Yvonne Liao | ‘Global Winds’: Circulations, Circularity, and Coastal Historiography

Event details

Speaker: Yvonne Liao (University of Edinburgh)

Date: Thursday 3 March 2022

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: ECA Main Building, West Court

Abstract

Across the historical disciplines and their multiple research languages, there remains a prevalent interest in the stories and narratives of coastal port cities, notwithstanding a parallel interest in inland ports and the logistics landscape of ‘dryports’ (e.g. Bergqvist, Cullinane, and Wilmsmeier 2016). This coastal interest, moreover, has had the inextricable effect of shaping and even reinforcing conceptions of maritime (and imperial) history. In the study of twentieth-century musical circulations, for example, can be found an extensive literature on the migratory practices and communities whose documented lives are often articulated with the role of colonial port cities as hubs of encounter and exchange (e.g. Denning 2015; Yang, Mikkonen, and Winzenburg 2020). Conversely, and just as salient, are the concomitant challenges of disentangling from, without losing sight of, the received worldviews long perpetuated by oceanic webs of trade and empire, as well as their attendant knowledge of a ‘historical geo-economics’ (Sivasundaram, Bashford, and Armitage 2017).  

Yet this ambivalence of perspectives also points to the new and untapped possibilities of exploring a coastal historiography from within—and the additional perspectives it may bring on charting musical continuity and change. More specifically, what may a post-/maritime view of musical circulations entail? My talk offers some related reflections, by centring on musical imports and their circularity in the colonial non-colony of (coastal) treaty port Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, and focusing on two wind imports: the military wind band, and the harmonica, a wind reed instrument. Crucially, here, in emphasising circularity over circulations, my discussion considers the extent to which these so-called musical imports—despite their transnational and transhistorical influences—can be understood as ‘global’ musical imports, or ‘global winds’. Can it be assumed in other words that such imports feed into one sweeping circulatory movement of an interconnected port world, and a singular maritime imagination writ large? Two case studies serve to inform my assessment, respectively the Shanghai Volunteer Corps Band and the print discourse of Chinese harmonica magazines. More broadly, in rethinking the meanings and trajectories of dissemination, I contemplate fragmentary ideas of the global at the interstices of (examining) coastal historiography and its lived experience.  

Biography

Yvonne Liao is a music historian and a Teaching Fellow in Musicology at the University of Edinburgh. Her current work centres around two related interests: the assessment of European music cultures in China’s treaty port history, and the ‘musical canon’ and its life forms in colonial and postcolonial Asia of the twentieth century. Yvonne’s writings among other publications have appeared in The Musical Quarterly, on Austro-German Jewish refugees and ‘Little Vienna’ in 1940s Shanghai; in Cambridge Opera Journal, on an epistemology of Chinatown theatre history and global operatic knowledge; and in the recently published volume Rethinking Bach, on the nuances of Bach reception across colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong. Her forthcoming and co-edited publications include The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism and a special issue of Postcolonial Studies, entitled ‘Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives’. Her book project, Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–1997 is under contract with University of Chicago Press and the New Material Histories of Music Series. Yvonne is a co-lead of two networks: CPAGH, Colonial Ports and Global History (founded with Julia Binter, Olivia Durand, Helena Lopes, Katharina Oke, Min-Erh Wang, and Hatice Yildiz); and WIGM, Women in Global Music (founded with Joe Davies). She is also a founding member of the American Musicological Society’s Global Music History Study Group.