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At the turn of the 1970s and the 1980s, after the cessation of the Cultural Revolution Chinese composers began intensive study of the 20th century European musical classics, including the compositions of the Second Viennese School, as well as the European and American postwar avant-garde, including serialism. The result of this was an adaptation of serial technique on the Chinese cultural soil, a synthesis of the method with national traditions – modal, timbral, metro-rhythmic, philosophical and aesthetical. Mastery of the technique took place in two mutually conditioned directions – the theoretical-methodological, connected with expounding the chief principles of Schoenberg’s compositional method, and the practical, which led to the creation of dodecaphonic works by Chinese composers. The first to demonstrate interest in the 20th century Western classics was Luo Zhongrong. As the result of his translations of musical texts, the theoretical works of Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith became well-known, the ideas of the American apologists of serialism, George Perle and Allen Forte, began to be disseminated. A major researcher of serial technique in China is musicologist Zheng Yinglie. From the late 1970s he developed original courses devoted to twelve-tone music for students and aspirants, and in 1989 he published his own tutorial materials as a monograph “Courses of Composition of Serial Music.” Special interest for Chinese musicians was aroused by the figure of Arnold Schoenberg. At the present time analysis of chosen works carried out by Chinese music scholars has firmly entered into tutorial material for students of higher musical educational institutions in the People’s Republic of China. The greater part of articles about Schoenberg written in China is devoted to his pedagogical, theoretical and conducting activities. In the domain of Chinese scholarship all of the crucial works by Schoenberg pertaining to different periods of his work have been examined. In recent years there have appeared articles elucidating the history of study of the legacy of Schoenberg in China. Keywords: Chinese serial technique, Arnold Schoenberg, Zheng Yinglie, Luo Zhongrong, Chinese musicology.

The main positions of scientific studies of Chinese musicologists in Ukraine through the prism of understanding the intercultural dialogue as a communication process are covered in the article. Communicative processes between European and Chinese cultures in socio-cultural, aesthetic-stylistic planes, in musical-theatrical, vocal, instrumental arts are considered. The purpose of the article was to identify the positions of contemporary musicological thought that addresses the idea of intercultural dialogue and its related processes in general and in the context of the «Europe-China» relationship. The main scientific positions were outlined regarding the idea of intercultural dialogue in its relation with the phenomena of communication, inculturation and acculturation tendencies, etc.; the contemporary (from the 1990s) musicology studies carried out in Ukraine about the musical culture of China were considered; the existence and specificity of the implementation of intercultural communication were discovered; the main lines for further study of the European-Chinese intercultural dialogue were identified in the research process. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is based, first of all, on the Bakhtin’s dialogue concept and also the concepts by O. Berehova, Yu. Lotman, O. Samoilenko, M. Shved and others. In the process of studying this topic, the work of such Chinese researchers as Vu Huolinh, Li Siabin, Lo Kun, Liu Bintsian, Sun Zhuilun, Tu Dunia, Khou Tszian, Khu Pin, Chzhan Siaokhao, Chzhu Chanlei. Conclusions are made on the active development of comparative studies in contemporary musicology, based on comparing European and Chinese artistic traditions. Research can be of practical importance to future researchers in intercultural communication processes. The main task in the intercultural dialogue Europe-China is to achieve the creative understanding, which, according to M. Bakhtin, arises at the level of a consistent interpretation of the essence.

What does music convey to people living within a culture? How is it understood? How should we approach the study of music when we want to attain a synthetic and comprehensive view of musical activities in human culture? This article explores the cultural interface of the traditional Chinese musical instrument, the guqin . It brings to light the interconnections of ideas and images of this instrument with the expressive resources of Chinese culture, and it studies the symbolism of this music in terms of its orientations toward cosmological views of life, human comportment, poetic values, and spiritual attainment. By tracing the networks of symbolic meaning throughout the cultural fields of Chinese life, one can arrive at a deeper understanding of the thoroughgoing resonance of musical performances in this part of the world.

Throughout history, more than 2000 Chinese musical instruments have existed or been historically recorded, they are of non-negligible importance in Chinese musicology. However, the public knows little about them. In this work, we present a multimedia database of Chinese musical instruments. This database includes, for each instrument, text descriptions, images, audio clips of playing techniques, music clips, videos of the craft process and recording process, and acoustic analysis materials. Motivation and selecting criteria of the database are introduced in detail. Potential applications based on this database are discussed, and we take the research on subjective auditory attributes of Chinese musical instruments as an example.

