When the local encounters the global: aesthetic conflicts in the Chinese traditional music world

Abstract

Through a case study of the Chinese traditional music world, this study explores how artists in different specializations within an art world working on an indigenous art form make sense of divergent aesthetics. By adopting both Becker’s (Art worlds: 25th anniversary edition, updated and expanded, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008) view of art worlds as substantially existing communities shared by artistic individuals and Bourdieu’s (Poetics 12(4–5):311–356, 1983) emphasis on artistic divergences stemming from broader social structures, I build a theoretical framework regarding how implicit aesthetic conflicts coexist with explicit collaborations in an art world. Under the impact of cultural globalization, the Chinese traditional music world’s conventions have experienced a historical revolution. Since then, music performers enact frames to defend the aesthetics that they consider “traditional” that emphasize stability in terms of the musical content but that have highly idiosyncratic styles of performance. However, other types of musicians—namely those involved in composing, conducting, theoretical research—are more likely to enact frames defending aesthetics that express a willingness to “Westernize” based on their understandings and emphasize on innovation in terms of musical content and systematic and routinized styles of performance. Their framings shape their different reactions to their art world’s conventions. By analyzing this process, I show how local–global dynamics constitute aesthetic conflicts in an art world that is often considered highly local and traditional.