Description
Presence Through Sound narrates and analyses, through a range of case studies on selected musics of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Tibet, some of the many ways in which music and ‘place’ intersect and are interwoven with meaning in East Asia. It explores how place is significant to the many contexts in which music is made and experienced, especially in contemporary forms of longstanding traditions but also in other landscapes such as popular music and in the design of performance spaces. It shows how music creates and challenges borders, giving significance to geographical and cartographic spaces at local, national, and international levels, and illustrates how music is used to interpret relationships with ecology and environment, spirituality and community, and state and nation.
The volume brings together scholars from Australia, China, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the UK, each of whom explores a specific genre or topic in depth. Each nuanced account finds distinct and at times different aspects to be significant but, in demonstrating the ability of music to mediate the construction of place and by showing how those who create and consume music use it to inhabit the intimate, and to project themselves out into their surroundings, each points to interconnections across the region and beyond with respect to perception, conception, expression, and interpretation.
In Presence Through Sound, ethnomusicology meets anthropology, literature, linguistics, area studies, and – particularly pertinent to East Asia in the twenty-first century – local musicologies. The volume serves a broad academic readership and provides an essential resource for all those interested in East Asia.
Table of Contents
Catherine Ingram and Keith Howard
Introduction: Reflections on the significance of place for East Asian musical traditions
China
1 Catherine Ingram
The Shifting Strength of Place in Contemporary Big Song Singing from Southwestern China
2 Anne E. McLaren
From the Heart of the Lake Booms a Mountain Song: Sense of Place in the Song-Cycles of Coastal China
3 Min Yen ONG
Bringing the Past to Life: Creating and Contesting Place in Kunqu Singing Practices
4 Lu LIU
Beijing in the Contemporary Pipa World
Tibet
5 Gerald Roche
The Alphabetical Order of Things: The Language of Place and the Place of Language in Tibetan Song
Taiwan
6 Yang Ming TEOH
Lingering Across the Ocean, Rooted on the Island: Indigenous Music and the Notions of Mountain and Sea as Taiwanese Identifiers
Korea
7 Keith Howard
The Constructed Soundscapes of Place in Korea, South and North
8 Hee-sun KIM
Place as Brand: The Role of Place in the Construction of Contemporary Traditional Music in South Korea
9 Hilary Finchum-Sung
The Sonic Habitus of Silk and Wood: Kugak’s Twenty-First-Century Terrain
10 Roald Maliangkay
Not a Habitus for the Have-Nots: The Walker Hill Shows, 1962–2012
Japan
11 Naoko TERAUCHI
Gagaku and the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri Festival of Nara: From the Sound of Authority to the Sound of Local Identity
12 Hugh de Ferranti
Biwa’s Place in Modern Times
13 Kiku Day
Place and Locality in Fuke-Style Shakuhachi: The Case of Nezasa-ha Kinpūryū
