Full Description
For three centuries, the former Portuguese colony of Macau served as the gateway into mainland China and the locale for the development of an Asian Catholic culture that encompassed distinctive musical practices and styles. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide draws extensively upon historical documents in Chinese and Portuguese for a polylingual approach to Catholic sacred music. Jen-yen Chen follows this music from the sixteenth century through the twentieth by reading literary accounts of sound, primary source documents, and musical notation to examine the impacts of linguistic, political, and cultural divides and the ways sounds have traveled across these divides. Chen covers Chinese responses to Western sounds in Macau and southern China, illuminating the strategies for the use of sounds and musicking adopted by Jesuit missionaries; and the complexities of identity formation negotiated by Macau Catholics who confront exceptionalist historical discourses of Chinese or Portuguese "greatness."
Drawing from sound studies and musicological methods, Chen argues that Chinese descriptions of Catholic sounds in Macau, including the ringing of church bells, the playing of the organ, and choral singing, illuminate spatial, sonic, and ideological mobilities that reconfigure Chinese and European identities. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide also extends to contemporary times to explore how present day members of Macau's Catholic community position themselves in relation to the historical narratives often told about their city, cultivating a rich individuality of identity that refuses conformity to fixed notions of Asianness or Westernness.
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Macau and Sonic Mobility
Chapter 1. The Sounds of Western Others and Their Chinese Listeners in the Guangdong Region
Chapter 2. Devout Spectacles, Triumphal Conversions: The Music Activities of Macau's College of St. Paul
Interlude. Nadir and Re-Emergence: Catholic Sacred Music in Macau During the Proscription of the Faith
Chapter 3. Postcolonial "East" and "West": Sacred Music and the Chinese Catholic Community in Contemporary Macau
Chapter 4. Latinized Cantonese and Contemporary Sacred Music Composition in Macau
Conclusion. Global History and the Gift of Babel
Bibliography
