Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 by Thomas Irvine

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 by Thomas Irvine Manuel Erviti and Jeremy Leong Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839. By Thomas Irvine. (New Material Histories of Music.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. [vii, 271 p. ISBN 9780226667126 (hardcover), $55; ISBN 9780226667263 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, figures, endnotes, bibliography, index. In Listening to China, Thomas Irvine examines how the West experienced China aurally from the latter part of the Enlightenment to the beginning of the First Opium War (1839–42). Drawing on travelogues, personal diaries, letters, manuscript accounts, music historical documents, and other supporting evidence, he explains how China’s soundscape was articulated through the partial views of European travelers and how some prominent Western music historians/scholars (particularly Charles Burney, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and Adolf Bernhard Marx), who had not experienced China nor its music, sought to speculate on the Middle Kingdom’s sounds and musical development. In their effort to construct their own “enlightened” understanding of global music history, China was categorically excluded, as it failed to measure up to the European standard of musical progress. Irvine argues that their omissions were largely an acknowledgement of their “insecurities” of the placement of European music on the world stage. After all, the development of Chinese music, with its emphasis on melody, took a defiant stand against the widely accepted European model that asserted the inevitable path of monody to polyphony as a definitive sign of progress. As Irvine reveals, Burney, Forkel, and Marx excluded China from their major music projects and instead relegated their writings on Chinese music history to “second-order texts” (p. 4). By at least giving some attention to Chinese music, the work of these three can attest to contribute to the musical concerns of Europe’s global engagements and to imagine “the globe as a ‘given’ category destined to be dominated by Europe” (p. 5). Sound studies and postcolonial theory form the disciplinary framework of Irvine’s arguments in his attempt to structure a global narrative of the West’s relationship with China. “My aim,” he writes, is not to write a comprehensive history of Sino-Western soundscapes that gives equal weight to Western and Chinese “sides.” Instead it is to show how Western travelers in China and writers with a stake in Chinese music or sound, or both, defined themselves as Europeans or North Americans in a global context. . . . These travelers sometimes reacted to China’s sounds in ways shaped by what they had read. Likewise, the reports they brought home . . . in turn shaped perspectives on the sounds and music of China written by those who had never traveled there. Taken as a whole, I tell the story of a feedback loop on a global scale. (pp. 15–16) [End Page 58] Irvine’s main objective is to fill a lacuna in research on Westerners’ sonic knowledge of China around 1800 and at the same time argue that the claims of “universal” value in Western music history were undeniably aided by comparing it with the “great ‘other’ (China)” (p. 2). Furthermore, the debate over the universal ear in Europe during the eighteenth century brought about a new understanding of human communication across the globe. Europeans did entertain the idea that different peoples could possibly hear differently. By 1830, however, with Europe’s rise of military power and economic ambitions overseas, the “universal ear was dead” (p. 2). Evidently, Western art music began to be seen as the “arbiter” for excellence and musical progress when compared to the development of non-Western music, including Chinese music. In chapter 1, Irvine relates how Europe’s commercial interests in China had also brought about an intense flow of writing about the Qing dynasty to Europe. While a lot of these writings focused on ways to convert China to Catholicism, they also discussed the sound of China and the role auditory sense could possibly play in shaping Chinese civilization. Interestingly, many eighteenth-century European writers viewed China as equal if not, in some areas, superior to the West. The opinions of some, however, began to turn negative towards China in the early nineteenth...