Voice, Timbre, and Politics in Chinese Popular Music, 1920–1980

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dc.contributor.advisorWallmark, Zachary
dc.contributor.authorLiu, Annie
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-07T21:53:30Z
dc.date.available2024-08-07T21:53:30Z
dc.date.issued2024-08-07
dc.description.abstractThis thesis examines the political and cultural context informing the voices and timbres of Chinese popular music between 1920 and 1980. Drawing from scholarship by Jones (2001), Chen (2007), and Ouyang (2022), I survey shidaiqu or “songs of the times” from the 1920s through ‘40s and Chinese Communist Party populist music during the Cultural Revolution. I first analyze shidaiqu, often labeled “yellow music” due to its Western popular influence and bourgeois political leanings, through a case study of Japanese citizen Yamaguchi Yoshiko, who masqueraded as a Chinese songstress Li Xianglan in Japanese propaganda films during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). I show how her mixed identity encompassed both Chineseness and cosmopolitanism, which I term zá, a term meaning motley and variegated in both Chinese and Japanese. I conduct spectrographic case studies of five shidaiqu performers over the course of their careers, finding that some moved toward Western-modeled singing and others embraced traditional Chinese vocal aesthetics. My findings indicate that yellowness does not manifest itself as a timbral feature of the voice, but rather, as an ideological reaction to the zá (both/and) nature of shidaiqu vocal timbre. The zá sound implies that the politics of East and West could coexist and even complement one another, a reason for the CCP to ban shidaiqu in 1949 when they established the People’s Republic of China. I then analyze populist music during the Cultural Revolution by surveying the soundscape, technological mediation of sound, Chairman Mao’s strategic muteness, radio announcer’s natural tone, sonic warfare, and repetition. I argue that Mao instituted what I term ritualized sonic boredom to mobilize the masses. Additionally, the label “yellow” reappears during the Cultural Revolution regarding quotation songs and during Deng Xiaoping’s administration in response to Teresa Teng’s music, confirming its perpetual usage as a political tool and an authorization of condemnation and censorship. Throughout, I demonstrate the cyclicity and persistence of political tensions concerning voice, timbre, and cosmopolitanism in popular and populist music.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/29774
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectChinese musicen_US
dc.subjectPopular musicen_US
dc.subjectSound studiesen_US
dc.subjectTimbreen_US
dc.subjectVoiceen_US
dc.titleVoice, Timbre, and Politics in Chinese Popular Music, 1920–1980
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineSchool of Music and Dance
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.levelmasters
thesis.degree.nameM.A.

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