Book Launch of : Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island

Speakers: Nancy Guy, Meredith Schweig, Jennifer C. Hsieh

This session will be held using Microsoft Teams

Book Description

This book vibrantly demonstrates how the study of music allows for identification and interpretation of the forces that form Taiwanese society, from politics and policy to reactions to and assertions of such policies.

Contributors to this edited volume explore how music shapes life — and life shapes music — in Taiwan, focusing on　subjects ranging from musical life under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) through to the contemporary creations of Indigenous musicians, popular music performance and production, Christian religious music, traditional ritual music and theatre, conceptions about sound and noise, and garbage truck music's role in reducing household waste. The volume’s twelve chapters present diverse approaches to their sounding subjects, some deeply rooted in the methods and concerns explored by Taiwan's first generation of ethnomusicologists. Others employ current social theories.

Presenting a window into the cultural lives of the residents of this multicultural, politically contested island,　Resounding Taiwan will appeal to students and scholars of musicology and ethnomusicology, anthropology and Asian studies more widely.

Speaker Bios

Meredith Schweig is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Emory University. She earned her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University. Her work explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular musics of Sinophone East Asia, with a particular emphasis on narrativity, gender, and cultural politics in Taiwan. Her articles have been awarded the Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize from the Association for Chinese Music Research, as well as the Marcia Herndon Prize and the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her first book, Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press.

Nancy Guy is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and is an ethnomusicologist whose broad interests include the musics of Taiwan and China, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese operas), music and politics, and the ecocritical study of music. Her first book Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology. Her article, "Flowing down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination," (Ethnomusicology, 2009) is a foundational text in the field of ecomusicology and was awarded the 2010 Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize. Guy's second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills (University of Illinois Press, 2015), focuses on the artistry and appeal of the beloved American coloratura soprano and was deemed "Highly Recommended" by Choice.

Jennifer C. Hsieh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford and has held research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Vossius Center at University of Amsterdam, and Fairbank Center at Harvard. She is completing an ethnographic book project on the scientific, bureaucratic, and audiovisual practices underlying the production of environmental noise from early twentieth-century Taiwan to the present.

Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: jl91@soas.ac.uk