A workshop led by Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis at the Music of Asian America Festival in Philadelphia in November, 2018
Upcoming Events
Sunday, February 7, 2021, 4:00-5:30pm EST: “Three Generations of Asian American Symphonic Music.” Pioneer Valley Symphony Discovery Series (Virtual). Ticket available will be available soon at: https://www.pvsoc.org/discovery-series.
In this presentation, Nancy Rao and Eric Hung will explore Asian American composers of symphonic music since the 1950s, and put their lives and careers in the context of Asian American history and U.S. immigration history. They will guide the audience through Paul Chihara’s Forest Music (1969), Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 (1993), and Reena Esmail’s Black Iris (#metoo) (2018).
February 12-14, 2021, Exact Time TBA. “Chronicling Trauma Beyond Pain: Two Asian American Musicians Work to Document Fuller Lives” with Eric Hung. Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Virtual Conference hosted by Indiana University).
Trauma studies scholars often have a propensity to emphasize pain in their writings. This is understandable, given the nature of available archival sources and some scholars’ appeal for action, but it is also problematic. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang wrote in “R-Words: Refusing Research” (2014), “Academe’s demonstrated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability.” This paper examines how works by Asian American musicians Zain Alam and Bochan Huy explore trauma beyond pain.
Thursday, February 25, 2021, 4:30-6:00pm EST. “Beyond Tokenism: A Music History Redo” with Jacky Avila, Joy Doan, Kunio Hara, Jasmine Henry, and Eric Hung. Part of Binghamton University Department of Music’s “White Supremacy and Antiracism in the Music Academy Series. Details TBA.
Friday, March 11-Sunday, March 13, 2021, Exact Time TBA. “Foregrounding Stories of Citizenship in Public History” with Patrice Green, Eric Hung, Mandi Magnuson-Hung and Andrew Urban. National Council of Public History Annual Conference (virtual).
At its most formal, citizenship is a status that a state grants to certain subjects to denote membership and belonging. However, state-granted citizenship often bears very little resemblance to membership and belonging in everyday life. This working group aims to help public historians discuss citizenship-related issues that recent events have brought forward, and create nuanced and impactful exhibits, programs, educational materials and staff training plans. We aim to produce a crowdsourced annotated #Citizenship syllabus and a podcast series featuring interviews with practitioners and theorists who are working on public history projects that deal with citizenship.
Monday, March 22, 2021, 3:00-4:30pm EST. “Who’s An Immigrant? A Podcast Series” with Eric Hung. Part of the Sound and Media Working Group of the Central New York Humanities Corridor Lecture Series. Details TBA.
June 9-12, 2021, Exact Time TBA. “Performing Asian American Liminal Citizenship: Zain Alam’s ‘Lavaan’ and Jason Chu’s ‘This Is Asian America’” with Eric Hung. Society for American Music Virtual Conference.
I examine two music videos that perform Asian Americans’ liminal citizenship, and discuss the ethical issues they raise about appropriation and the performance of trauma. Zain Alam’s “Lavaan” juxtaposes and overlays home videos of the Sikh-white Dhillonn family from 1959 to 1971 with clips of television news stories about anti-Sikh violence. Its soundtrack combines the Sikh “Lavaan” chant—sung in a way that fits Western harmonies and rhythms—and Alam’s original electronic music. Together, they reveal the family’s struggles to determine the extent to which they should preserve Sikh traditions, assimilate, create new hybridities, and/or resist. Inspired by Childish Gambino, rapper Jason Chu and Tow-Arboleda Films’ “This is Asian America” seeks to help Asian American communities open conversations about the pain that is silenced by Asian’s “honorary whiteness,” symbolized by the violin and the “classical”-sounding hook. Meanwhile, the rapped verses on how the “model minority myth” exacerbates self-harm, domestic violence and income disparities point to the need for Asians to speak up and form solidarities with other BIPoCs.
Previous Events
Sunday, November 8, 2020, 3:00-4:30pm EST and Monday, November 9, 2020, 12:45-2:00pm EST: “From a Midwest City to Chinatowns and Broadway: The Kim Loo Sisters in the Context of Chinese American History in the Early 20th Century” with Leslie Li and Eric Hung. Sunday’s presentation was jointly presented by the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, the 1882 Foundation, and the Music of Asian America Research Center. Monday’s presentation was a part of the Hartt Music History Forum. (Link to Video of the November 8 presentation.)
