Date/Time
Fri, Nov 1, 2024
3:30 pm EDT - 5:00 pm EDT
This talk by Qingfan Jiang revisits the concept of exoticism in the context of global music history. While exoticism is generally used to discuss how European composers dealt with musics from what they perceived as “foreign” places, this talk explores how people in these “foreign” places, notably China, responded to European music. Looking specifically at how the Chinese imperial court incorporated Western music theory into the Chinese music system, Jiang shows that rather than adopting the European model of exoticism, the Chinese constructed their own framework for understanding music of different cultures. This framework, known as Chinese cosmopolitanism, posits that the Chinese identity is predicated on becoming and not being, which allows differences to be continually folded into Chineseness. The Chinese imperial court used this framework to claim a unity of Chinese and European music, blurring the boundaries between the native and the foreign. Ultimately, this talk aims to enrich the current discussion on exoticism in the eighteenth century and offer a new approach to global music history beyond critical race theory and postcolonialism.
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Bio
Qingfan Jiang is an assistant professor of Musicology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the musical exchange between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has published in Eighteenth-Century Music and contributed to the edited volume Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom: Crossover, Exchange, Appropriation. Before joining Peabody, Jiang held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She received her PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University in 2021. She has given talks at conferences in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Australia. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Council for European Studies, the Ricci Institute, and the American Musicological Society.