Yvonne Liao
Yvonne Liao is a music historian and Assistant Professor in Musicology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her current interests include postcolonial writing, global and world history, public humanities, and human-animal studies, with related projects funded by the CUHK Faculty of Arts and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in The Musical Quarterly, The Chopin Review, Postcolonial Studies, and the Journal of Global History. Yvonne is also co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism and working on her monograph, Imperfect Global, Imperfect Empire: Writing Musical Lives across Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–2024, under contract with The University of Chicago Press.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Session
Western classical music provides an intriguing lens to explore the stakes of world history “after globalization,” seeing that classical music is shaped by its own entanglements with European imperialism, colonization, and canonized “great composers” and “classics” (Weber 1999; Walker 2020). Global integration persists, though always within different contexts and conditions of empire.
This paper ventures beyond grand narratives of music and empire to examine empire’s global grain, treating it as a site of archival textures and fissures (Stoler 2009; Liao 2023)—and as a means of understanding uneven connections as they relate to classical music in late-colonial Hong Kong between 1987 and 1991. Specifically, the paper focuses on two sets of documentary materials held currently at the Hong Kong Public Records Office. The first concerns piano storyboards for Chinese-language television commercials vetted and sanctioned by the government, in particular their recurring motifs of instrumental craft and British musical excellence (in the form of ABRSM exams)—and an advertising rhetoric that ostensibly smooths over cross-cultural encounters while symbolically reifying the European canon. The second set of materials concerns the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s public orchestral experiments and the ways in which their newspaper reviews reveal both new audience interest among the local Chinese population and entrenched concertgoing habits, often though not exclusively among the colony’s foreign nationals. By analyzing empire’s global grain in late-colonial Hong Kong, the paper reflects further on the postcolonial legacy and lexicon of “East Asian classical music,” as part of a world historiography marked by contact and slippage.