A historian of music and music theory, I focus my research on music and state-building—empire-building, to be more specific. Empires are by default players and products of transregional processes encompassing diverse peoples, territories, and traditions. Hence the other throughline of my work: a comparative perspective, informed by my current expertise in early modern Europe and late-imperial China (16th to 18th centuries) and by my new pivot to ancient and early imperial China (8th century BCE to 1st century CE) and late antique and early medieval Europe (7th to 11th century CE).
These two throughlines converge in my recently completed first book, Examining Sounds: Music, Empire, and Empiricism in Early Modern China. Supported by the ACLS/Luce Foundation Early Career Fellowship in China Studies, the book interrogates the entanglement of listening and empire-building during first half of the Manchu-ruled Qing (1636–1912), the last imperial dynasty that laid the foundation for modern China. Though it opens with the early advent of European music in China through the Jesuits, the book pivots away from the familiar tales of Eurocentric global history to reveal a new epistemology of empiricism that, in its aural form, transformed late-imperial understandings of music, calendar, tuning, language, and writing and structured the Qing’s governing ideology as a conquest regime presiding over a diverse empire. While concentrating on China, the book concludes by illustrating the fundamental similarities between high Qing China and contemporary Europe and its colonies in leveraging listening as an instrument of dominion and assimilation, reflecting as well on the implications of such similarities for comparativism as an underexplored methodology of global history and music history. These theoretical questions are explored in explicit Sino-European comparative contexts in my article “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism” (2021), which won the Alfred E. Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society in 2022.
Continuing such more explicit comparative studies will be my second book, tentatively titled Music Unifies whilst Ritual Differentiates: Music, Ritual, and the Feudal Making of China and Europe. In its current conception, the book will compare the longue durée making of imperial China from c. 5th century BCE to the 1st century CE (from Warring States to Western Han) to the similarly longue durée making of Europe from c. 7th century to the 11th century CE (from late antique to central medieval). I juxtapose these two spacetimes despite their lack of contemporaneity, because (1) both witnessed the formation of geographies and territorial imaginations (“China” as a unified polity, “Europe”—as opposed to the Mediterranean world—a cultural as well as continental unit) that proved stable till this day; (2) both saw discourses and practices of power that would shape the centuries to come, and (3) both have continuously beckoned debates of “feudalism” in Weberian and Marxist historiographies. Taking as a premise that such making of China and Europe entailed social relations formalized and transformed, my book will interrogate the role of music and ritual in such formalization and transformation. Where studies of early medieval Europe have recognized the significance (and problems) of “rituals” in understanding Carolingian and post-Carolingian state-building in non-teleological terms, transformations (or “collapse”) of music and ritual have been a paramount framework in traditional and modern Chinese historiographies of the transition between the ancient and early imperial periods. It is therefore my hope that a comparative approach will mutually elucidate early imperial China and early medieval Europe, which also saw the formations of the canons of musical theories, practices, and institutions in both Chinese and Western European traditions.
My comparative and cross-cultural approach is also reflected in my interest in translating primary sources, particularly those related to the history of music theory. Since 2021, I have been collaborating with Thomas Christensen (University of Chicago) and Carmel Raz (Cornell University) as co-editors of Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, forthcoming with the University of Chicago’s Online Publication Service. With c. 300 entries comprising translations and commentaries by close to two hundred contributors of diverse musical, linguistic, and cultural specialties, the annotated reader drastically expands the primary source purview of the Anglophone study of the history of music theory. In making the first attempt to cover the vast temporal and geographic span of human musical theorizing, we interrogate what “music theory” has meant and can mean, challenging the conventional focus on the textual Western European traditions in terms of not just its geographic but also its epistemological bounds that have elided oral, embodied, or otherwise non-discursive forms of musical knowing and theorizing. Additionally, my own teaching of the history of Chinese music at the undergraduate and graduate levels has also generated more than a hundred of primary source translations of Classical Chinese texts on musical practices, aesthetics, and philosophies as well as theory. I plan to publish these translations as a reader tailored to students of music history and of China studies.
I was born and raised in Beijing, China, and I came to the United States for my Bachelor of Arts, majoring in French and Music, at Amherst College (2013). I completed my Ph.D. in music history and theory at the University of Chicago (2019), where my dissertation won the Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award (2020). In addition to the ACLS/Luce Foundation Fellowship, my research has been supported by the Townsend Center Fellowship, CLIR/Mellon Fellowship, Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, and Chateaubriand Fellowship.
Publications
Examining Sounds: Music, Empire, and Empiricism in Early Modern China (forthcoming).
“Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull?: Toward a Decolonial Comparativism.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, No. 3 (2021), 501-569.
“A Global Phonographic Revolution: Trans-Eurasian Resonances of Writing in Early Modern France and China,” in Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, ed. by Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, 167-200. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020.
“Review: A Voice as Something More: An International Conference, University of Chicago, November 20-22, 2015.” Opera Quarterly 32, No. 2-3 (2016): 226-232.
“Toward Modal Coherence: Mode and Chromaticism in Carlo Gesualdo’s Two Settings of ‘O vos omnes.’” Early Music 43, No. 1 (2015): 63-78.
Recent Graduate Seminars
Music and Discipline (Fall 2024)
Music in Early Medieval China (Spring 2024)
Writing Sounds, Writing Voice: Other Histories of the Phonograph (Spring 2022)
Early Modern Phonographs (Fall 2019)
Recent Undergraduate Topical Courses
Mozart and the Enlightenment (Spring 2024)
Chinese Music: Philosophy, Practice, Politics (Spring 2022)
Music in Chinese History (Spring 2021)
In Search of AnOther Voice: Song and Opera in Early Modern Europe (Spring 2020)