This contribution focuses on Hermann von Helmholtz’s work on Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Helmholtz used his scientific concept of distortion to analyze this music and, reversely, to find corroboration for the concept in his musical analyses. In this, his work interlocked with nineteenth-century aesthetic and scholarly ideals. His eagerness to use the latest products of historical scholarship in early music reveals a specific view of music history. Historical documents of music provide the opportunity for the discovery of new experimental research topics and thereby also reveal insights into hearing under different conditions. The essay argues that this work occupies a peculiar position in the history of musicology; it falls under the header of "systematic musicology," which eventually emerged as a discipline of musicology at the end of the nineteenth century. That this discipline has a history at all is easily overlooked, as many of its contributors were scientists with an interest in music. A history of musicology therefore must consider at least the following two caveats: parts of it take place outside the institutionalized field of musicology, and any history of musicology must, in the last instance, be embedded in a history of music.

Many composers have combined Western music with Asian music such as Turkish, Arabic, Berber, Persian, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesia and others. The most significant characteristic of Asian music is the use of pentatonic and gong. Pentatonic and gong are also used in western music along with other instruments. This describes the relationship between Western and Asian music. This music composition is an idea from the story of the life of TjongA Fie. Tjong A Fie (1860-1920) or Tjong Yiauw Hian was a Hakka Chinese businessman, banker and kapitan (Chinese Major) who built a large plantation business in Sumatera, Indonesia. This composition examines the TjongA Fie story which combines Chinese, Indonesian (Malay rhythm: inang, joget and zapin) and Western music techniques. The researcher created a music composition as entitled above, using the six-pitch scales or modes, Huowu. The six-pitch scale is then combined with the twelve tones of the Western music system. Then the tones are transposed within twelve tones in the Western music system that will produce a new pitch scale. With the new set of scales, the music has more aesthetic expressions in terms of visual elements which include melodic motif, color, sound, atonal harmony, rhythm patterns, and texture.

Through discussion on the increments of unordered elements in the transition of 20th century western contemporary music, this paper investigates similarities between 20th century western music and traditional Chinese music. Analyzing chaos in Tradition Chinese Music scripts and inheritance and comparing the fractal features of Chinese and Western music, it also views, from the perspective of philosophy, the value and philosophical meaning of Chinese and Western music.

In this paper, the extensive application of audio testing software to Chinese musicology was reviewed. New audio testing software developed by Chinese musicologists include DEAM and GMAS , which along with imported audio testing software such as Solo Explore 1.0, Speech Analyzer3.0.1 have been widely applied by Chinese musicologists to ethnomusicology, archeology of music, folk music as well as musical entertainment. With the support of audio testing software, Chinese musicology has made much progress.

In this article, four cases of ethnomusicological research on South Asian music are presented to substantiate the social essentiality (Wesentlichkeit) of music, and therefore the complementary role of a socially-grounded approach to studying complex musical traditions. Historiographically, it is argued that this social orientation progresses logically from, and is in keeping with, the growing cosmopolitan reality of musical scholarship and of music itself. Ethnomusicology draws resourcefully from its rich, inter-disciplinary heritage of musicology, music theory, anthropology, and area studies to yield tools of musical description and analysis that are culturally appropriate, culture-specific and yet cross-cultural, this paving a foundation for a truly comparative—and "Adlerian"— musicology.

With the spreading of the consumerist culture, t he contemporary Chinese musicology seems to focus on the performance skills of music, without emphasis on the moral c onnotation of music. Confucius attached great importance to the educational function, the c ommunicative function and the political function in music teaching, and regarded music as the accomplishments of a moral personality. Creating the Ren (Benevolence) system and displaying the subjectivity of human being, Confucius reconstructed humanism of the traditional music, making music education and people's life style inseparable. Currently, it is very meaningful to make research into Confucius's music education and revitalize traditional music e ducation.

The first half of the 20th century is a period of blending of Chinese and Western cultures, and Chinese piano culture was brought in as a cultural phenomenon in that period. Chinese musicians absorbed Chinese and Western cultures and digested them sufficiently, thereby establishing a set of piano music cultural system with Chinese characteristics. This paper discusses characteristics of Chinese piano music national character in the first half of the 20th century so as to explain cultural connotation of Chinese piano music.

