Book Review

Asia

This pioneering work on music history and media culture in China during the interwar years is theoretically engaging and ambitious, probing as it does a variety of questions concerning the global diffusion of new media technologies, transnational cultural appreciation and confusion, colonial modernity and national salvation, and the politics of gender, class, and race. Although dialoguing with "characteristically postcolonial" works in the field, the author has managed to avoid engulfing readers in a cloud of jargon. This is a highly readable work that is empirically grounded and written with flair.

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Andrew F. Jones's overview of modern Chinese music life starts with the arrival of European music on Chinese shores in the seventeenth century, brought as part of the baggage of Jesuit missionaries, and quickly advances to the early twentieth century, where developments included Japanese-style school songs promoted by reformists like Liang Qichao, the idea of music being part of "aesthetic education" advocated by Peking University president Cai Yuanpei and the cartoonist Feng Zikai, and a seminal speech on the relationship between music and political power given by the German-trained musician Xiao Youmei. The book also includes discussions of records, popular magazines, cinema, and institutes. In particular, it depicts in some detail what Jones calls "gramophone culture" and argues that the advent of the gramophone and allied technologies such as radio broadcasting and sound films "served to fundamentally alter the political economy and social meaning of music consumption" (p. 55).

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