Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China

Abstract

The rise of choral singing as public performance in Shanghai during the mid-1930s was the result of overlapping historical developments and conditions. This study considers how new sound technologies, the introduction of new singing subjects as well as subject matter, and an acute sense of the nation in crisis converged to turn “community singing” into a fresh musical practice and generate a new sonic culture. Sound cinema in particular made new heroes visible as well as audible. Liu Liangmo, a secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Shanghai, was instrumental in initiating and promoting the community singing movement. His efforts, along with contributions by Lü Ji, a composer and music theorist of the cultural left, propelled the emergence of China as a “singing nation” by the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan in 1937. This process was an integral part of the cultural as well as political history of producing an articulate and audible subject against the soundscape of modernity.