Abstract / About the project

The new subgenre of over 500 Chinese-Western fusion concertos is arguably the most significant of China’s newly adopted musical forms of the past century. Like all cross-cultural remnants of colonial conflict and negotiation, the subgenre requires new modes of analysis for understanding its underlying aesthetic and ideological underpinnings. This article offers novel insight, via Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, into how disparate cultures, texts, performance practices, and sonic media construct new national meaning within a hitherto undocumented repertoire. To a (re-)emerging China, the eclectic scoring of indigenous and Western vocal-instrumental traditions constitutes symbolic empowerment on the international stage.

The article is published in: Perspectives of New Music Volume 51, No. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 101-140