This dissertation explores how the language of regional songs fashioned the popular appeal of the city of Suzhou as the economic and cultural center of early modern China. Located in the Lower Yangzi Delta at the crossroads of domestic and global commerce, Suzhou became a hub for the circulation of tantalizing words heard and read across urban spaces, including the publishing industry, entertainment quarters, and performance venues at the turn of the seventeenth century. Suzhou-based polymathic editor Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) navigated this marketplace to set the trends. His most experimental publication was Mountain Songs (Shan'ge 山歌, ca. 1610s). By pushing the boundaries of writing norms, he molded local Wu speech (Wuyu 吳語, or Wu dialect)—the everyday language prevalently used by contemporaneous denizens in rural and urban communities of the greater Suzhou area—into the print medium for transmitting hundreds of racy regional songs in vogue. Untangling the convoluted reception history of Mountain Songs, this dissertation revises received understandings of its sensational language. To Qing Confucian moralists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book's invitation to erotic indulgence indicated local decadence and unruliness, a threat to textual authority that led to its own oblivion. By contrast, enlightenment-minded intellectuals in the early twentieth century glorified the colorful use of the local tongue in the rediscovered songbook as an index of transcendental expressivity. They read the spontaneous voices of the repressed people into the newly defined "folksongs" in line with a Romantic teleology of oral supremacy. To rectify the dualism of textual imitation and oral authenticity, this dissertation offers a revisionist account of the fabric and affect of Mountain Songs on the local scene. Rather than taking local Wu language as a given, it places the language's constitutive role in conveying the sensorium of Suzhou at the center of analysis. Its argument is that entrepreneurial editor Feng Menglong mobilized the regional language of Wu as the cornerstone of a new fashion system in the circuits of corporeal pleasures across media, which related print to performance and amusement spaces in and out of the city. Feng did this by a creative deployment of a spectrum of linguistic registers to mediate between local cultural resources and established literary models. Mountain Songs showcased artful verbal play that translated the bodily sensations of everyday labor and desires for consumer goods into intermedial fun and games. Feng thus reinvented the song genre by rendering intelligible the lifeworld of local men and women and their embodied experiences in a sensuously playful manner that renegotiated scholarly authority. His reinvention contributed to the allure of Suzhou as a fashionable brand that appealed to middlebrow audiences and consumers along the trade routes on land and waterways leading to the rest of the empire and beyond. As such, this dissertation brings the ephemera of Wu language back to the study of literature, advancing the localist turn historiography in dialogue with book history, media studies, urban history, and fashion history/material culture.

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

According to a recent United Nations report, China's population of 1.4 billion represents 19% of the world's entire population of 7.6 billion. As the distance between east and west contracts in business, so too do the arts. This dissertation focuses on six selected contemporary Chinese art songs composed by Nan-Chang Chien. By providing the references of musical facts, synopsis of the poems, word-for-word translation, IPA transcription, poetic translation, and interpretive and performance guides, singers and pianists will have an overall understanding and detailed directions for learning the Chinese language and Chinese art songs. This dissertation also provides the foundation and model for further exploration and research into Chinese art sing literature by scholars in the west.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

Firstly, while the Yao people inhabit in wide geographic regions stretching across Southern China and South East Asia, even overseas, the Paiyao, a branch of the Yao who inhabits only in the Liannan district of the Guangdong province, is unique not only in their geographical inhabitancy but also cultural characteristics. / Secondly, while Yao people's Getang ritual is a wide spread ritual practice with local variations, there has not been any in-depth study on the Getang ritual of the Paiyao people. / The significance of this study are Three-fold. / The thesis aims to study the soundscape of Paiyao ethnic nationality's "Getang Ritual" in Guangdong Province. / Thirdly, with a musicological concern, this thesis approaches its subject from the perspective of "soundscape of the ritual enactment", (Tsao Penyeh 2006: 81) and aspires to reach an understanding of the wider meaning of the Getang ritual among the Paiyao people and their society. / This study consists of the following three processes: (1) Fieldwork to investigate and compile ethnographic texts from both the researcher's observation and insiders' oral narrations and relating to actions in the makings of the ritual soundscape. (2) Analysis of the ritual "sounds", in terms of themselves and their extra-musical factors. (3) Interpretation of the meaning of ritual sounds and their soundscape of Paiyao's Getang ritual within the framework of the belief system that consists of a trinity of sounds and soundscape, ritual enactment and belief. / This thesis has seven chapters, with its theoretical and methodological reverences indebted to ritual studies by Tsao Penyeh (his research of ritual and ritual soundscape of China's belief systems) and Clifford Geertz (his many writings on anthropological theory and methodology, as well as his study of "reinterpretation to other's interpretation"). / 周凱模. / Adviser: Pen-Yeh (Poon-Yee) Tsao. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 2945. / Thesis (doctoral)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-317) and indexes. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Zhou Kaimo.

English, Italian, French, German, and Russian songs often appear in the repertoire of Western singers, but only a few singers try to sing Chinese songs. Chinese songs have a wealth of musical material uninterrupted for nearly 10,000 years. However, the lack of clear and correct International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) makes non-Chinese singers confused and unable to pronounce Chinese accurately. In this study, I have used the IPA that singers are familiar with to change the old version of Chinese IPA, which applied many phonetic transcriptions that are not included in the Western phonetic alphabet and even wrong phonetics. The new version Chinese IPA I created solves the problem of the old version. To demonstrate the practicality of this new IPA version, I have then used this revised IPA in six songs by Zaiyi Lu, who is one of the most outstanding contemporary Chinese composers. His vocal music works are among the finest works of contemporary Chinese art songs. I added Chinese pinyin to the song translation, given a performance guide to introduce the songs' background, IPA with word-by-word translation, poetic translation, singing skills, and emotional expression for both singers and pianists. This study developed a useful tool (new version of Chinese IPA) for western singers, introducing Chinese songs to singers worldwide, giving future scholars more ideas, allowing people to feel the charm of East Asian art, and enriching the repertoire.

Dead water : song cycle for tenor and piano -- Shan shui : for string quartet -- Kuang fu : for SSAAATTBB and yangqin -- If life is unknown : for wind quintet -- Symphony II : Marrison for chamber orchestra, male choir, erhu and zheng -- Jazzy illusion of a Chinaman : for clarinet/bass clarinet, piano/electric keyboard, electric guitar, drum set, cello and double bass -- Liao Zhai : Chinese strange tale for recorders , percussions, soprano, tenor and baritone -- A madman's diary : piano solo work. / Tam, Chin Fai. / Thesis (D.Mus.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 391-392). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong , [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; includes in Chinese.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Chinese