Ya-Hui Cheng examines the emergence of popular music genres – jazz, rock, and hip-hop – in Chinese society, covering the social underpinnings that shaped the development of popular music in China and Taiwan, from imperialism to westernization and from modernization to globalization. The political sensitivities across the strait have long eclipsed the discussion of these shared sonic intimacies. It was not until the rise of the digital age, when entertainment programs from China and Taiwan reached social media on a global scale, that audiences realized the existence of this sonic reciprocation. Analyzing Chinese pentatonicism and popular songs published from 1927 to the present, this book discusses structural elements in Chinese popular music to show how they aligned closely with Chinese folk traditions. While the influences from Western genres are inevitable under the phenomenon of globalization, Chinese songwriters utilized these Western inspirations to modernize their musical traditions. It is a sensitivity for exhibiting cultural identities that enabled popular music to present a unique Chinese global image while transcending political discord and unifying mass cultures across the strait.

Since the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s unique brand of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese–language pop music) has dictated the musical tastes of the mainland and the rest of Chinese-speaking Asia. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow explores Mandopop’s surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for twenty years. In his early chapters, Marc L. Moskowitz provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary Mandopop scene, beginning with the birth of Chinese popular music in the East Asian jazz Mecca of 1920s Shanghai. A brief overview of alternative musical genres in the PRC such as Beijing rock and revolutionary opera is included. The section concludes with a look at the manner in which Taiwan’s musical ethos has influenced the mainland’s music industry and how Mandopop has brought Western music and cultural values to the PRC. This leads to a discussion of Taiwan pop’s exceptional hybridity, beginning with foreign influences during the colonial period under the Dutch and Japanese and continuing with the country’s political, cultural, and economic alliance with the U.S. Moskowitz addresses the resulting wealth of transnational musical influences from the rest of East Asia and the U.S. and Taiwan pop’s appeal to audiences in both the PRC and Taiwan. In doing so, he explores how Mandopop’s "songs of sorrow," with their ubiquitous themes of loneliness and isolation, engage a range of emotional expression that resonates strongly in the PRC. Later chapters examine the construction of male and female identities in Mandopop and look at the widespread condemnation of the genre by critics. Drawing on analyses and data from earlier chapters (including interviews with dozens of performers, song writers, and lay people in Taipei and Shanghai), Moskowitz attempts to answer the question: Why, if the music is as bad as some assert, is it so central to the lives of the largest population in the world? To answer, he highlights Mandopop’s important contribution as a poetic lament that simultaneously embraces and protests modern life. Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow is a highly readable introduction to an important but understudied East Asian phenomenon. It will find a ready audience among scholars and students of Chinese and Taiwanese popular culture as well as musicologists studying transnational music flows and non-Western popular music.

How the Chinese pop of the 1960s participated in a global musical revolution What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s? And how did the mambo, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? In Circuit Listening, Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, and suggests how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music around the globe. Focusing on the introduction of the transistor in revolutionary China and its Cold War counterpart in Taiwan, Circuit Listening reveals the hidden parallels between music as seemingly disparate as rock and roll and Maoist anthems. It offers groundbreaking studies of Mandarin diva Grace Chang and the Taiwanese folk troubadour Chen Da, examines how revolutionary aphorisms from the Little Red Book parallel the Beatles’ “Revolution,” uncovers how U.S. military installations came to serve as a conduit for the dissemination of Anglophone pop music into East Asia, and shows how consumer electronics helped the pop idol Teresa Teng bring the Maoist era to a close, remaking the contemporary Chinese soundscape forever. Circuit Listening provides a multifaceted history of Chinese-language popular music and media at midcentury. It profiles a number of the most famous and best loved Chinese singers and cinematic icons, and places those figures in a larger geopolitical and technological context. Circuit Listening’s original research and far-reaching ideas make for an unprecedented look at the role Chinese music played in the ’60s pop musical revolution.

This accessible, illustrated introduction explores the history of Chinese music, an ancient, diverse and fascinating part of China's cultural heritage.

DIVThe distribution of the gramophone and the birth of popular music, including jazz, as a part of nation-building and modernity in China./div

A History of Ancient Chinese Music and Dance describes the history of music and dance in ancient China in the past five thousand years in the forms of poems, music and dance. It includes court music and dance, music and dance in drama and folk music and dance. It covers historical and professional knowledge such as music, dance, poetry and drama. The book consists of eleven chapters, from ancient times to the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. In each chapter, there are historical background, music and dance works, people, events, and related poetry and images. The Yellow Emperor created tonality for wind instruments. Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun invented musical instruments qin and se. Duke of Zhou made system of rites and music. Apart from these, music, dance and acrobatics in the Qin Dynasty and the Han Dynasty, grand compositions in the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty and music and dance in drama in the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty can all lead us to the long developing process of ancient music and dance. The book was the Project of 2003 National Tenth Five-Year Plan for Art Science in China. It was co-funded by the National Publishing Fund and “China Classics International” of the General Administration of Press and Publication.

From the early days, musical instruments in China were made from everyday items: hunting tools, trees, bamboo and even bones. During the Zhou dynasty, there were about 70 instruments. Today, there are hundreds. But have you ever wondered how these musical instruments in China came about? Well, in this book, the evolution of Chinese music over the centuries is examined, from prehistoric times, through the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties, all the way to our modern times. Indeed, this book holds a treasury of fascinating information and stories pertaining to Chinese musical instruments. This is definitely something any music lover should have in their collection.