Audiences and Chinese-language popular music: Street music and “intercultural” performances 

Abstract

In this talk, I present research involving Chinese-language popular music, focusing on how audiences and musicians relate to each other in different performance circumstances. I discuss my entry into this research through a long-held interest in street music in major cities of China. My ethnographic fieldwork in the regional metropoles of Wuhan, Kunming and Guangzhou, for instance, has involved attending various kinds of informal musical performance occurring regularly in city streets, parks and squares. I have been interested especially in how this street music is embedded in the ongoing unfolding of everyday activity, and how musical experiences here are highly depended not only on the most prominent figures (musicians and their dedicated listeners) but also on people (such as passers-by) encountering the music more peripherally.

These interests have developed into another major avenue for my research: concerts of Chinese-language popular music taking place overseas. I introduce my work studying performances by Transition 前進樂團, a band of white British rock musicians who play at “intercultural” events in the UK – sometimes for audiences with no particular prior knowledge of, or interest in, Chinese language or related cultural knowledge. I discuss how the notion of “interculturality” may be problematised and indeed extended to consider the moment-to-moment interaction of musicians and audiences from dissimilar backgrounds. To this end, I introduce ongoing research involving video tracking methods for plotting the routes of audience members through an outdoor festival performance space, considering the “intercultural” dimensions of how band and audience negotiate attunement in these experiences.

Biography

Samuel Horlor is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Music, Durham University. Previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Ethnomusicology, Yunnan University (China), he is an ethnomusicologist and scholar of popular music currently most interested in global street music, Chinese-language performances in the UK, and audience research. Samuel is currently serving as President of CHIME, Worldwide Platform for Chinese Music, and in 2023, his article “Audiencing in China: Foreign Rock Musicians’ Perceptions of Difference and Sameness” won the Association for Chinese Music Research Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize. He is also the author of Chinese Street Music: Complicating Musical Community (Cambridge University Press), and co-editor (with James Williams) of Musical Spaces: Place, Performance, and Power (Jenny Stanford Publishing).

Contact lara.pearsonuni-koeln.de if you would like to attend.