ABSTRACT
In various calls for the adoption of a “global history” of music, musicologists and ethnomusicologists have considered ways of dismantling the assumptions of Western superiority and other forms of Eurocentric thought in responding to theories of globalization and postcolonialism. Of central importance to this approach is the demonstration of networks of exchange and influence among different musical cultures. Taking the music history curriculum in high schools and Soochow University in Suzhou, China, as our case study, we examine how Chinese historiography has grappled with the relationship between Chinese music and Western music and how it has treated Western music independently as one strand of “world music.” We also draw upon widely available popular biographies and cultural history extending to the 1940s and 1950s to sketch a reception history of selected Western composers in China that forms a background to the historiography underlying this textbook.