China has extensive and profound culture and music, Chinese and western music are in total different style. Both of them have their proud points. Chinese music is has a long history of culture accumulated rich experience in the Chinese nation, due to differences in regions, Chinese music is significantly different with the western classical music. This article summarize the different style of music between Chinese and western, and do the comparison between this two kinds of music education.

The institution of copyright has frequently been criticized by scholars of popular music for systematically misrepresenting and under-privileging popular music as a field of creative practice. In this respect, it is sometimes suggested, copyright law harbours a bias in favour of Western art music that is remarkably similar to that embedded in musicology, the discipline in opposition to which popular music studies chiefly defines itself. Setting the scene for this special section of Social & Legal Studies on (copyright) law and music, this introduction reviews the literature in which these concerns have been expressed, and traces them to the fact that copyright law - not unlike musicology - operates with a conception of the musical artefact as a bounded expressive form originating in the compositional efforts of some individual: a fixed, reified work of authorship. It explores the origins and significance of the workconcept as a musicological category, and critically analyses the claim that the legal concept of the musical work is identical to this category and has been determined by it. It concludes with the suggestion that the legal and aesthetic musical work-concepts are at once distinct and overlapping: both reify a temporal experience (a musical event), but for very different reasons. Whereas the musicological category facilitates a certain kind of musical appreciation and certain kinds of listening practice, the legal category facilitates the drawing of proprietary boundaries around ‘objects’ that will figure in commercial transactions and be the focus of commercial expectations.

SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF WOMEN AND Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective in 1987 I have watched the steady growth of feminist and, more recently, genderist studies in musicology and ethnomusicology. (1) Heavily influenced by postmodern theories derived from history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, queer theory, and the many "posts" (e.g., postcolonialism, poststructuralism, postfeminism), it is clear that recent postmodern studies have contributed much to our understandings of how both music sound and sociomusical activities are gendered. What has been less clear, however, are the reasons behind a growing separation between the two fields of musicology and ethnomusicology with respect to this research: after a brief spurt in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, work in feminist and genderist ethnomusicology seemed to slow in relation to that of musicology. Yes, certain recent works stand out, Beverly Diamond and Pirkko Moisala's Music and Gender and Tulia Magrini's Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, among others. (2) Yet, compared to studies in musicology and especially in popular music studies, there seemed to be comparatively few. I began to question, first, if this were actually the case and, second, what could explain this disparity, if it did indeed exist. To find some answers I conducted a quick, informal search, scanning the titles of over fifteen hundred books and articles written since 1990 on the subject of women and music, feminist theory and music, gender and music, and, most recently, men and music to see if my perceptions were correct. The book titles were culled from the Voyager Catalog on the University of Rochester's library system, and articles were taken from three prominent journals: the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnomusicology, and Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. I knew from previous searches that at least half of the works would not be scholarly but, rather, trade books (more or less) chronicling the lives of famous female jazz singers or rock groups. The remaining 750 or so, that is, those attempting to theorize women, men, gender, and music in some way, could be roughly divided as follows: musicology, including Western classical and popular music, about 90 percent; ethnomusicology, meaning everything else, including non-Western popular and classical music, about 10 percent. I decided to separate musicological from ethno-musicological work on the basis of method: was the work under question derived from textwork or from fieldwork? Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, the only music journal totally dedicated to publications on women, gender, and music, had a slightly higher percentage for ethnomusicological publications (ca. 17 percent). Table 1 shows the distribution of articles from the initial issue in 1997 to 2004. We could partially explain these statistics as evidence for the relative numbers of musicologists and ethnomusicologists in the field today. According to the American Musicology Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology websites, about 3,300 people are members of the AMS, and about 1,200 belong to the SEM. Of course, some of these are the same people, but if we accept these numbers at face value, then indeed there are almost three times the number of musicologists than ethnomusicologists out there. It is easy to see why there are comparatively fewer published works in feminist and genderist ethnomusicology. However, this is not the complete story. I linked Western popular music studies with musicology, not ethnomusicology, although, until recently, all music outside the Western art canon was considered the province of ethnomusicology. Western popular music studies, influenced by the newly burgeoning theories of cultural studies, brought the so-called music of the middle class into the canon--at least for some. Until the advent of the "new musicology" in the 1980s music studies were traditionally divided into three genre categories: Western classical music, popular music, and non-Western music. …