Daughters of a Chinese “paper son” and a Polish seamstress, the Kim Loo Sisters broke through the bamboo ceiling to perform first in kiddie revues in and around their hometown of Minneapolis, then on vaudeville and Chop Suey circuits around the country, and finally on the Broadway stage and Hollywood screen where they shared top billing with Frank Sinatra, The Three Stooges, Ann Miller and Jackie Gleason. When one of the sisters left the act to marry the son of the vice president of China and witnessed the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) first-hand, her sisters — dubbed “the Chinese Andrews Sisters” — carried on as a trio and joined the USO to entertain American and Allied troops stationed in Europe during World War II. This presentation tells the story of the “Kimmies,” and reveals that there is a lot more to early 20th-century Chinese American society beyond Chinatowns, bachelor societies, and exclusion.
Sunday, October 11, 2020, 2:00-4:00pm EST: “Finding the Space and the Coalitions for Imagination” with Eric Hung. Project Spectrum’s 2020 Symposium “Diversifying Music Academia: Building the Coalition.”
In this presentation, Eric Hung discusses the importance of organizations like the Music of Asian America Research Center for diversifying music academia. He argues that, unless there are organizations accomplishing objectives that make academia jealous, music academia will not change.
Saturday, October 10, 2020, 2:15-2:45pm EST: “Intercultural Music: Fusion, Appreciation, or Appropriation?” with Eric Hung. College Music Society Virtual Conference.
In this lecture-recital, Eric Hung discusses three theories of cultural appropriation and applies them to three piano works that combine Asian and Western Classical elements.
Saturday, October 10, 2020, 11:00am-12:00pm EST: “Chronicling Trauma Beyond Pain: Two Asian American Musicians Work to Document Fuller Lives” with Eric Hung. American Musicological Society Capital Chapter Fall Meeting.
Trauma studies scholars often have a propensity to emphasize pain in their writings. This is understandable, given the nature of available archival sources and some scholars’ appeal for action, but it is also problematic. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang wrote in “R-Words: Refusing Research” (2014), “Academe’s demonstrated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability.” This paper examines how works by Asian American musicians Zain Alam and Bochan Huy explore trauma beyond pain.
Thursday, July 14, 2020, 1:30-3:30pm CDT: “Effective Strategies to Promote Inclusion and Equity in Public Musicology.” Society for American Music Virtual Conference.
This session began with four short presentations. In “Towards Active Engagement and Relevance in Public Musicology,” Mandi Magnuson-Hung discusses how usable pasts and relevance are key concepts in creating an effective social justice-oriented public musicology. In “Asian American Women Composers and Digital Sanctuary: A Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon,” Jennifer C.H.J. Wilson provided tips and reflected on her experience incorporating the world’s most used encyclopedia in her graduate seminar. In “Podcasting for Greater Inclusion and Equity,” Eric Hung discussed the current podcasting landscape, and strategies for creating narratives. Then, in “Performing Collective Memory in Refugee Songs,” Brian V. Sengdala explored the ethics of public musicology in traumatic histories, and discussed how “public” strategies are useful within families. After the presentations, attendees broke into three break-out rooms where they can dig deeper into one of the tools discussed in the presentations.
Saturday, July 11, 2020, 2:00-3:30pm EDT: Asian American Entertainment in the Exclusion Era. Virtual lecture presented by Alexandria Library, VA.
Nancy Yunhwa Rao and Eric Hung, presenters. Andrea Castillo, host. Between 1875 and 1943, federal, state and municipal governments severely restricted immigration from Asia, and barred many Asians from citizenship, land ownership and numerous occupations. The result is the development of largely bachelor ethnic enclaves. This program, co-sponsored by 1882 Foundation, explores how Asian Americans of this period entertained themselves, and what the shows they produced say about their efforts to assimilate, preserve heritage cultures, and form new “Asian American” hybrids.
MAARC Virtual Story Circles (Recordings forthcoming)
- Friday, May 15, 2020, 8:00-9:15pm EDT
- Friday, May 22, 2020, 8:00-9:15pm EDT
- Friday, May 29, 2020, 8:00-9:15pm EDT
On Friday evenings–May 15/22/29–at 8pm EDT/5pm PDT, panels of diverse Asian American musicians will share stories about their lives, family histories, music and experiences of race! The entire series will be available via Facebook Live on this page!
Here are the lineups:
May 15: Joe X. Jiang, Tiffany Lytle, Tricia Park, Kim Nguyen Tran
May 22: Zain Alam, Loren Kajikawa, Ben Kono, Amanda Su
May 29: Juhi Bansal, Chi-Sun Chan, Umi Hsu, Alex Shaw
We will introduce each panelist fully on our page in the next couple of weeks!
Thursday and Friday, April 23 and 24, 2020, 4:00-4:40pm EDT: Music Scholarship at a Distance, Resource page available at: https://asianamericanmusic.org/msaad.
In a workshop entitled “Effective Strategies to Promote Inclusion and Equity in Public Musicology,” Eric Hung, Mandi Magnuson-Hung and Jennifer Wilson will lead attendees on how to create programs that are relevant, how to make a podcast, and how to use Wikipedia effectively.
