Sound Check! A Festival of Asian American Music, Sound, and Scholarship

Organized by the Music of Asian America Research Center

In partnership with Wing Luke Museum

Onsite at Wing Luke Museum, Seattle, WA & On Zoom, April 27-29, 2024

On Zoom on May 11, 2024

 

Festival Home | Schedule | Registration & Tickets | Invited Artists

 

Research Presentation Abstracts and Bios

 

Session #1: Afterlifes of the Japanese American Incarceration

Lei X Ouyang (she/her/hers), Swarthmore College
Kishi Bashi’s Omoiyari: Music, Memory, and Solidarity

In this lightning talk I will consider how Kishi Bashi’s 2022 film and 2019 album, Omoiyari, serve as a contemporary reminder of the potential that cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarity has to offer for communities fighting historic and ongoing oppression and injustice. The ten-track album, Omoiyari, meaning “compassion” in Japanese, is based on stories Kishi Bashi heard from Japanese Americans and their families about their experiences of incarceration during World War II and the continued legacies today. The 2022 film is a beautiful and moving glimpse into Kishi Bashi’s journey meeting with the survivors and their families and how their stories serve as musical inspiration for the album as well as his own reflections as a second generation Japanese American. Thinking about the roots of pan-ethnic and pan-racial solidarity in the Asian American movement, I consider how these origins are important reminders of the potential for cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarity in contemporary, ongoing, and future movements.

Lei X Ouyang is Associate Professor and Chair of Music, and Director of Asian American Studies at Swarthmore College where she co-directs the Chinese Music Ensemble and teaches ethnomusicology courses centering East Asia, Asian America, race and racism, politics, and memory. She previously taught at Skidmore College where she co-founded a social justice program, Intergroup Relations, and she recently co-founded the Tri-College Asian American Studies program across three Philadelphia area campuses. Her book Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution was published in 2022 and she was honored to join the Community Advisory Committee for the Sound Check! exhibit.

Nathan Huxtable (he/him), University of California, Riverside
Marking Model Minority Time: The Politics of Asian American Military Music in Postwar Seattle

This presentation examines the shifting politics of Japanese American (JA) military music in Seattle following World War II. Founded in 1955, the Japanese Buddhist Church Troop 252 Boy Scout Drum & Bugle Corps became a staple of the city’s JA community by playing militaristic music in local parades and festivals. During this time, observers from JA political organizations positioned the corps as a symbol of model youth civics and post-incarceration patriotism. In 1966, however, the ensemble left the church and reformed as the co-ed Seattle Imperials. Over the next two decades, the group transformed into a racially integrated competition corps, playing contemporary drum corps arrangements on national tours. To date, scholars within Ethnic Studies (e.g., Wu 2014; Yeh 2013) and music studies (e.g., Wong 2019; Wang 2015) have examined the origins of the Model Minority Myth (MMM) and how sound might challenge this homogenizing, racialized discourse. This paper extends this research by asking how and why Asian Americans have used music—particularly militaristic US-American music—to navigate the shifting terms of this discourse across Asian American history. Here, I posit that “marking time” (the practice of marching in place at a steady tempo) offers a framework for theorizing the dynamic political, historical, and temporal meanings of militaristic JA music-making. Drawing from newspaper records, oral history interviews, and audiovisual materials, I argue that the Imperials “marked model minority time” by turning their performance practices away from assimilationist postwar MMM politics and towards a coalitional ethos mirroring the nascent Asian American Movement.

Nathan Huxtable (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside, where he conducts research as a Provost Fellowship recipient. Nathan’s research areas include historical ethnomusicology, oral history, and American music studies, and his dissertation research examines the relationships between military music-making and Asian American identity in the US-American drum and bugle corps scene. He is a scholar-practitioner within US drum corps circles, where he has worked as a performer and educator since 2010.

Noriko Manabe (she/her), Indiana University
Asian American Rap in a Time of Anti-Asian Racism

While Asian American hip-hop artists have been successful as DJs or dancers, they have historically been less visible as rappers. Nonetheless, a few Asian American rappers have engaged in political material, particularly in the spate of anti-Asian violence.

This paper explores the ways in which Asian American interracial relationships and politics are expressed in hip hop. Drawing from Wang, Hisama, Wong, Kajikawa, Ho and Mullen, and Kim, I first consider the reasons, including racial triangulation, which tend to exclude Asian American rappers from the mainstream music industry, as well as the ways in which interracial tension and fascination are played out in hip hop.

I then explore Asian American rap addressing two events: Japanese-American internment during World War II and #StopAsianHate, the movement against anti-Asian violence in the wake of the pandemic.

Considering theories of storytelling (e.g., Jackson, Fernandes), I analyze tracks on Japanese internment by Japanese-American rappers Key Kool and Mike Shinoda, in which the rappers recount their grandfathers’ experiences as internees and bear witness to an often-neglected aspect of US history. I use semiotics and intertextual methods to analyze the lyrics, music, and visuals of the many songs that reference #StopAsianHate. Combined with the musicians’ activities at rallies, performances, interviews, and social media, this music teaches the history of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States, debunks Asian American stereotypes, and promotes interracial unity. A soundtrack to the discourse, these tracks provide an outlet for the expression of “minor feelings” (Hong) and a tool for political mobilization.

