内容説明
Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories and classical music performance competitions. In the first book on the subject, Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at age 3. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households. Against this historical backdrop, Yoshihara interviews Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan and Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be.
From Publishers Weekly
An associate professor at the University of Hawaii, Yoshihara (
Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism) delivers a comprehensive cultural, historical and ethnographic study of Asians and Asian-Americans who pursue Western classical music in the United States. At age three, she began piano lessons in Japan. After moving to California at 11, she started more rigorous musical training. Passing up the conservatory, she chose to major in American studies at the University of Tokyo, eventually returning to the U.S. as an academic. This study is the result of her in-depth interviews with 70 orchestra members, soloists and university and conservatory faculty, as well as her own experiences of master classes, auditions, a recording session, workshops and some 100 concerts. Describing Asian musicians' personal histories, roots, gender dynamics, experiences and goals, she dispels common misconceptions, such as the assumption that Asians have a natural affinity for Asian music. Yoshihara's scholarly background and musicianship merge in this probing, authoritative survey. The extensive bibliography lists sources in both English and Japanese. 18 b&w illus. not seen by
PW.
(Oct. 28) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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