Thursday, March 19, 2020, National Council of Public History Virtual Conference, “poster” available at: https://asianamericanmusic.org/ncph.
Eric Hung and Mandi Magnuson-Hung will present a poster entitled “Using Music in Public History: Two Initiatives @ The Music of Asian America Research Center.” The poster will discuss MAARC’s podcast and DAACME initiatives.
Sunday, March 8, 2020, 12:00-12:45pm: College Music Society Northeast Composers’ Concert, Temple University, Klein Hall
Eric Hung performs Philadelphia-based Taiwanese American composer Ke-Chia Chen’s To An Isolated Island.
Thursday, January 16, 2020, 6:30-8:30pm: Asian Musical Voices of America, Asian American Writers Workshop
MAARC co-sponsored this pioneering event about Asian American Western classical musicians. Eric Hung moderated the panel consisting of Hyeyung Yoon (event’s chief organizer), Charlton Lee, Tricia Park, Anjna Swaminathan, Joseph Lin and Monique Truong.
Saturday, November 16, 2019, 11:00am-12:30pm: Appropriators or Originators: APIs, Hip-Hop, and Authenticity. Asian Arts Initiative. (Link to video of event.)
In a lecture co-sponsored by the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival and the Music of Asian America Research Center, Chinese American rapper jason chu discusses why cultural interchange between Asian American and Hip-Hop communities are so hard to discuss, and how Asian Americans might be able to enter Hip-Hop culture without objectifying it.
Sunday, November 10, 2019, 10:00-11:00am: Documenting Asian American Community Music Ensembles, University of Pennsylvania, Irvine Building (part of Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival)
Eric Hung, Victoria Huynh and Joe X. Jiang discuss the early results of MAARC’s “Documenting Asian American Community Music Ensembles” initiative.
Friday, October 25, 2019, 4:30-5:00pm: Hearing Hồ Xuân Hương Through a Musical Lens in the 21st Century, College Music Society National Conference, Hyatt Regency Louisville (KY), Keeneland Room
Mezzo-soprano Amy Hartsough and Eric Hung will present a lecture-recital about P.Q. Phan’s “Spring Confessions,” which is based on the poetry of early 19th-century Vietnam woman poet Hồ Xuân Hương.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019, 9:00-10:15am: Transforming Archives Through Acts of Repair, Society for American Archivists Annual Meeting, JW Marriott Austin
Eric Hung will discuss how MAARC’s projects repair the archival record through collecting, disseminating and doing research on materials related to Asian American music-making. He will also discuss how archives can use music more effectively in archival community engagement.
Talk Story: Eric Hung will give a presentation entitled “Songs of Chinese American Labor” in Washington DC on June 30
Sunday, June 30, 2019, 2:00-4:00pm: Songs of Chinese American Labor
I Street Conference Center, 600 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001
A part of the Talk Story series sponsored by the 1882 Foundation
Free Admission
Eric Hung will give a participatory lecture about songs Chinese American musicians have created about Chinese American labor on the railroads, in plantations, in automotive factories, and in restaurants.
Saturday, April 27, 2019, 8:15-9:45am: Association for Asian American Studies
Madison Concourse Hotel, Conference Room 1
MAARC has organized a panel entitled “The Music of Asian America Research Center: Creating Infrastructure for Resistance through Music.” . The panel includes talks by three of MAARC’s Board Members and its Executive Director:
- Byron Au Yong, “Asian Men in the Media, What Americans Fear, and Ways Out of Oppression”
- Eric Hung, “Teaching the History and Relevance of Asian American Labor through Music”
- Jennifer Jones Wilson, “Creating Sanctuary through a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon: Asian American Women Composers and Digital Memory”
- Nancy Rao, “Intertwined Histories of Asian Americans in Opera”
Friday, April 12, 2019, 11:15am-1:15pm: “Only You and Your Ghost Will Know: Music, Death, and Afterlife”
Museum of Pop Culture (Seattle), Sky Church
MAARC’s Executive Director Eric Hung participated in a roundtable entitled “Raise Your Voice: Music and Mass Violence.” He discussed the ways that digital archives about music can help to forward conversations about both anti-Asian violence and mass violence perpetrated by Asians in the United States.
Music of Asian America @ PAAFF 2018
Music of Asian America Festival, Philadelphia, November 2018
MAARC organized and co-hosted this three-day conference of paper presentations, workshops and concerts.
Concerts of Asian and Asian American Music, Madison, October 2018
- Friday, October 26, 12:00-1:00pm
- Sunday, October 28, 2:00-3:30pm,
Mezzo-soprano Amy Hartsough and Eric Hung will perform works by Alice Ho, P.Q. Phan, Gao Ping, and Toru Takemitsu.