Noriko Manabe is professor of music theory at Indiana University, with affiliations in ethnomusicology and East Asian Studies. She researches music in social movements and popular music. Her monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima, won prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. From the Society for Music Theory, she won publication awards for her article on Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” and her video on Kuwata Keisuke’s “Abe Road.” She is editor of 33-1/3 Japan and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott).

Session #2: Music and Home

Maako Shiratori (She/her/hers)
Making Jappalachian Music: An Asian Diaspora Community from the Mountains

Historians documented thriving communities in Japan where people have enjoyed playing American vernacular music such as Country, Bluegrass, and Appalachian Old-Time Music, since the end of the Pacific War. However, these narratives emphasized the Japanese musicians’ temporal “pilgrimages back to America, to the birthplace of the music” and ignored Jappalachian musicians’ negotiations with American folk music by emphasizing the one-way distribution from America to Japan. These scholarships overlooked trans-pacific contamination of U.S. Southern cultures with Asian Americans’ practices. Asian Appalachian musicians are left behind from recent projects on music of multi-cultural America such as (another music legacy of the U.S. bases) Filipino/Japanese jazz on the coastal areas, Hawaiian guitar, or Japanese Californians’ traditional Taiko and Shakuhachi. To address this erasure of Asian diaspora music communities in Appalachia, I will share my exploration of making a community to keep playing music as a Jappalachian fiddler. How could we negotiate with Appalachian music and Japanese music to claim one’s own aesthetic space in America? What are the motivations and struggles of Japanese immigrants to continue music? I introduce my collaborative oral history project with fellow Jappalachian musicians, which highlights complex differences and connections between American and Japanese bluegrass communities related to authenticity and participatory characters. The presentation includes my performance of fiddle tunes which I learned from my mentors in western North Carolina. This will be the first study of Asian music traditions in Appalachian and contribute to the debate of community-based American vernacular music’s enactment by reclaiming accessibility.

Maako Shiratori is a scholar-artist who investigates the resonances of Japanese and Appalachian vernacular cultures. Following her undergraduate degree in Japan she completed an MA in Appalachian studies at Appalachian State University. A classically trained violinist, she has immersed herself as a performer in the Appalachian fiddle tradition which allowed her to develop relationships with her research collaborators. Her work speaks to Asian diasporic communities in the eastern US, a demographic that has been neglected by folklore studies. She continues her work in the ethnomusicology PhD program at Duke University, especially in North Carolina, where she has developed her field research.

Noah Rosen (he/him/his), Columbia University
Specters of Remittance: Composing the Balikbayan in Original Pilipino Music (OPM)

Within the rock and pop-style songs of Original Pilipino Music (OPM), the representation of Balikbayans has become a recurring lyrical subject from a uniquely Philippine point of view. An amalgamation of the Tagalog words balik, meaning “to return,” and bayan, meaning “country,” the term is an identity marker for migrant Filipino workers who are connected to their home country through the remittances they send back to their families in the Philippines. While some scholars have focused on the labor communities that balikbayans have formed internationally, including their positionality within the larger Asian American tapestry, their status and presence (or lack thereof) within the Philippines remains largely absent in existent scholarship. To this end, OPM songs that detail these emigrant friends and family members begin to broadly underscore how they are regarded by those in the homeland in ways both endearing and contentious.

This talk explores how Balikbayans become musically represented in the lifeworlds of Filipinos in the Philippines despite their physical absence from society. Songs such as “Balikbayan Box” (1998) by Eraserheads and “Dear Kuya” (2006) by Sugarfree establish moods and intimacies that resonate with Filipino attitudes towards those working abroad whose affective presence is felt within a liminal state of returning that is never fully realized. I use these songs to analyze the transnational economic realities that impact Filipino relationships and identity formations globally, and argue that OPM brings new focus within this diasporic dynamic to those who remain in the Philippines.

Noah Rosen is an ethnomusicology PhD student at Columbia University. Originally from Berkeley, California, he holds a BM in jazz studies and an MA in interdisciplinary studies/musicology from New York University (2018, 2020), and an MA in ethnomusicology from Columbia University (2022). His research focuses on transpacific sonic pathways across the Philippine diaspora, theories of affect and belonging in Asian American communities, and dynamics of Filipino identity in jazz and popular music.

Session #3: Musical Memories

Ky Nam Nguyen, Florida State University
The Compositional Techniques of “A Vietnamese Mother’s Letter to Nixon for Mezzo-Soprano, Chamber Ensemble, and Live Electronics”

“A Vietnamese Mother’s Letter to Nixon” (for Mezzo-Soprano, Chamber Ensemble, and Live Electronics) was premiered on November 17 at Florida State University by the Polymorphia New Music Ensemble.

