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Barbara Mittler. Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China Since 1949. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997. 516 pp. ISBN 3-447-03920-5 (hardcover). This book, based upon the author's doctoral dissertation (University of Heidelberg), is an exploration of the relationship between politics and music in China by tracing the early efforts of Chinese composers who blend pentatonic Chinese melodies with Western harmony. Mittler also studies the more current Chinese attempts in bringing Chinese musical elements and aesthetics together with twentieth-century Western instrumental and compositional techniques. In so doing, she joins the scholars such as Peter Chang and Eric Lai1 in studying hybrid music; she is by no means a "solitary fighter" on "fragile ground" (p. 35). The title of the book arouses much interest. Yet, defining the scope as a study of new Chinese music contradicts what the book title suggests. In equating Chinese music with "new Chinese music," Mittler underrates its wide-ranging nature and musical development within the timeframe the book specifies. Many composers, whose works are explored here, come from major metropolitan areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong and Taipei. The majority of such composers has an academic conservatory background and has studied abroad. Many indeed studied with Zhou Wenzhong (Columbia University), one of the early Chinese composers of this form of hybrid music. Though Zhou's presence is acknowledged, the impact he had on the compositional styles of his students (who later become composers in the field) has not been evaluated. Neither have the socio-economic attributes of the composers been discussed. Homogenizing compositional styles in "all three parts of China" (China, Taiwan and Hong Kong) as the outcome of the "the forces of the market" (p. 266), underrates various socio-cultural and political factors at work in shaping this form of music. The book consists of four chapters; new Chinese music as a politicized language is the overarching theme of Chapters 1 to 3. In Chapter 1, Mittler presents the music history of Chinese composers who pondered the path Chinese music was to take after having experienced a century of Western imperialism. Here the author provides useful background information of such composers and their efforts for non-Chinese readers. In Chapter 2, Mittler raises the question: How political is new Chinese music? Claiming to investigate the "non-semantic" power of music as social critique, she focuses on "instrumental, absolute music" (p. 16). Paradoxically, the majority of musical works scrutinized, such as The Red Detachment of Women (1961), the first model revolutionary works during the Cultural Revolution, and Hong Kong composer Doming Lam's When the Winds Are Changing (1990), either have lyrical titles or well-defined programs. On another tangent, claiming The Red Detachment of Women as new Chinese music at one point and denouncing it as falling outside the "Chinese convention" because it is "modeled very closely on Western archetypes" at another, is an incongruent argument. Further, the claim that all music in China "is political" because of the non-semantic nature of absolute, instrumental music (p. 125) is a reduction of the complex relationships that exist between various musical works and the discretely different socio-political contexts from which they stem. In Chapter 3, Mittler raises the question: How new is China's new music? She aptly points out that new music composers draw heavily from tradition. Unfortunately, her shifting reference to and interpretation of China's "tradition" weaken both her argument and conclusion. Not only does she valorize "folk songs" as the articulations of peoples who live the "unchanging realities of the Chinese countryside" (p. 296, n. 130), but she also takes "folk" elements in musical compositions as immediate Chinese markers. …

canadian university music review

Barbara Mittler. Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China Since 1949. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997. 516 pp. ISBN 3-447-03920-5 (hardcover)