Thinking about Chinese music the author is trying to find answers on different questions. What implication on Chinese culture had events in down the history on territory present-day China? What result from syncretism of Chinese music with other phenomena of Chinese culture? What implication on formation of Chinese tonal system had the cyclic principle of tuning? It seems, the music in Europe reflects an ideal imagination of known world and music change according the new recognition of the world. What caused absence of similar evolution in Chinese music? The differences between Chinese and European culture relate to different visions of the category of time, and it has serious consequences in the field of music.

Both electroacoustic music and its associated musicology are a half century old. Although the number of relevant technological developments during this time could be said to be extremely high, its music has known relatively few heroes, at least within contemporary art music, and written scholarship demonstrates a bias towards formalism and therefore much less of one towards the contextual, aesthetic, reception, etc. The previous sentence implies an imbalance worthy of addressing. This article is less a survey of what exists in the area of electroacoustic music scholarship than one looking into delineating the area and suggesting where the ‘holes in the market’ might be and how they might be filled. Are the fields of sonic art and its musicology intentionally avoiding coherence? And why do musicologists of the music of notes continue to avoid the musicology of the music of sounds? Finally, triangulation, i.e. the use of feedback and evaluation so rarely applied in electroacoustic music(ologogical) contexts, is promoted as a means to greater cohesion and understanding, avoiding what is called an ‘island mentality’ demonstrated by many individuals working in all areas of the sonic arts.

Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects. Edited by Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [viii, 229 p., ISBN 0-19-516749-X. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, index, bibliographies. Statistics in Musicology. By Jan Beran. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2004. [viii, 299 p. ISBN 1-58488-219-0. $71.94.] Music examples, illustrations, index, bibliography. Recent decades have witnessed a significant rise in scientifically-inspired music research. This expansion is apparent, for example, in the founding of several journals, including Psychomusicology (founded 1981), Empirical Studies in the Arts (1982), Music Perception (1983), Musicae Scientiae (1997), Systematic Musicology (1998), and the recently founded Empirical Musicology Review. The dictionary definition of "empirical" is surprisingly innocuous for those of us arts students who were taught to use it as a term of derision. Empirical knowledge simply means knowledge gained through observation. Science is only one example of an empirical approach to knowledge. In fact, many of the things traditional musicologists do are empirical: deciphering manuscripts, studying letters, and listening to performances. Historically, empiricism began as a uniquely British enthusiasm, so it is entirely proper that seven of the nine contributors to Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects are British. The book adopts a notably broad perspective in describing empirical research in music. After an introductory chapter, the book begins with a contribution by ethnomusicologist Jonathan Stock, who describes the "participant-observer method" that has been the cornerstone of anthropological field research for the past half century. The chapter provides some concrete advice related to keeping a field notebook, interviewing, and video documenting. Echoing the views of most ethnomusicologists, Stock notes that the participant-observation method has considerable potential value in music research beyond its usual application in studying non-Western musics. Jane Davidson's "Music as Social Behavior" emphasizes survey methods, distinguishing two broad approaches. The first is the cross-sectional survey which aims to provide a generalized snapshot using quantitative information gathered from a large sample of people. The second is the longitudinal case study that focuses on individual experiences over time. In the first approach, the survey might be based on a formal questionnaire distributed to some group of people. In the second approach, researchers might make use of existing information, such as diaries (e.g., Berlioz) or correspondence (e.g., between Clara and Robert Schumann). Nicholas Cook contributes a chapter on computational and comparative methods in music scholarship. Since the late 1950s, successive generations of enthusiasts have predicted that computers would revolutionize music research. Cook suggests that recent developments in computational musicology are finally beginning to fulfill the promise glimpsed by earlier scholars. He describes a number of studies carried out over the past decade and concludes that there is significant opportunity for what he calls "disciplinary renewal." Given the availability of large amounts of musical data (often from a wide variety of cultures) Cook recommends that music scholars reconsider the long-standing antipathy toward comparative studies. Throughout his presentation, Cook takes special pains to distance his empirical enthusiasms from past positivist presumptions. "[W] hat I am suggesting," he notes, "is that musicology in the broadest sense can take advantage of computational methods and transform itself into a data-rich discipline, without giving up on its humanist values." (p. 123) Perhaps the most extensive empirical efforts in music scholarship are to be found in the areas of performance studies and in studies of musical sound. Eric Clarke provides a fine outline of the history of empirical studies in musical performance, including a convenient list of landmark achievements. …