This composition is based on the letter of Mrs. Le Thi Anh to President Nixon as she was pleading for an investigation into the tragic death of her son, Nguyen Thai Binh, who graduated as an honors student from the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1972. Binh’s anti-war activities during his time in the US have led him to a tragic death in Vietnam, as he was accused of being an “air pirate” and shot to death with five bullets in the chest. While that accusation is still highly controversial, Nguyen Thai Binh’s legacy remains a significant, authentic Vietnamese voice amidst the American students’ peace movements.

Combining Western contemporary techniques with elements from Vietnamese language and music, I portray Mrs. Le Thi Anh’s emotional spectrum within the letter. The composition encompasses the diplomatic formalities, the maternal love, pain, indignation, and the burning questions for Nixon regarding the suspicious circumstance of her son’s murder. This work also conveys the mother’s earnest yearning for truth and justice.

By analyzing the compositional techniques, the rehearsal process, and the overall performance experience, I would provide an insight into how sounds enhance the emotional impact of the texts on both performers and audiences.

Ky Nam Nguyen (b. 1996) is a DMA student in Music Composition at Florida State University. The harmonious blend of her Vietnamese heritage and Western classical music is always central theme of her works, which have been performed and conducted by internationally acclaimed musicians such as Liliya Ugay, Julia Davids, Robert Kyr, Popebama Duo, and many more. Through various compositional techniques, Nguyen’s music is a reflection of her Vietnamese soul, inspired by the inflections of her mother tongue, the transparent tones of the Buddhist temple bells, and stories about the pain and joy of her homeland.

Josh Yoon, Expedia Group
55 Years of North American Taiko

Since 1968, the rapid expansion of North American taiko, or the Japanese word for drum, artform has largely been driven by the efforts of sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans. While recent scholarly work has made considerable strides towards elucidating how taiko has played a role in addressing identity politics, challenging gender roles, and reclaiming Asian American cultural heritage, there is still a gap in our understanding of how this community of taiko practitioners has grown from a holistic vantage point. To this end, I adopt a set of analytical methods that capture the story of how the taiko artform has evolved in North America through several aims. The first aim is to develop a comprehensive time-series map that displays when and where taiko ensembles formed over its rich 55-year history. The second aim further examines the impact the original ensembles had on subsequent groups that were later founded. The final aim is to reveal significant factors that were instrumental in sustaining the taiko community over the course of decades using a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data. One highlight is a model of symbiosis between collegiate and community-based taiko groups which has been ongoing over the past 30 years. I hope to offer novel insights into the diverse range of social dynamics that are at play within the taiko network and showcase the power of digital tools in enhancing visibility for a community of artists that are looking for new opportunities to share and advance their own artform.

Josh Yoon is currently a Data Scientist at Expedia Group and was previously a Senior Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. He received his PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University and a BS in Physics from Caltech. Josh previously played with Stanford Taiko (2013-17) while attending graduate school and Seattle Kokon Taiko (2023-24). He also most recently served as a Board Member (2021-23) of the Taiko Community Alliance (TCA) and continues to volunteer in various committees. Josh resides in Seattle, Washington.

A Conversation with Theo Feng

Theo Feng has been one of the most indefatigable promoters of Asian American musicians over the past half century.  From 1980 to 1995, he produced and hosted Gold Mountain, a hour-long weekly Asian American radio show in Washington DC on WPFW 89.3 FM.  It covered Asian American public affairs and played music by Asian Americans.  Since 1996, he has run a music calendar and website that covered contemporary music by Asian Americans and contemporary music influenced by Asia.  In a 1990 article about Gold Mountain in The Washington Post, Valerie Chow Bush wrote, “Wherever there is a gathering of Asian Americans — an Asian journalists’ association conference in New York or a performance of Hawaiian plays in Washington — Feng is there.”  Thirty-four years later, that is still true.  In this conversation, Feng will talk to Eric Hung about his initial interests in Asian American music-making, how he discovered Asian American musicians, the goals of his radio show and website, and his most memorable encounters with Asian American musicians.  He will also discuss four musicians who he thinks has been unfairly neglected.

Session #4: Popular Music

Peng Liu (he/him), Truman State University
Revisiting Asian American Popular Music in the 1970s through a Study of Three Albums

In 2016, Peter Horikoshi, a former member of Asian American band Yokohama, California, re-released the band’s 1977 album Yokohama, California, supplemented with several additional tracks recorded from the same year. Three years later, Horikoshi released another two albums featuring a 1979 live concert of two Asian American singer-songwriters Philip Kan Gotanda and Charlie Chin, organized by the Japanese Arts and Media. These albums, accompanied by informative liner notes, provide not only a rare listening journey into the past voices of Asian American musicians but also a vital resource for re-examining the historiography of Asian American popular music in the 1970s.

