Second Conference of the IMS Study Group
Global History of Music 2023
Resonances: Exploring Global Music Histories Across Cultures
Manila, Philippines / Hybrid
3–4 November 2023
Yvonne Liao
Keynote Abstract, July 2023
Global (Un)Doing, the Pig, and the Piano
Resonances across cultures are as appealing as they are provocative. As such, resonances lend themselves readily to the global historical imagination, and even more so to the vagaries of continuity and change that accompany it. In my talk, I begin by asking: What are some of the resonances or conditions that might affect global music history in its sounds and articulations, as it moves through bodies and specters alike, along crisscrossed contours of time and place?
My aim, then, is to explore resonances as conditions. A focus on hearing and engaging afterlives through their storytelling will reveal how these conditions emerge. It is also a nod to “imperfect global,” my ongoing framework for understanding the extents and entanglements of global canonicity and coloniality, littorally within coastal cities. My interest in afterlives, moreover, relates to their conception and character as signifying life forms, and their materialism of global (un)doing, beyond and as a result of maritime hangovers of colonialism in circulation.
First up: Ludpig, aka McDull, an anthropomorphic pig. Dressed (almost) exactly like Ludwig, with (almost) the same hair parting, Ludpig resonates personally with fate and tries his hand at the motif on his Euro-Cantonese staff lines. His sweat and labor of composing symphonically for the Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s Beethoven 250 publicity instigate deeper dialogue, as well, with “human-nonhuman assemblages” (Bennett 2010), animal depiction in cartoons (Wells 2008), and animation performativity (Crafton 2013), as canonicity amplifies its aurality as a quasi-transformative condition. Next up, and moving away from a southern Chinese postcolonial city in 2020: the postwar postcolonial piano up the coast, “who” now cues in the Chinese Nationalist municipality of Shanghai in the mid- to late 1940s. This sentient piano, echoing as a specter of a surviving subject, will also highlight in its thing-condition the coloniality of place, performance, and French social ordering, within earshot of Shanghai’s pre-war treaty port era. Like the pig, the piano too will contemplate its existence, here pertaining to place (Grimley 2018) and the treaty port’s living textures (Brunero and Villalta Puig 2018). Pig and Piano will then join forces in closing, and consider the wider resonant conditions of life, play, and regeneration in their global (un)doing.
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Yvonne Liao
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Yvonne Liao is a music historian and an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She is a founding member of the American Musicological Society’s Global Music History Study Group. Among her interests are global canonicity, coloniality, and their signifying life forms, in (but not limited to) the contexts of China’s treaty port history, and its material and institutional legacies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her related funded work from the academic year 2023–24 includes a project on “indigenous musical canons” and symphony orchestras in contemporary Hong Kong (supported by the Early Career Scheme of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, RGC Ref. No. 24606123); and a smaller project on the cartoon and the canon (supported by a Direct Grant from the Faculty of Arts, CUHK).
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Yvonne’s Musical Quarterly article on “Little Vienna” in Japanese-occupied Shanghai was awarded the Royal Musical Association’s 2017 Jerome Roche Prize. She has since published in Cambridge Opera Journal and several edited volumes. Her publications in 2023 can be found in The Chopin Review and a special issue of Postcolonial Studies, “Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives,” co-convened with Philip Burnett and Erin Johnson-Williams. Yvonne is also co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (forthcoming 2024) with Erin Johnson-Williams and Roe-Min Kok. Meanwhile, she is working on her monograph, Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–1997, under contract with University of Chicago Press.