannot make a sound or say a word during the concert. Don’t let them say that Chinese people are disorderly.’ ” For the native elite (of which Chang’s family was certainly a part), concertgoing was both an emblem of modernity and, paradoxically, a suitably bourgeois and distinctly equivocal gesture of resistance against colonial domination. The lesson that Chang’s mother teaches her daughter is that Chinese “noise” must submit to modern, Western discipline, if only as an article of national pride.
The Shanghai Conservatory was not the only school engaged in the propagation of Western musical discipline. The decade’s first two years saw a number of music schools established throughout the country, the most notable being the Guangzhou Conservatory of Music (Guangzhou yinyue yuan) founded by the composer Sitson Ma in 1932. In addition, dozens of colleges and universities, including Yanjing University, Hujiang University, the University of Shanghai, Lingnan College, Huanan College, Jinling Women's College, the National College of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, Peiping Women’s College of Arts and Sciences, Central University, and others, established new departments of music. These institutions spawned a variety of choral groups and school bands, a development complemented by expanded musical curricula in high schools and primary schools.
The expanded infrastructure of China's music education led to an explosion of music publishing and amateur music societies. Thirteen new music periodicals appeared from 1928 to 1934, many of them mouthpieces for amateur and scholarly societies. An amateur symphony orchestra and choral and instrumental groups (including the Shanghai Songsters and the Chinese Harmonica Association) were established in Shanghai during this period. Similar activities took place in Hankou, Beijing, Nanjing, and Tianjin.
The most politically influential of these new organizations, however, took root in the provinces. In 1932, Cheng Maoyun, a KMT official and the composer of the Nationalist Party anthem, established the Jiangxi Committee for the Advancement of Musical Education (Jiangxi tuixing yinyue jiaoyu weiyuan hui). This organization operated out of the Jiangxi bureau of education and was funded by the KMT. Locally, the committee maintained its own orchestra and choir, organized concerts and recitals, and promoted the dissemination of patriotic school songs. Its primary mission, though, lay in enforcing standards of musical quality and crusading for the elimination of "vulgar" folk and popular music. Indeed, one project undertaken by the committee involved detaining blind, itinerant folksingers in order to teach them new (and presumably less objectionable) material! The committee also exerted influence on a national level through its monthly magazine, Music Education. This official publication played a crucial role in the political struggles that began to rage around music in the wake of the deepening of China’s national crisis in 1932, serving as a mouthpiece for both conservative advocates of the KMT’S increasingly repressive cultural policies, and (in the years directly preceding the outbreak of the Sinolapanese War in 1937) leftist insurgents.
The crisis of 1932, initially sparked by the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, marked a turning point in the May 4th project of musical modernization. It took the Japanese attack on Shanghai's Zhabei district in the spring of 1932, however, to bring the gravity of China's plight home to the intellectuals, writers, and cultural workers clustered in the multiply colonized metropolis. In music, the attack resulted in an unprecedented politicization of musical production and activity. Composers, regardless of their ideological camp, threw themselves into composing patriotic anthems and military marches. Much of this output reflected the influence of school songs and brass band music. At the same time, many grander goals of the May 4th project—the creation of a national school, for instance—began to lose some luster. These ideals were replaced by a heightened interest in music as a technology of power, as an instrument for the mass mobilization of nationalist sentiment.
While the majority of music professionals embraced nationalism, not all of them were willing to support the Nationalist Party. Indeed, this crisis marked the factionalization of Chinese music. By 1932, three distinct groups can be discerned: the cultural left, the humanist center, and the KMT right. A musical left had begun to coalesce as early as 1930 with the founding of the League of Left-wing Writers (Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng hui). By 1933, leftist musical activists had begun to form cells for the study of Soviet and proletarian music. Some of them had also begun to participate in the production of popular music and sound films. Many of these musicians lacked formal Western musical training; several, in fact, were dropouts from the Shanghai Conservatory. For this reason, they may have lacked the sense of investment in the musical establishment shared by their elite counterparts within the academy.
In the center stood a group of music professionals unwilling to commit themselves to either side of the political fray. Qingzhu, a composer and influential music theorist based at the Shanghai Conservatory, is representative of this group. He and others like him were committed, broadly speaking, to humanism and musical cosmopolitanism. While they shared with their colleagues a nationalistic concern for the fate of China (and sporadically pitched in by writing patriotic songs), they maintained a faith in individualism and the autonomy of artistic creation. Qingzhu, in particular, was a romantic apostle of the sacrality of secular music, a man who saw music as “the highest expression of the inner world of man.” Just as music rose above political struggle, he asserted, it also crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries with impunity. In the highly charged political context of 1932, though, Qingzhu’s emphasis on the aesthetic and spiritual autonomy of music seemed obsolete at best.
A powerful and established figure like Xiao Youmei had more in common with the left-wing music movement than a figure like Qingzhu. Xiao and Cheng Maoyun—both of whom were closely affiliated (ideologically and financially) with the KMT—shared with the left an interest in the power of music to mobilize the masses. The difference between these men and their leftist counterparts, of course, was that this power was to be harnessed not by the revolution, but by the nation-state.