In this article I review some of the latest books in what has been called the ‘New Musicology’. I also ask why music therapists and musicologists seem until now to have taken so little notice of each other's work, but suggest that this situation is changing. Developments in critical thinking about music represented by the ‘New Musicology’ may be of particular relevance to music therapists searching for theoretical perspectives on their work. But equally the theorists of the ‘New Musicology’ could learn much from music therapy – which can be seen in many ways as a ‘laboratory’ for new thinking about the nature of music and its place in society.

The author reviews a recent text of contemporary musicology, Musicology and Difference, which seeks to. explore the representation of gender in music, and, by the attribution of fanciful interpretations to notes, keys, Crescendos, cadences and other elements of music, to invalidate the phrase “the music itself.” The text is seen as representative of current work in this area, and challenged here in the polemical terms of that current work.

Chinese culture is so substantive content-wise, so broad in diversities, and has had so long history, which is so distinguishable from its outsiders. Most significant components of Chinese culture embraces music, literature, martial arts, cuisine, visual arts, philosophy, religion, ceramics and architecture. China’s literature is in black and white in one language for more than 3,000 consecutive years, resulting easy to read those literature by the Chinese nation in all parts of the country, in spite of steady modifications in pronunciation, the advent of regional and local dialects, and alteration of the characters. Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism are pillars for compositions of social values. Chinese architecture was bring into being from more than 2,000 years ago, is almost as old as Chinese civilization and has long been a significant hallmark of Chinese culture. Chinese classic texts are enriching the world with a wide range of topics comprising constellations, calendar, astrology, astronomy, poetry and many more. Chinese art encompasses all characteristics of performance art, folk art and fine art. Chinese painting considered a highly esteemed art in court circles incorporating a diverse variation of Shan shui with specialized styles such as Ming Dynasty painting. Drama is an additional old and significant literary form. China has a very antique and rich convention in literature and the dramatic and visual arts like workings of Confucius (551-479 BC) and Lao-tzu (probably 4th century BC). With rich Chinese philosophical, religious, and historical writings, China also produced dramatic writings, novels, and poetry from an ancient. Chinese drama generally combines vernacular language with music and song and as a result it has been widespread and very popular among the general people. In the famous Peking Opera of the present era, a wide range of popular and standard themes are staged, which is undoubtedly the best known of several operatic traditions that developed in China. China is one of the foremost birth places of Eastern martial arts. The arts have also co-existed with a range of weapons comprising the more standard 18 arms. Chinese tea culture is an essential component in daily life of people. China's legendary tradition endures to the present-day, although much 20th-century writing has focused on efforts to improvement or revolutionize or reform China. Under Communism, writers have been anticipated to endorse the values of the socialist state. Regardless of the fact that China has steadily become modernized during the last one hundred years, the naturalistic view of life is still engrained deeply into the Chinese mind of the contemporary era.

In the word musicology ‘music’ is followed by ‘logos’ and the practitioners of this scholarly discipline follow the current of musical creativity in their academic texts. Yet, there is a question of distance. Can musicologists tailgate music too closely, leaving no room for critical reflection about its meaning and contexts? Or, on the contrary, are they distracted with their own linguistic production, making ‘logos‘ into a primary goal? Recently, North- American music theorists formed a group devoted to the Philosophy of Music, but the group has focussed on the ‘Philosophy of Music Theory‘ instead. Is Musicology Australia in danger of falling into the same trap?

The author's experience with musicological research of contemporary music developed his critical attitude towards musicology in general, especially towards the one that considers music only as text and limits the approaches to musical works on philological methodology. Both Schering's Experimentelle Musikgeschichte (1913) and Kerman's requests for musicology as fusion of scholarly musicological work and sense for music as art (1985) attempt to get rid of this »philological burden«. A further problem, however, is the equality of all kinds of music, requested by the New musicology and the impossibility to develop appropriate analytical tools for each of them. Harrison's suggestion of ethnomusicological (i.e. sociological) approach is not sufficiently convincing, because – as proven by the quotation from Treitler – the contextual (i.e. social) meaning of any musical work is not so easily to decipher. The author pleads for consciously critical approach to musicological research which permits even contrary readings of the same text, and points out that this is the way in which he persuades his students to cope with the lacunae of their subjects of interest.

