Abstract / About the project

The subgenre of over 500 Chinese-Western fusion concertos requires new modes of analysis for understanding its significance in modern Chinese culture. This article positions early twentieth-century Russian contemporaries Aaron Avshalomov and Mikhail Bahktin at a vital historical junction between cultures, disciplines, and genres. Bakhtin’s key literary theory of polyphony emerges as a pivot point between the Western concerto and China’s first fusion concerto, where novelistic characterization becomes a metaphor for both solo-orchestral dialogue and tense Chinese-Western relations in semi-colonial Shanghai. This article is the first to identify Avshalomov as a central agent for the new Chinese-Western repertoire.

This article is published in: Journal of Musicological Research 37/3 (2018), pp. 209-238.