Music history is taught as a compulsory course in every tertiary level music school and institute throughout China. Given the lack of exposure to music history educa-tion outside of these institueduca-tions, the music history curriculum implemented across universities and colleges, including course content and pedagogical approaches, de-cisively shapes Chinese people’s understanding of music history.
This survey reviews the current situation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history education in China. The methodology emphasises the present by look-ing chiefly into the materials that became available in the years of 2015 to 2018, including syllabi, course outlines, admission brochures, and so on. Interviews were also conducted with people relevant to the subject. Before delving further into the details of the method and the survey itself, a brief glimpse at the institutionalisation of music education in China will reveal a difference between music history education in China and the West.
China’s higher music education in the modern sense was initiated during the be-ginning of the twentieth century, when the country was at the turning point from a decadent empire into a new republic with no fewer troubles. Increasingly, more people believed that the country was lagging behind the West culturally, just as it was economically. A solution was to borrow everything from the West to rebuild the country, beginning with education. As part of this trend, China’s first tertiary music institute, the Shanghai National Conservatory of Music, established in 1927, was modelled on the West. What distinguishes the school from its Western model is that it offers programmes in both Western and Chinese music studies. This structure that offers Chinese and Western music parallel to each other has been adopted by all of the subsequently founded music schools, and is a foundation for current curricula.
This short survey is based on recently conducted interviews with teachers and students from two prestigious music schools in China, namely the Central Conserva-tory of Music (Beijing) and the Shanghai ConservaConserva-tory of Music. The field of student interviewees consists of senior undergraduate and graduate students and, for under-graduate students, the interviewees are also differentiated by those who major in his-torical musicology and those who do not. The sample selection intends to represent tertiary music education in China at the highest level, albeit with an awareness that regional and developmental discrepancies exist. The fact that these top-level con-servatories in China function as models for other Chinese concon-servatories ensures that
their practices will set the direction for hundreds of music schools and departments in universities to follow.
As mentioned, music history is a compulsory course for every college music major in China; this includes students of musicology, performance, composition, as well as music education, management, digital music production, and so on. It is subdi-vided into two courses, namely “Western music history” and “Chinese music his-tory”, which each take approximately an equal length of four to six semesters each for musicology major students, and one to two semesters for non-musicology stu-dents. These two courses are both designed to be introductory. For non-musicology majors, the Western music history course, although intended to be general history, covers mainly tonal music history, roughly encompassing the late baroque to French impressionism due to the limited timeframe. The time devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history is considerably brief, however students may take an elective course focusing on this period. For musicology majors, the history of music since 1900 occupies an entire semester (18 teaching weeks), facilitating richer content and discussion.
In the Chinese music history course, twentieth- and twenty-first-century music is more heavily emphasised when compared to the Western music history course, oc-cupying approximately half of the entire course. This is partially because the course is divided into two equal parts: ancient Chinese music history, and modern Chinese music history (which essentially means music since the beginning of the twentieth century). However, an underlying cause may also be traced to the fact that ancient Chinese music does not depend so much on a work-concept as it does on perfor-mance, whereas the history of modern Chinese music, receiving great influence from the West, underscores the composer-work relation. The significant change in aesthet-ics, as well as the much richer sonic materials, help to elevate this short history in terms of timespan to the point that it is able to balance its previous history of over two thousand years.
Although the twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history elements of both courses focus on composers and compositions, it is structured differently. One might say that in the Western music history course study of this period is structured more according to musical factors, among which style is the most important. Lectures on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history customarily begin with the de-cline of tonality, then proceeds to German expressionism, the 12-tone music of the second Viennese school, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, music in the USSR, the experi-ments of the European and American avant-gardists in the 1950s–60s, minimalism, spectral music, and normally culminates with American neo-Romanticism. Music history from the 1980s to the present is sporadically touched upon in specialised elective courses, some of which will be mentioned later. In the Chinese music
his-tory course, on the other hand, twentieth- and twenty-first-century music hishis-tory is structured more according to music’s reflection of and responses to social conditions.
Consequently, political influence plays a significant role in forming the narrative in this aspect of the course. For example, the lectures on Chinese music history of the 1930s and 40s are often divided into two parts: one focusing on the music practices in the area ruled by the Kuomintang Party, and the other on those in the area ruled by the Communist Party. The latter benefits from such political orientation by receiv-ing positive commentary and unbalanced treatment, such as more detailed coverage, and has caused scholars to appeal for rewriting modern Chinese music history in recent years.
Another important distinction between the two courses, which may not be exclu-sively relevant to the lectures on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, is that for the Western music history course, there seems to be a clear line that separates the so-called art music and the rest of the genres. Therefore, although jazz might be mentioned when addressing music by Ravel and Stravinsky, it is never incorporated in the discourse for its own sake, whereas in the Chinese music history course, the line is very much blurred; popular music, theatrical music, and folk music all receive a place in the lectures as independent topics.
Aside from the two introductory courses, twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history is also taught in other compulsory and elective courses. Most of these courses are devoted to specialised topics such as “Chinese popular music since the be-ginning of the twentieth century”, “Trends in music philosophy of the 20th century”, or “Studies in modern opera”, instead of a periodical account of general history. In the case of the graduate program, the number of elective courses available for stu-dents expands significantly, and the topics and approaches are accordingly broadened.
Most of the text materials used in these courses are written by Chinese scholars, be they concerned with Western or Chinese music history, yet a great number of writings by Western scholars, Carl Dahlhaus for example, have been translated into Chinese and are sporadically used. These include the standard textbook by Donald Jay Grout and Claude Palisca, and specifically pertaining to twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history, Robert Morgan’s Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America was recently translated (2014).
It can be observed in the seminars offered in recent years that the interests of Chi-nese academia in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music lean towards technical as opposed to historical issues. For example, in the 2017–2018 curriculum of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, at least six seminars offered concerned twentieth-century music theory and compositional techniques, covering topics from rhythm, form, and dissonant counterpoint, to serial music and set theory, whereas only one seminar was based on historical perspectives.
Although the setting that dichotomises Chinese and Western music in China’s ter-tiary education has its historical cause, it problematises China’s music history educa-tion in this globalised era of the twenty-first century. An obvious queseduca-tion that arises is: Where do we posit music history of regions other than China and the West? Is it because these histories are less important that they are not included in compulsory study? If the criticism about this dichotomised setting of music education as being driven by the nationalistic enthusiasm, or as manifestation of self-orientalism is too vitriolic, we shall at least question whether it is necessary to adhere to the old re-search methods from the West, that revolve around the composers and compositions, to form the narrative of Chinese music history since the 1900s. Similarly, we shall not ignore that although the research on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music history exhibits a variety of perspectives, they are based on the same epistemological ground that treats music as a scientific discipline, and consequently fail to embrace more socially and culturally constructed approaches, such as gender study in music.
Given that the musical and scholarly exchanges between China and the West have increased considerably in the recent years, it was to be expected that these approaches that had been practiced in the West since the “new musicology” launched in the 1980s would soon enter China’s colleges. Such prophecy highlights the great influ-ence from the West after ninety years of tertiary music education in China.
Michael Fjeldsøe