It's the small words that do the most cultural work. THE MUSIC OF A CENTURY, the title of the conference for which this paper was written, imputes a spurious singularity to a multiplicity of cultural practices, and begs the question of in whose interests this singularity is being constructed. An alternative question, 'WHOSE MUSIC OF A CENTURY?', could be explored in political terms (and nowhere more fruitfully than with reference to South Africa), but in this paper I focus on the broader intellectual and ideological factors that lead us to construct music in this manner. I do this by showing how, through its emphasis on score and structure, musicology silences the multiple and divided voices of music in performance, and argue that the same restrictive assumptions pervade our writing of music history. The fundamental problem in doing justice to the historical development of twentieth-century music is that of writing multicultural history. (SA J Musicology: 1999/2000 19/20: 1-14)

Barbara Mittler. Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China Since 1949. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997. 516 pp. ISBN 3-447-03920-5 (hardcover). This book, based upon the author's doctoral dissertation (University of Heidelberg), is an exploration of the relationship between politics and music in China by tracing the early efforts of Chinese composers who blend pentatonic Chinese melodies with Western harmony. Mittler also studies the more current Chinese attempts in bringing Chinese musical elements and aesthetics together with twentieth-century Western instrumental and compositional techniques. In so doing, she joins the scholars such as Peter Chang and Eric Lai1 in studying hybrid music; she is by no means a "solitary fighter" on "fragile ground" (p. 35). The title of the book arouses much interest. Yet, defining the scope as a study of new Chinese music contradicts what the book title suggests. In equating Chinese music with "new Chinese music," Mittler underrates its wide-ranging nature and musical development within the timeframe the book specifies. Many composers, whose works are explored here, come from major metropolitan areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong and Taipei. The majority of such composers has an academic conservatory background and has studied abroad. Many indeed studied with Zhou Wenzhong (Columbia University), one of the early Chinese composers of this form of hybrid music. Though Zhou's presence is acknowledged, the impact he had on the compositional styles of his students (who later become composers in the field) has not been evaluated. Neither have the socio-economic attributes of the composers been discussed. Homogenizing compositional styles in "all three parts of China" (China, Taiwan and Hong Kong) as the outcome of the "the forces of the market" (p. 266), underrates various socio-cultural and political factors at work in shaping this form of music. The book consists of four chapters; new Chinese music as a politicized language is the overarching theme of Chapters 1 to 3. In Chapter 1, Mittler presents the music history of Chinese composers who pondered the path Chinese music was to take after having experienced a century of Western imperialism. Here the author provides useful background information of such composers and their efforts for non-Chinese readers. In Chapter 2, Mittler raises the question: How political is new Chinese music? Claiming to investigate the "non-semantic" power of music as social critique, she focuses on "instrumental, absolute music" (p. 16). Paradoxically, the majority of musical works scrutinized, such as The Red Detachment of Women (1961), the first model revolutionary works during the Cultural Revolution, and Hong Kong composer Doming Lam's When the Winds Are Changing (1990), either have lyrical titles or well-defined programs. On another tangent, claiming The Red Detachment of Women as new Chinese music at one point and denouncing it as falling outside the "Chinese convention" because it is "modeled very closely on Western archetypes" at another, is an incongruent argument. Further, the claim that all music in China "is political" because of the non-semantic nature of absolute, instrumental music (p. 125) is a reduction of the complex relationships that exist between various musical works and the discretely different socio-political contexts from which they stem. In Chapter 3, Mittler raises the question: How new is China's new music? She aptly points out that new music composers draw heavily from tradition. Unfortunately, her shifting reference to and interpretation of China's "tradition" weaken both her argument and conclusion. Not only does she valorize "folk songs" as the articulations of peoples who live the "unchanging realities of the Chinese countryside" (p. 296, n. 130), but she also takes "folk" elements in musical compositions as immediate Chinese markers. …

Confronting a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it?, this collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons - rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays seek to push at the very boundaries of these traditional divisions within the study of music.

