Chime 2015 academic conference is going to begin next Wednesday onward. The Conference in this year will be held at Geneva Univeristy, a well-known university in Europe with the world-ranking 27. The main theme, of course, centers around all kinds of Chinese music, ranging from pop music and traditional ethnic music, to contemporary new music. It is my pleasure that my paper has been accepted and will be delivered on Oct 22, 2015. Since the website for the Conference has just finished a few weeks ago, the time to post all information about the event is not enough to open to the public. My proposal of the presentation, therefore, is published here for all friends' and colleagues' sharing.
For the Conference Event, please visit the followings:
http://www.chime2015.org/
Hope you will enjoy it.
The Proposal:
Whose Face? China
Hongkongese or Hong Kong Chinese:
Reshaping the “Chineseness”
by Hearing the Quoted Tunes in
Two Contemporary Hong Kong Compositions
When the umbrellas were held up against the tear gas attack in the
protest on September 28, 2014, the hot issue raised by the marathon-like Yellow
Umbrella Movement was not only the matter of politics but also a coincidence created
for the locals to face or be faced with an already moot cliché: How Hongkongese
can redefine their identity, particularly under the increasingly hegemonic influences
from the mainland. My present paper is not intended to discuss the topic of “identity”
on the platform of postcolonial studies such as transculturation. But instead, I
am far more interested in locating such issue on the aesthetic dimension of
collective memory, which is revealed in two Hong Kong contemporary
compositions, Tung’s The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting (2002), and Chan’s The
Enigma of Moon (1998). In the process of shaping and reshaping the “Chineseness”,
a new face, in which the composers tend to create, and the local listeners tend
to experience, albeit transient, can appear in every nuance of sonic metaphor.
It has been widely known that a sense of history and culture can often
be manifested themselves in the context of collective memory. Acts of recall triggered
by musical sound, I believe, have time and again challenged the destructive
force of time, and drop-by-drop they have woven a picture of what we may now
legitimately call Hong Kong’s “history” and
“culture.” Moreover, to borrow, appropriate or quote from the other
musical cultures for a formally self-contained piece is no longer a
taken-for-granted or unconscious act. Such borrowing is impossible to escape
the question of meaning and motivation of the composer. Yet again this quoted
tune never fails to conjure up a memory in the listener or function as a
representation of one such act of recall from time to time. As such, in this
paper I wish to argue that given Hong Kong’s present unique situation, musical quotation
– typically, a fragment borrowed from indigenous folk tune and Cantonese traditional
opera – is illustrative of the workings of collective memory. Be it a tune,
rhythm or sonority, a reference to a style or genre, a quotation is a tangible
link between the sonic and cultural reality of the past and those of the
present as well as metaphor for the formation of Hong Kong “Chineseness”,
forming part of the local cultural identity.
2015-10-16
