Search

Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was home to communities and musicians from all parts of the world. Among the over 20,000 Russians living there, a significant population of musicians contributed to the musical life of the city, particularly the Conservatory of Music founded in November 1927. This article reveals an overlooked phase of musical exchange between China and the West by 1) tracing the context and early development of the Conservatory; 2) identifying and discussing the activities of the Russian pedagogues (including Boris Zakharov, Vladimir Shushlin, and Sergei Aksakov amongst others) and their more notable Chinese students’ (including Li Delun, Ding Shande, Wu Leyi, and Yi Kaiji amongst others) reaction to them; 3) assessing the role that Russians played in the affairs of the Conservatory; and 4) demonstrating how Russian pedagogues influenced the development of Western classical music in China through their students’ notable achievements.

This article examines the British Broadcasting Corporation's broadcasting of contemporary art music during the 1960s and early 1970s. Particular reference is made to the ideas and activities of William Glock, controller of music at the BBC from 1959 to 1973, contemporary composers whose music the BBC either neglected or championed during this period because of the idiom in which they composed, and Glock's controversial legacy. Setting Glock's ideas and activities in a historical and philosophical context provokes reflection on aspects of music and broadcasting history, and provides a case study in two aesthetic assumptions which dominated the three decades after the Second World War: change is preferable to stability, and novelty guarantees value. Doing so also helps explain why the labels ‘contemporary’ and ‘avant-garde’ became indistinguishable during the 1960s, and the logic by which more traditional but still contemporary works were excluded from programmes devoted to twentieth century music.