Through a musical, cultural, and historical analysis of over 40 songs featuring nine Asian American musicians in these albums, this paper reveals a rich tapestry of themes and musical styles present in these works. While some songs, especially those from Yokohama, California, echo the political fervor of the Asian American movement during the era by emphasizing anti-war sentiments, social injustice, racial oppression, and inter-Asian and cross-racial solidarity, others present a less politicized front, delving into personal and aesthetic explorations, as seen in Charlie Chin’s romantic ballads and Philip Gotanda’s evocative and poetic lyricism coupled with elaborate music-making beyond the folk music style. Recognizing the diverse themes and musical styles within these underexplored songs, this paper broadens scholarly discourse on Asian American popular music in the 1970s (Wang, 2001) and embraces a pluralistic approach to understanding Asian American music-making within this historically marked decade for the community.

Peng Liu is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Truman State University. His research focuses on piano music and performance culture, women musicians, and Asian American music and identity politics. His writings have appeared in The Journal of Musicology, Notes (The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association), and Journal of Central Conservatory of Music. He has regularly presented his work at regional, national, and international refereed conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the International Conference on Women’s Work in Music, and Music of Asian America Conference.

Aydin Quach (he/they), University of British Columbia
Emotional Dance Music: Race, Capitalism, and Techno-Orientalism in Asian American Consumption of Electronic Dance Music

Based on preliminary ethnographic and autoethnographic field research, this paper is an exploratory attempt at trying to understand the consumption of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) by Asian North Americans in the 2020s. Drawing from Transpacific Studies, Performance Studies, and Cultural Theory, this paper argues that the subgenre of EDM known as Melodic Dubstep represents a sonic space for understanding why many Asian North Americans call the genre “Asian North American Music.” This stands in opposition to the fact that most of the EDM artists Asian North Americans listen to are White and the history of EDM stems from queer Black and Latinx communities. In conclusion, this paper argues that the production of Melodic Dubstep, its visuals used at music festivals, and its lyrical motifs can test essentialized histories and conceptualizations of race while simultaneously fostering an improved awareness of one’s place within the larger geopolitical frameworks of capitalism and empire.

Aydin Quach (he/they) is an MA student in the Department of History at The University of British Columbia. His research deals primarily with sex, gender, race, and sexuality in the transpacific, with a particular focus on the queer Asian diaspora and queer nightlife. His work is guided by pleasurable objects of analysis (music festivals, fetish wear, sex[uality]) and their illustration of queer Asian or “Gaysian” lifeworlds in diaspora across the Pacific Rim.

Viet-Hai Huynh (he/him), University of California, Riverside)
Rolling with the Punches: Asian American Affective Negotiations with Electronic Dance Music

In November 2023, electronic music producers ISOxo and Knock2 sold out four shows at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Attended by several electronic dance music titans, members of the music label 88rising, and thousands of ravers across the country, ISOknock’s shows welcomed the convergence of countless Asian American histories, ecstatic bodies, and rhapsodic musics on the dancefloor. Although Asian American rave culture has long existed, little scholarly work has been conducted outside the field of sociology or within the field of ethnomusicology. My presentation makes two key contributions: first, it contextualizes Asian American entanglements with EDM and rave culture as we search for community, resilience, and belonging; and second, it analyzes the shifts in popular electronic dance music genres in relation to evolving Asian American subjectivities and trends. Through a musical and aesthetic analysis of popular genres, songs, artists, and festivals, I consider how rave culture has been continually shaped by Asian American affective negotiations throughout the last decade. I further utilize ethnographic fieldwork to link the affective labor of ravers to the creation of new musical forms, exploring how ravers communally map their memories and experiences onto the sonic. Finally, I end with a discussion on the newest electronic era heralded in by ISOknock’s four-night California residency, arguing that this generation of Asian American ravers throws punches rather than just “rolling” with them.

Viet-Hai Huynh is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside whose research interests include Asian-American youth culture and its relationship with electronic dance music and rave culture, the recent proliferation of Asians in the popular music industry, and the K-pop factory. He is fascinated with the ways music and media alter perceptions of Asian-Americans in mainstream culture through negating, reaffirming, and contributing to new tropes, stereotypes, and subjectivities. His forthcoming master’s thesis analyzes the diasporic media series “Paris by Night” to understand how Viet Kieu create new affective proximities in their search for a cultural home.

Nic Vigilante (they/them), Cornell University
K-Pop as Community: Genre, Identity, and Queer Asian American Nightlife in Los Angeles

The queer Asian American nightlife scene in Los Angeles has spent the last two years reinventing itself amidst the rubble of long-running pre-Covid institutions. The result has been a proliferation of small, dispersed events ranging from themed parties at trendy gay clubs to night markets in deserted parking lots, drag shows in upscale office buildings to open mics in repurposed Hollywood prop studios. Remarkably consistent across all of these events – even with their divergent aesthetics, geographic locations, and social contexts – is K-pop. In this presentation, I attend to K-pop as a cultural formation which includes dance styles, musical canons, and modes of material consumption and social interaction; in doing so, I ask how K-pop comes to function as a cultural touchstone across queer, pan-ethnic Asian American nightlife contexts in which few other similarities may exist. I draw from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles to argue that, by attending to K-pop’s multiple guises in divergent nightlife contexts, we can better understand queer Asian American sociality as a mode of performance and an aesthetic formulation. K-pop, more than simply a musical genre, is a set of affective affordances through which the world comes to look, sound, taste, and feel distinctly queer and Asian.

