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Soundtracks of Asian America
Navigating Race Through Musical Performance
By Grace Wang Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7608-8
CHAPTER 1
Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture
"Music Moms" and the Performance of Asian Difference
In 2002, as part of a series of articles about summer camps, the New York Times reported on the Perlman Music Program—a prestigious six-week instructional program led by the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. Tellingly, the article focused less on the teenagers who attend the camp and more on the efforts and ambitions of their parents, the "music moms" who enroll their children in advanced programs of music study. As the reporters note, "'Music moms' seasons are far longer than those of soccer moms. Their financial payoffs are far smaller and more elusive than those of tennis moms. But they are every bit as competitive, protective, ambitious and self-sacrificing." The ethos of self-sacrifice emerges clearly in a comment offered by one of the article's featured mothers, Mrs. Kim, who bluntly states: "First priority is Yoonjee." For this mother, such prioritization has meant living apart from her husband, a South Korean diplomat whose work required him to return to Seoul, so that her daughter, Yoon-jee, could continue her piano studies at the Juilliard School's Pre-College Division. As the New York Times article makes clear, from the initial decision to enroll their children in music lessons to the continued labor of driving back and forth to music lessons, rehearsals, and performances, "music moms" like Mrs. Kim play an integral role in the realm of classical musical training.
To understand the broad context of Western classical music making, an examination of the "music moms" who facilitate, organize, and support their children's musical pursuits is critical. Variations of the "stage mom" exist in many different realms, from competitive sports to beauty pageants. Yet, while such figures as the "soccer mom" typically bring to mind the image of a white, middle-class, suburban parent, this chapter reveals how the traits of sacrifice, pushiness, and determination embodied in the "music mom" have increasingly become associated with being Asian. This chapter asks: What new meanings and significations have emerged alongside the racialization of this character? How has classical music training come to emblematize particular race and class notions about "Asian" parenting in the U.S. public imagination? And how do Asian parents themselves mobilize the multiple meanings contained in music to engage with and challenge their racial construction in the United States?
The contemporary racialization of the "music mom" is, at first glance, not necessarily surprising in light of the increasingly visible presence of Asians and Asian Americans in classical music since the 1960s and 1970s. In the following decades, Asians and Asian Americans constituted anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the student population at leading U.S. music schools and departments, with numbers often higher at the pre-college level. Indeed, by the 2000s, Asians and Asian Americans made up more than half of the student body at highly regarded music programs, such as Juilliard Pre-College; the two largest groups represented are students of Chinese and Korean descent studying the violin or piano. We can trace the growing participation of Asian and Asian Americans in classical music over the past few decades to multiple, overlapping contexts: the historical deployment of Western classical music in East Asia; the economic ascension of East Asian nations; and the wave of educated and professional Asian immigrants who have arrived in the wake of changes in U.S. immigration policies in 1965.
Still, socioeconomic and demographic shifts tell only part of the story. To contextualize the narratives placed on and mobilized by Asians and Asian Americans involved in classical music, this chapter draws from a range of sources—U.S. media representations, oral interviews conducted with Asian parents (primarily Chinese and Korean immigrant mothers) at Juilliard Pre-College, attendance at meetings held for Juilliard parents, and countless informal conversations with parents and musicians. Within the confluence emerging from these accounts, racialized discourses about Asians and Asian Americans—as disciplined, hard-working, family-oriented, imitative, and zealous embracers of Western culture—map unevenly onto beliefs that classical music connotes an "international" or "universal" language, a site of transcendent beauty, the unique cultural property of the West, and a cultural system through which the power of the West is enacted and authorized. As the media accounts I analyze in this chapter underscore, this complex and sometimes contradictory set of racial and musical discourses arises out of the colonial contexts through which classical music was institutionalized in East Asia and the imbalanced relations of power that have historically framed U.S. understandings of Asian and Asian American participation in this field of high culture.
Given these power dynamics, when Chinese and Korean immigrant parents enter conversations about their involvement in and affinity for Western classical music, they do so on unequal footing—in a new country, a new language, and through a cultural framework established and reworked through long-standing claims of Western superiority. Many of my interviewees articulated feeling that their actions are often misunderstood, hesitated to acknowledge the racism they encountered in their everyday lives, and expressed ambivalence at times about what it means to parent well in the U.S. context. They generalized broadly about characteristics that distinguished "Asians" from "Americans" and the ways in which these traits translated well into achievement in classical music and beyond. Still, while the emphasis my interviewees placed on possessing such characteristics as diligence, pushiness, and discipline can appear, on the surface, to reproduce stereotypical beliefs about their racial difference, this chapter suggests a more complex relationship between cultural practices and narratives. In what follows, I demonstrate how Asian parents choose from and reformulate available cultural narratives to claim alternate ascriptions of their race and class positioning in the United States.
