Category Archives: Music
Thursday, February 8th: Eilin Rafael Pérez “The Half-Life of Sovereignty: The DPRK and the Thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students”
Eilin Rafael Pérez
PhD Student, Department of History
“The Half-Life of Sovereignty: The DPRK and the Thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students”
Thursday, February 8th, 3-5 PM
John Hope Franklin Room [SSB 224]
Discussant: Alex Murphy [PhD Student, East Asian Languages and Civilizations]
Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Eilin Pérez as he presents his work-in-progress, titled “The Half-Life of Sovereignty: The DPRK and the Thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students.” He has provided the following abstract:
This paper explores the rhetorical and visual representations of youth culture deployed by the DPRK at the Thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students in 1989, and argues that the state marshaled the language of solidarity alongside the mentions of the everyday towards asserting its own transnational pedagogy of sovereignty.
Eilin’s paper can be found at this post.
As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.
If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu
Lester Zhuqing Hu – June 2
Frontiers of Music History: The Trans-Eurasian Making of “China” in 18th Century Qing Court Music
Paper: Hu — Frontiers of Music Theory, Proposal, 28 May 2016*
Speaker: Lester Zhuqing Hu (PhD Student, Department of Musicology, University of Chicago).
Discussant: Yiren Zheng (PhD Student, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)
Date: Thursday, June 2
Time: 4:15 to 6:00pm
Venue: John Hope Franklin Room (Social Science Research Building, 224)
*“The entire proposal, compiled of various fragmentary sections, is presented here — but I have “de-highlighted” parts to skip by putting them in a very light color; they are there in case you want to consult anything in there [for example with a search function] or if you are interested to see what’s there. I am only requesting you to read the parts in black, as well as the red rubrics, and the primary source appended to the end. I thank you very much for your accommodation and patience and look greatly forward to your comments.”
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Jun Hee Lee 2/11
Music for the Youth: American Folk Song’s Impact on 1960’s Utagoe
Ling to paper: Music for the Youth
Speaker: Jun Hee Lee (PhD Student, Department of History, University of Chicago)
Discussant: Paride Stortini (PhD Student, Department of Divinity, University of Chicago)
Date/Time: Thursday, February 11, 4:15 to 6:00
Venue: John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB), Room 224
05/02 Andrew Jones
Andrew F. Jones
Professor at Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of California, Berkeley
“Quotations Songs: Portable Media and Pop Song Form in the Chinese 1960s.”
(co-sponsored with Literature, Theater, and Cultural History of China workshop & Arts and Politics of East Asia workshop )
May 2, 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Place: Social Sciences Tea Room (2nd floor of SS building)
Abstract:
Quotations Songs: Portable Media and Pop Song Form in the Chinese 1960s
Quotations Songs: Portable Media and Pop Song Form in the Chinese 1960s
Andrew F. Jones
As the Cultural Revolution reached its crescendo in the years between
1966 and 1969, a new and remarkable form of popular music saturated
Chinese public space by way of a system of hundreds of millions of wired
loudspeakers that spanned the country. ‘Quotations songs” set Chairman
Mao’s writings to music, and were deliberately conceived as a musical
analogue and mnemonic device for The Quotations of Chairman Mao.
Surprisingly, these songs adapted from what is now known as “Little Red
Book” were eventually proscribed by Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who
objected to what she saw as their off-color propensity to set listeners into
pleasurable motion. Yet what could possibly be promiscuous (or even
pleasurable) about a choral march in duple meter entitled (to cite just one of
the more than one hundred such compositions that were published and
recorded) “Ensure that Literature and Art Operate as Powerful Weapons for
Exterminating the Enemy”? The answer may lie not just in the ecstatic
movement which sometimes accompanied the performance of such music,
but also in the deliberate promiscuity of their form. By form, I indicate not only
their musical, lyrical, and ideological characteristics, but also the way in which
these qualities made use of the new technological possibilities and ever
expanding reach of the socialist mass media in the 1960s. Quotation songs,
in a manner not radically different from popular music in the same years in the
West, were designed for promiscuous movement, for effortless portability.
And as with the mass-mediated pop songs of the 1960s in the US and
Europe, the revolutionary songs of the 1960s owed their popularity in part to
the self-conscious crafting of a ‘hook’ — a ‘catchy’ melodic figure,
catchphrase, or distinctive sound that rendered a song not only recognizable
but also replicable in disparate media and contexts.
One of the arguments of this chapter is that the rhetorical logic of
the “hook” is already implied by the citational form of the “Little Red Book”
itself. Quotations songs were in fact the product and the logical conclusion of
a system of what we might now call “cross-platform marketing” or “media
interactivity” that took shape in the Chinese 1960s, and their power was
premised on the ease with which they traveled across different media, from
print to performance, from radio to records, and from the revolutionary
postures of the “loyalty dance” to poster art.