Nic Vigilante is a PhD Candidate in Music & Sound Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, where their ethnographic research revolves around questions of queerness, virtuality, liveness, and Asian American aesthetics. Nic is a member of the inaugural cohort of the ACLS/Mellon Foundation’s Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and is currently writing a dissertation on the sonic, performative, and affective aspects of spaces outside of “real life.” Their three main areas of focus – bridging physical, augmented, and virtual realities – are queer Asian American nightlife; concerts in virtual worlds; and the role of sound and music in e-sports.

Session #5: First- and Second-Generation Immigrants

Kathryn Minyoung Cooke (she/her), Columbia University
The Worshiping Bodies of the Silent Exodus: Nunchi Bwa-ing in a Second-Generation Asian American Church

In 1996, Helen Lee dubbed the departure of second-generation Asian Americans from the non-English-speaking immigrant churches that they were raised in as the “silent exodus.” This nationwide phenomenon was taking place largely because first-generation churches failed to provide the second generation with culturally relevant care that would enrich their ethnic, national, and spiritual identities. Glory, the church of focus in this study, was founded by and is home to many silent exiles. In hopes of being an enriching church for second-generation Asian Americans, pastoral staff and leaders have created spaces within Glory for racial identity and faith to be in conversation with one another. However, in regard to the music of the church, they were stumped on what could be done to make it uniquely and proudly Asian American. This conundrum inspired a key question in this study: What is distinct about the way that Asian Americans worship God through music?

This study argues that the worship music at Glory Church is distinctly Asian American not by what is sonically perceived, but rather by what is physically performed and collectively experienced. The Korean-English, or Konglish, term nunchi bwa-ing (눈치 봐-ing) is utilized as a keyword to describes Christian musicking in a multilingual setting and foregrounds the Korean/Asian American worshiping body. This study concludes by looking forward and arguing that Asian Americans ought to amplify their worship music to the larger Contemporary Worship Music scene as it has the potential to be a powerful site of intergenerational healing.

Kathryn (Katie) Minyoung Cooke is a second-year PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She also graduated from Columbia in 2019 and received Music Departmental Honors for her thesis “The Ministry of Love: An Exploration of Turkish Contemporary Christian Music.” As a PhD student, Katie’s research interests include Christian Contemporary Worship Music in modern-day Turkey, among Korean diasporas, and the intersections of the two as a manifestation of spiritual and (trans)national kinship. Katie’s works have been published in Religions and Yale Journal of Music & Religion. On top of her academic pursuits, Katie is an avid worship music director.

Shelley Zhang (she/her), Rutgers University
Conservatory Pathways and New Asian Americans: Immigration, Transnational Memory, and Music Education

According to the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, the number of
Chinese international students studying in the country has increased by 10,876% between
1980 and 2014 (NCES N.d.). In recent years, elite music conservatories in the United States have reported significant populations of international and Asian students, with the Curtis Institute of Music documenting that 41% of students were non-resident aliens and 17.9% were Asian in 2019; and The Juilliard School that 28% were non-resident aliens and 11.9% were Asian in 2019 (Data USA N.d.). Within these statistics is overlap: there are Chinese and other Asian international students studying at the most competitive conservatories in the country. These statistics also speak to another phenomenon: that of a growing demographic of successful Asian musicians who are migrating through conservatories. Some will remain, eventually becoming a new generation of Asian Americans whose transnationalism is intimately tied to family sacrifice, risk, ambition, and the arts. In this paper, I examine conservatories as music institutions and pathways for global migration influenced by intergenerational trauma and the population politics of Mainland China. I focus on Chinese musicians who were born during the one-child policy (1980-2015) and whose parents survived the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), often by sacrificing their own musical aspirations due to political censorship. In tying together socio-political events to conservatories, I argue for a rethinking of these spaces as complex sites of performance, transnational memory, and possibilities for citizenship as many international students may remain as expatriates and eventually residents.

Shelley Zhang is the Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, and the President of the Association for Chinese Music Research. Her work focuses on Chinese musicians of the one-child generation and issues of migration, race, precarity, and trauma. In addition, she continues archival research on the Philadelphia Orchestra and Li Delun during and after the Cultural Revolution, and contemporary forms of Orientalism in North America. Her publications can be found in Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Material Culture, and Canadian Folk Music.