To better understand the alignment between race, class, and cultural hierarchies, this chapter draws on Pierre Bourdieu's articulation of culture as a multidimensional field wherein groups and individuals compete to gain various forms of capital and extends his analysis to consider the transnational circulation of cultural capital. Participating in a global cultural economy historically structured by Western dominance, Asian parents understand Western cultural norms and capital as yielding the highest forms of recognition on an international stage. At the same time, the decline in popular attention paid to classical music in the contemporary U.S. context allows these parents to narrate their place within a field of culture that is marginal and prestigious as setting themselves apart from—and indeed above—mainstream American norms and values. Underpinning Asian parents' involvement in classical music is a desire to be arbiters of high cultural knowledge and to inhabit class and cultural identities of their own choosing rather than those imposed upon them as racialized immigrants in the United States.
Historicizing Western Classical Music in East Asia
Classical music was part of the mandatory education.... Everything was based on classical music. They just started making Japanese traditional music mandatory as well. So classical music is part of the culture. The fact that I grew up and didn't know anything about Japanese traditional music is more of a surprise to many non-Japanese people.—Midori, violinist
When violinist Midori noted in our interview that Western classical music—rather than Japanese traditional or art music—formed the basis of her music education in Japan, her observation highlighted the degree to which she views Western music as part of her own background and contemporary Japanese culture more broadly. Her characterization of Japanese traditional music as unfamiliar and classical music as unmarked (i.e., assumed to be Western classical music) blurs the boundaries of race and nation typically placed on ideas of musical ownership. Indeed, over the past few decades, the strong educational structure and government support for Western classical music in Japan, Korea, and China have made East Asia a key site for the global circulation of Western music. U.S. media reports have even begun pointing to East Asian performers and composers as the best hope for preserving and revitalizing Western classical music in the contemporary period.
To better understand the intensity of interest in Western classical music in East Asia, and to contextualize more fully the value and meanings that Asian American families ascribe to this music form, it is useful to historicize briefly the dissemination of Western classical music in Japan, China, and Korea. In all three nations Western classical music first arrived by way of Christian missionaries and missionary schools but spread through government interventions that linked modernization to the adoption of Western music principles. Recognizing the pragmatic use of Western music for social and political purposes in East Asia helps debunk, at the outset, beliefs that the transcendent or universalizing properties of Western classical music propelled its global circulation. Rather, the specific ways that Japan, China, and Korea adopted Western classical music emphasize how definitions of culture figure critically into global struggles over political, economic, and national power.
In Japan, classical music did not grow in popularity until the Meiji government (1868–1912) incorporated it into its military and educational system as part of a broader "national goal of catching up with the West." Driven less by aesthetic reasons than by social and political concerns, the Meiji government sought to refashion the cultural and musical landscape of Japan in an effort to win respect within a Western-dominated world order. While Japan was not subject to literal colonial rule, unequal power relations shaped by Western imperialism set the terms and context for the spread of Western music in that country. Historian E. Taylor Atkins observes that "the Meiji government's motivation for adopting Western music as the standard for the nation's military and educational system was part of the larger program of importing Western culture and technology in order to achieve parity with Western nations and renegotiate unequal treaties." In this way, the Meiji government deployed Western classical music in the service of political and economic goals.
In China, state-directed reforms also facilitated the spread of Western music. Inspired by the successes of the Meiji government, Chinese nationalists introduced educational reforms based on Western principles as part of a broader project of nation building. Andrew Jones notes that by the late nineteenth century, "musicians, cultural critics, and educators promoted music as a means of national mobilization, resisting Western imperialism, and fighting Japanese aggression. Musical modernization, moreover, was conducted not under the auspices of the bourgeoisie, but of the nationalist state." The social and political meanings attributed to Western classical music shifted during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when the performance and study of European composers were banned owing to their association with foreign and bourgeois influences. However, because music played a central role in nation-building processes during the Cultural Revolution, large numbers of musicians were trained in Western instruments and traditional Chinese music and performed the model operas and revolutionary songs that proliferated during that decade. This musical training unintentionally helped provide the basis for the renewed public embrace of Western music following the Cultural Revolution.
