School of Arts
& Department of Music
Boris Wong
You are viewing:
Key information
Key information
- Roles
- School of Arts Department of Music PhD researcher
- Department
- School of Arts & Department of Music
- Qualifications
- BA (CUHK), MPhil (CUHK)
- Thesis title
- Military Band as Socio-Political Agent: Negotiating and Constructing Identities in Postcolonial Singapore
- Internal Supervisors
- Professor Rachel Harris
Biography
Boris Wong is currently a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London.
His dissertation research, for which he holds the SOAS Research Scholarship, addresses how and why military and display band practices have been adapted and localised by postcolonial nations in East and Southeast Asia, with emphasis on the social and cultural formations of postcolonial Singapore.
Before coming to SOAS, he attained doctoral candidature with distinction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from where he also obtained an MPhil in historical musicology and a BA in music with first class Honors.
Research interests
My dissertation research addresses the issue of how and why the military band practices first developed in European nations have been adapted and localised by postcolonial nations in East and Southeast Asia.
Much intertwined with the Western imperial histories, military bands have often been interpreted by Western scholars as symbols of colonial power and authority (Flaes 1993; Herbert and Sarkissian 1997; Reily and Brucher 2013). Recent scholarship has however challenged this notion that military bands are inherently effective as symbols of imperial power, proposing that the ensemble is “susceptible to claims of power but not to outright domination” (Liao 2017).
This project explores how the dominant ideologies and metaphorical associations attached to the band have been adapted, negotiated, and subverted in postcolonial Asia. I take the wind band scene of Singapore as a case study to look at how this collective musical practice has been involved in the social and cultural formations of Singapore’s nation-building. My contention is that the military band serves as a politico-musical ensemble that adaptively expresses a blend of cultural and musical elements.
These elements originate from the country's colonial past, and its multiracial composition, and extend to cosmopolitan influences reflecting broader social and political ideologies endorsed by the state. Informed by postcolonial and decolonial theories as well as approaches from performance studies, this project understands the military band not only as a strategic site for embodying and manifesting Singapore’s political ideologies and aspirations but also as a socio- political agent for negotiating and constructing the nation’s postcolonial and cosmopolitan identities.