Session #6: Karen O

Lauren Shepherd, Columbia University
Title TBA

Scholars of popular music often rely on external journalistic lists—like the Billboard Hot 100 or Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”—to guide value judgements about what music should be studied. These charts frequently emphasize the contributions of white and male musicians, distorting the work and influence of musicians outside these lists. To take one example, the musical accomplishments of Karen O, the Korean American front woman of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s who pioneered post-Millennial rock music in New York City, remains excluded from existing literature.

This paper examines the generic space created by Karen O in the early 2000s and its subsequent influence on the genre of post-millennial rock. I first complete a brief explanation of existing understandings of genre labels in popular music across different fields of study, arguing for a viewing of genre as a flexible construct (following Drott 2013, Holt 2007). Expanding on the work of Hisama (1993, 1999) and Mahon (2004, 2020), I shift the focus from artists at the top of popularity charts to the music of biracial Asian American women to ultimately create a more equitable perspective within popular music analysis that combines institutional history and social awareness with musical analysis. I then situate examples by Mitski and Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast) at the heart of this generic understanding to demonstrate the ways in which music scholars can use genre theory to actively work against reinscribing canons of popular music that reinforce the white male frame proposed by Ewell (2019).

Lauren Shepherd is a PhD Candidate in Music Theory at Columbia University, where she specializes in genre theory and American music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her dissertation, “Reconceiving Genre: Exploring the Social Constructions of Musical Styles in American Popular Music,” presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of genre in popular music that combines frameworks from music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology with theories of gender, race, sexuality, and class. She maintains a strong interest in pedagogy and currently serves as the Music Department’s Lead Teaching Fellow. Lauren enjoys spending free time with her dog, Peanut Butter.

Douglas S. Ishii (he/him), University of Washington
“Am I What’s Left?”: The Post-2020 Asian American Legacy of Karen O

Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs has previously evaded racial identification and defied pop femininity in a particularly Xennial sense of difference, as her self-representation butted up against journalists’ curiosity about her biracial Asian American identity and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ mainstream crossover through their 2003 ballad, “Maps.” This ambivalence is archived in the postracialist and liberal feminist curation of Lizzy Goodman’s oral histories of the Brooklyn scene in Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 (2017). This narrative shifted after Michelle Zauner’s bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart (2021) names seeing the biracial Korean American frontwoman as formative in her own artistry. Amidst the late-2010s successes of Pitchfork darlings like Japanese Breakfast, Mitski, and the Linda Lindas, Karen O reemerged with a different legacy: as an Asian American rocker from when there were none. With the dual 2022 releases of the documentary adaptation of Goodman’s book and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ post-hiatus fifth studio album Cool It Down, gone are the days of Karen O fellating her mic as she is portrayed a mother and doyenne of a sound that once again feels disappearing. Tending to these shifts in her relation to racial and gender discourse since 2017 through the question she asks in the album’s lead single “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” this presentation asks: What does Karen O’s iconoclastic legacy suggest about Asian American womanhood after 2020’s #StopAsianHate?

Douglas S. Ishii (he/him) is an assistant professor of Asian American literature & culture at the University of Washington. He teaches classes on comparative Asian American studies, queer of color critique, and art by creators of color after 1945. He is currently completing his first book, on the mainstreaming of Asian American art and media since the Asian American Movement of 1968 to 1977. His scholarly work has been published in venues including American Literature, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, and The Journal for Asian American Studies, and his public work has appeared on KUOW and in The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought.

Session #7: Rediscoveries

Hedy Law (she/her/hers), University of British Columbia
Rediscovering the Lost Xiqiao: Catalogue Practices and Preservation of Early Cantonese Opera in Vancouver

This paper explains the rediscovery of more than ninety different Cantonese opera scripts, printed as xiqiao 戲橋 on the title page of most of the 306 booklets preserved in the Yip Family and Yip Sang Ltd. Fonds in the City of Vancouver Archives. Printed around the 1900s–1920s, these sources form one of the largest collections known in North America, with all the pamphlets published by Danzhutang 丹柱堂, one of the principal printers in early twentieth-century Guangdong province in Southern China.

Not mentioned in the major publications on Cantonese opera outside China (Rao 2017; Ng 2015), this xiqiao collection has remained unknown for decades due largely to the inconsistent genre labels (in Chinese and their English translations) in the library catalogues in Hong Kong (China), Seattle, and Vancouver. However, these scripts are evidence of a vibrant publishing business in Guangdong, which sold these scripts to North American Chinese-speaking buyers. To do justice to this print culture, I suggest cataloging the xiqiao collection at the City of Vancouver archives by modelling on Bell Yung’s recently completed catalogue of 373 volumes of Mu Yu Shu preserved at the Special Collections of the University of Washington Tateuchi East Asian Library. A new catalogue of the xiqiao collection based on the best cataloging practice would make the xiqiao collection searchable, enabling it to disclose early twentieth-century Cantonese syntax, the print and consumer cultures that supported Cantonese opera, and the interplay between performance and print cultures in early twentieth-century North America.