The Sangitasiroman i, "Crest-jewel of Music", is a major Sanskrit work on Indian musicology, composed in 1428 A.D. by scholars from all parts of India who participated in a musicological congress organized by Sultan Malika Sahi at Kad a (near Allahabad). Designed as a standard text-book on music the work summarizes and explains the opinions of older and contemporary authors. It deals with all the aspects of traditional Indian musicology, such as tone-system, scale, melody, rhythm, composition, variation and vocal technique. The complete English translation and the extensive introduction will familiarize the reader with the characteristic Indian concepts of music and the problems of their interpretation. For full information on the author's current projects in the field of Indian music, see www.sarasvatibhavan.com.

There are many obstacles to the complete acceptance of the sociology of music as an independent academic discipline within contemporary musicology. One such 121 obstacle is to be found in the remnants of the Romantic outlook which is on the whole opposed to sociological explanations of certain aspects of music, considering music as a private artistic world approachable only in the music itself. Although such an asociological conception is unjustified, in other cases opposition to the intrusion of sociology into the musical field is justifiable: when this, starting from sociological conceptions, reduces artistic facts to sociological phenomena, ignoring their intrinsic value. From the very outset, musical science has had to defend itself from the intrusion of other disciplines and the explanation of music by extra-musical factors. However a proper idea of musical sociology excludes all distortion of the true nature and essential qualities of the art; on the contrary we must emphasize the value of the sociology of music as revealing not only the sociological conditioning of music, but also the ability of music, through its artistic value, to outline the historical-social conditions which influence its creation and diffusion. There can be no doubt that sociological analysis reveals that many musical works have successfully survived the place and time of their composition precisely through artistic and human quality. The second basic obstacle to a fuller inclusion of musical sociology in musicology arises from the fact that the very conception of the sociology of music, of its subject, aim and method, is not yet sufficiently worked out. Justifiable reproaches which may be made to certain sociological approaches to music are abstractness, verbalism and philosophising, whereas the sociology of music is essentially a positive science and as such must be theoretically and methodically worked out so that it may as completely as possible concern itself with the positive analysis of concrete material. The third obstacle is seen in the fact that many musicologists neither in principle nor in theory include musical sociology in the field of musicological research (L. Hibberd, J. Chailley) or, if they admit the importance of the sociological approach, do not accept it as the subject of a special discipline. The problems of sociology of music were first stated by K. Bucher, J. Combarieu, M. Weber, and Ch. Lalo. By being included within musicology and especially within musical history the problems of sociology were gradually differentiated and ripened as a result of musicological discoveries and as a result of the development of sociology itself. Sociological elements can be traced in a number of works (notes 9 to 17) either in general terms for longer or shorter periods, mostly limited to individual countries or in particulars from a limited area. Very few works attempt, either theoretically or through positive research on the material, any initial synthesis or broader approach. Their common aim is mostly to justify the sociology of music as an independent theoretical and practical science. The special characteristic of the sociology of music in comparison with other branches of the sociology of art lies in the problems of the musicaL work of art as an expression of the milieu in which it was created and in which it is reproduced through performance. Its special quality lies in the fact that it must investigate an art which makes use of abstract means of expression. From thence emerges the difficulty of finding the connection between sound and social structures, especially on a deeper level from that which considers only the influence of the social status of the composer and of the immediate social commissioning of a work of art on its character and form. This obstacle must not however influence the establishing of the basic problems of the sociology of music which can be summarised as a programme of research, as follows: the social position of a musician in all its aspects; the effects of this position on the production, performance and diffusion of music; the social role of the musician 122 and his relations with other professions and other social groups; musical professionalism and amateurism; the influence of social life on music and vice-versa in different civilizations, social systems, nations, social classes and layers; the social functions of music and their variations according to social milieux; the musical public : its social formation, degree of cohesion, possible organization, needs, demands and reactions; forms, means, frequency and duration of performance and diffusion of a work in society; relations between folk music and serious music as the expression of different social milieux; musical tendencies, groups and schools in different civilizations, social milieux and nations; on the same level: musical education of amateurs and professionals; asthetic conceptions of music with musicians, aesthetes and philosophers as well as musical taste and evaluation by the public in different civilizations, social systems, nations, social classes and layers. The field of research and the positively scientific character of the problems of musical sociology justify its inclusion within the framework of musicology.