Musicality and the Myriad Things

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. How can we learn to listen across musical cultures? Why is it difficult to appreciate the musicality of sounds that we might find initially estranging? In Musicality and the Myriad Things, Anna Yu Wang explores these questions by detailing her encounter with Huangmei opera and Taiwanese opera, two Sinitic music theatrical traditions that challenged her habits of listening and training in Western art music. Through a combination of music analysis, ethnography, and study of historical sources, Yu Wang examines the rich metaphorical pathways by which musical textures, circuitous melodies, and senses of musical time in Huangmei opera and Taiwanese opera come alive with creative possibility and philosophical meaning. She shows that music, far from being a universal language, can at times reveal its musicality only to listeners who have learned to inhabit local modes of worldmaking. The book simultaneously offers an account of the limitations of frames of knowing that currently structure Canadian and American music studies and proposes a new methodology that aims to address the pluralisms, paradoxes, and ethical quandaries that confront a "global" music theory--a music theory that resists collapsing differences across musical cultures even as it illuminates novel and unexpected kinds of relation.