Hedy Law is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include eighteenth-century music and opera, the French Enlightenment, gender, Cantonese music, and global music history. Her publications appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, Musique et Geste en France: De Lully à la Révolution, as well as the Oxford Handbooks of Music and Disability Studies, Music and Censorship, and Music and the Body. Her 2020 book, Music, Pantomime, and Enlightenment France, was published by Boydell.

Shuk-Ki Wong
Beyond the Notes: Affirming Cultural Diversity through Rediscovering Keyboard Works of Asian Living Women Composers

Our society continues to become more diverse and multicultural, the ability of educators to teach diverse student populations effectively and foster a culture of diversity successfully in studios are crucial. In the classical music traditions, Asian women composers, in particular, are a group of artists whose works are historically (and still) marginalized––In 2021-2022 season, 95% of the music performed in concert halls were written by long-deceased white male composers; Asian living women composers only made up 0.66% of concert programming. Such data shows the urgency to accelerate change by actively boosting diversity and inclusion in our programming.

This session aims to diversify concert programming, discover Asian and Asian-American lived experiences through music, and explore performance practices in keyboard works by living women composers Hope Lee (b. 1953) and Emily Koh (b. 1986). Repertoire includes Hope Lee’s Flower Drum Dance (2001) and Emily Koh’s Reperio (2022). Topics of the integration of Chinese folk elements, social justice, and Asian-American lived experiences will be discussed. This session hopes to spark creativity and open up performance possibilities, promote advocacy and diversity through performing arts, as well as elevating the Asian community.

Dr. Shuk-Ki Wong’s research interest centers around intercultural pedagogy with an emphasis on underrepresented Chinese keyboard literature and folk tunes, living Asian women composers, as well as Asian and Asian American identities through performing arts. She maintains an active research profile and has been invited to speak at numerous conferences from regional, national, to international level. Wong’s scholarly writing has been highlighted in forums and DEI resource platforms in national music associations, for instance, NCKP Piano Inspires Discovery and MTNA Within the Studio. She currently teaches at Lawrence University as Lecturer of Music and Teacher of Piano.

Session #8: Western Classical Music

Chiara Cox
Evelyn Mandac: The Filipina Soprano who Broke Opera Glass Ceilings

Considered a Living Legend by many Filipinos, Evelyn Mandac was the first, and still is the only, Filipina to sing major roles at the Metropolitan Opera. Moreover, she broke the glass ceiling by performing not only leading roles in standard repertoire but also in operas by significant 20th century composers. Of these twenty-eight principal roles, five were American premieres and two World premieres. The latter were inspired by and written for her voice and dramatic prowess. She has performed at major companies worldwide, in various prestigious music festivals, under famous conductors, and with prominent opera singers during her illustrious career. She also made her TV debut appearance in the first opera adaptation made for the National Education Television. A young Filipina with little opera experience, she managed to break invisible barriers in the opera world in the late 1960s and beyond. Through personal interviews, her artist files from various opera houses, extensive research of reviews, images, and audiovisuals, this presentation aims to explore Evelyn Mandac as soprano, performer, and loving mentor. As Asian and minority women empowering themes gain importance in today’s social landscape of America, the story of Evelyn Mandac becomes more significant to share, record, and document.

Chiara Cox best explains her work as a Filipina American advocate, artist, and writer with this quote, “I am planting my own seeds in the soil where I now live as I grow roots to the home I left behind.” She is excited to be part of Sound Check! and considers it an incredible honor to be able to lecture on her esteemed mentor, Evelyn Mandac. You can find more about her work at www.ChiaraCox.com.

Session #9: Through Composers’ Eyes

Chieh Huang (she/her), University of California, Irvine
Weaving Worlds: The Interlacing of Atayal Language and Heritage into Contemporary Composition

Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895. During that time, indigenous dialects and culture were heavily restricted. Although the government has slowly promoted the idea of speaking indigenous dialects in the past five to ten years, younger generations are no longer proficient in the language. Language encompasses cultural traditions and values, and as the younger generation is not aware of them, it is an urgent matter to refocus on linguistic values.

​This dissertation, consisting of original music compositions and related theoretical and analytical writings, aims to create a dialogue between Atayal culture and the Western contemporary music field. The phonetics, grammar and metaphors that are prominent in the Atayal language are used as a basis for the compositional methodology, informing purely instrumental compositions as well as other works that feature spoken text. My compositions will also integrate improvisation and utilize technologies including the MUGIC motion sensor, spatialized sound, the MalletKat midi instrument, and interactive video will enable me to convey aspects of the Atayal language in ways that acoustic instruments cannot. The research thesis includes analysis of works by other indigenous composers and composers who have worked with languages as part of their method, and also outlines theoretical writings that have influenced my project by authors including Dylan Robinson, Eduoard Glissant and Nina Sun Eidsheim. My goal is to promote a broader understanding of the transformative potential within society that arises from these interconnected relationships.