During the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910–1945), the Japanese government limited music education to the teaching of Japanese and Western songs. While the Korean government reintroduced traditional Korean music into the formal educational curriculum following liberation from Japan at the end of World War II, Western music training continued to flourish as colleges and universities established music departments. By the 1990s, ninety-four universities had music schools offering majors in Western classical music performance. The first music conservatory—modeled after schools such as the Juilliard School in New York City and the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris—was established in Seoul in 1993.
In Japan, China, and South Korea, the aesthetic appeal of Western classical music continues to be imbricated with the extramusical meanings of cultural prestige and modernity ascribed to it. Yayoi Everett attests: "From a sociological vantage point, modernizing East Asian nations legitimized and embraced Western art music as a marker of status, along with their commodification of the Western lifestyle." The lavishly constructed concert halls and the proliferation of professional symphony orchestras in the major cities of Japan, China, and South Korea function as visible symbols of the economic growth and modernity of the region and the emergence of a rapidly growing middle class able to patronize these performances.
The rising status of and interest in Western classical music in East Asia helps account for the increasing numbers of both Asian musicians traveling to the United States to continue their musical training and Asian immigrants enrolling their children in classical music training. After the removal of national-origins quotas and the implementation of occupational and investor preference categories in 1965, the wave of professional and educated Asian immigrants who arrived to the United States brought with them an understanding of classical music as the embodiment of high cultural status and transnational cultural capital. Understanding the history of Western classical music in East Asia thus allows us to see how Asian parents are participating in a long tradition of using music to pursue particular cultural, political, and pragmatic goals.
Racializing Musical Encounters
While the universalizing discourses associated with Western classical music naturalize the performance rituals, audience etiquette, and veneration of musical text and (the usually dead European) composer as seemingly timeless practices, it is useful to recall the historical construction of such beliefs in the United States. As cultural historian Lawrence Levine elucidates, the "sacralization" of high culture in the late nineteenth century mobilized artificial distinctions between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture as a mode of rationalizing and reinforcing social, class, and racial hierarchies. The codification of behaviors meant to express proper appreciation and understanding of classical music (i.e., silent and attentive listening designed to inspire contemplative reverence for the composer and musical text) linked the elevated status of this revered high art form to its European origins. In this way, the implementation of cultural hierarchy in the United States and the nation's emergence as a center for the performance of classical music—that is, as a site with the cultural and institutional infrastructure to support it (from opera houses to professional symphony orchestras and training centers)—map the nation's twentieth-century rise as a global power. The disciplining mechanisms and racial ideologies embedded in the culture of classical music became institutionalized along with the "music itself" as it traveled to other regions and populations around the world, allowing for the further legitimation of U.S. dominance. The same procedures used to regulate the "improper" behavior and responses of American audiences and musicians at the turn of the past century were applied to East Asians, whose purported inability to appreciate and understand Western classical music reflected their racial and cultural differences.
While unequal power relations structured the dissemination of Western classical music across East Asia during the twentieth century, music professionals tended not to consider such "extramusical" concerns, framing the institutionalization of Western classical music in East Asia less as the further entrenchment of Eurocentric imperial power and more as an (albeit unidirectional) form of "cultural sharing" marked by openness, generosity, and patronage. As Richard Kraus asserts in his study of Western music and politics in China, the metaphor of music as an "international language" proved "comforting to both conquerors and subjects alike. The West's musicians, if they thought much about empire, preferred to imagine their art opening new opportunities for shared pleasure and enlightenment, rather than imagining its use as a secondary aspect of an increasingly global web of social control." Crafting Western classical music as the universal embodiment of human achievement—as transcendent expressions of grace, splendor, and sublime beauty—effectively circumvented discussions of politics and power, allowing the more powerful partner in the relationship to dictate the terms and narratives attached to its circulation. Musicians from the United States, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1956, had a duty to spread the gift of their rich musical knowledge and, in the process, to broker cultural understandings with those in the East.
In these transcultural exchanges, orientalist beliefs about "East" and "West," coupled with racialized assumptions about the distinct European inheritance of Western classical music, yielded doubts that East Asians held the capacity to comprehend and appreciate fully this complex music form. Such an uncertainty is best summarized in the following question, posed by conductor Rolf Jacoby following a stint guest conducting the Seoul Symphony Orchestra in 1949: "Do Koreans really enjoy Occidental music?" In Jacoby's view, the lack of proper concert hall etiquette displayed by raucous Korean audiences, alongside their incessant clamoring "for their favorites again and again," betrayed a lack of maturity in musical understanding and, by extension, personhood as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Soundtracks of Asian America by Grace Wang. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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