Asians in Classical Music
Culturally speaking, whose is classical music?
Whenever I go to a symphony, two demographic observations stick out: the crowd is nearly all white; and the performers are white and Asian.
Historically, the music derives from a place and time: Western Europe, in the early modern era. But does that make it European? Here’s a book I’ve read recently—the title says a lot: Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music
Author Mari Yoshihara is mainly out to argue that classical music is the property of everyone, despite its European origins; and that Asians in classical music nevertheless face obstacles in claiming this universal birthright.
The overarching problem here is that Yoshihara takes Europe’s claims of universal culture at face value. The music was born at a time when Europeans imagined they were moving beyond nation and tribe. But this cosmopolitanism would begin to shatter as folk looked with horror at the excesses of the French revolution. But that's another story.
So what if Yoshihara's historical work is faulty: does the claim of universality make it so? If classical music claims to be universal, is that also an invitation to make it universal? Whose is this classical music?
Pictured: Yo Yo Ma, at the World Economic Forum.
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Thank you for reading and writing about my book. I am not sure how you got the impression that I take Europe's claims of universal culture at face value. In fact I devote the entire last chapter of the book to the discussion of "authenticity" as a historical and cultural construction--a construction that is made differently in each field of classical music. In any case, whether any group of people have a more legitimate claim to classical music is not a question I'm particularly interested in; rather, my goal was to discuss what classical music means to Asians and Asian Americans, and conversely, what Asian and Asian American musicians' performances and compositions of "classical" music mean to their audiences.
Mari
In that regard, as someone who's spent years in Europe, I say this: In my experience, for all their embarrassing provincial attitudes, white Americans are years ahead of white Europeans in recognizing the whiteness of European culture. This is a European problem, not an Asian one.
-pg