Hearing the minorities in modern Chinese music

Abstract

The repertoire of “minority”-themed compositions accounts for approximately a quarter of post-1949 Chinese instrumental music output. The incorporation of real or imagined exotic styles into a genre of modern national music so deeply mired in reformist discourses and modernist procedures should prompt us to ask some important questions: What roles does musical exoticism play in China’s becoming of a modern musical nation? What might these self-fashioned and largely concocted “minority” styles tell us about China’s modern national music, rather than the other way? This essay argues that it is crucial to understand minority exoticism not merely as an outcome of some broader ideological processes but also as an important means through which modernist aesthetic goals may be achieved in modern Chinese music.