Chieh Huang is a percussionist, vibraphonist, and composer. Her most recent publication, titled “Indigeneity and Computer Music in the Anthropocene,” was published in December 2023 by Array, the journal of the International Computer Music Association. Her research interests involve exploring sounds using keyboard percussion instruments and incorporating the Atayal language as a model in music composition. Chieh Huang has been involved in various projects and collaborations, including Google News Initiative Case Studies, Tele Espacios Activos, Corcoran-Be Home, GreenacresFoundation, iRhythm Technologies, and the Findings Report. She is also part of the duo Brazen Sky with flutist Rebecca Larkin.

Teerath Majumder (he/him), Columbia College Chicago
The Interpreting and Intervening Audience: Progressing from the Spectacle of Performance to the Social Realities of Performing

Although studies on performance and improvisation have begun to illuminate the role of social relationships in the synthesis of musical meaning, the perceived audience is conspicuously absent in a major swath of current scholarship, which relegates musical production to an autonomous image separate from reception. In this paper, I add to the prevailing discourse a framing of performance as a process in which the boundary between production and reception is in flux. Paradoxically, while this process has the capacity to involve the audience in various modes of participation, it can also devalue their ability to interpret and intervene.

I develop a framework of analyzing spectatorship building upon Guy Debord’s “situationist” concepts, Claire Bishop’s criticism of participatory practices, Pablo Helguera’s participatory structures, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” among others. Applying this framework, I conceptualize musical performance as a fluid social space that is not bound by binary notions of producers and receivers. In doing so, I draw on Georgina Born’s deconstruction of musical mediation, Jeff Warren’s formulation of performance as a space to improvise relationships, and musical works featuring audience participation including my own. I argue that musical practices need to evolve to embrace an awareness of the social spheres they create and inhabit, and how those spheres value the interpretative and interventive tendencies of the participants. Such awareness will shift the paradigm by recognizing the audience as a vital force in musical meaning-making, and inspire greater understanding and communication between practitioners and the communities they engage with.

Teerath Majumder is a Bangladeshi composer, sound artist, technologist and educator who works in interactive and immersive media, computer music, and sound design. He is interested in how sound facilitates and mediates social relationships among people, spaces and objects. His 2022 project Space Within engaged audience members and featured musicians in a collaborative creation of electronic music. He frequently collaborates with dancers, filmmakers, visual artists and writers in various capacities. Teerath holds a PhD in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology from the University of California, Irvine and is currently an Assistant Professor of Sound Design at Columbia College Chicago.

Session #10: Popular Music and Asian Americans

James Gui (he/him), Columbia University
BIAS NYC: K-pop Edits in the Brooklyn Underground Club Scene

BIAS NYC is an underground party based in Brooklyn that combines K-pop culture and queer performance in DJ sets, drag shows, and dance. Beginning in January 2022, BIAS has also released two compilations of “edits,” or bootleg remixes, that rework K-pop songs into genres popular in the Brooklyn underground: UK garage, jungle, techno, and Jersey club. Margie Borschke, in tracing the history of the edit from the 70s New York disco scene to its global post-2000s digital resurgence, argues that the edit arises from the “intersection of human bodies with electronic technologies and copies of recordings” (Borschke 2017). While the role of race and gender in her account is supplementary, I connect the K-pop edit to Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of “ornamentalism”, in which constructions of Asian femininity disclose humanity’s entanglement with “synthetic extensions, art, and commodity” (Cheng 2019). The K-pop edit thus emerges as a form whose union of the human with the material arises from K-pop’s “promiscuous transferability,” suturing the Asian voice to Black musical forms. A K-pop edit is a risk taken—sometimes it results in misrecognition or confusion on the dance floor, while at others the fortuitous combination of wildly different musical contexts leads to joy, humor, and somatic release all at once. While K-pop edits may be similar to Western pop edits in structure, their form and performance at BIAS parties are acts of sonic recontextualization that both generate novelty and pleasure while indexing broader histories of Asian racialization and debates around cultural essentialism.

James Gui is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. In addition to contemporary independent electronic, experimental, and indie music scenes, he is interested in the history of popular music in Asia and its entanglements with networks of circulation attendant with U.S. military occupation during the Cold War and beyond. He is also a freelance music journalist, with words in Pitchfork, The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, DJ Mag, and other publications.

Rebecca Chhay (she/hers), UCLA
Humor and Genocide: Examining Hella Chluy’s Music Videos

The first wave of Cambodian American cultural production came from first generation refugees who directly bore witness to the atrocities, wanted to share their stories as testimony, and were concerned with juridical processes. A newer wave of Cambodian American cultural production comes from 1.5 or second generation refugees who have what scholar Marianne Hirsch terms postmemory; memories that are both traumatic, but I argue, inflicted with humor of various kinds. Generally, humor’s presence indicates a lack of seriousness, but I contend that instead of trivializing genocide, the subject matter speaks to how we must take the humor seriously. I argue that when Cambodian Americans are telling stories of how they survived through incredibly unlikely stories and circumstances, the laughter is part of a celebration of how they survived.

In this paper, I examine music videos by Phanit Duong, also known by his stage name Hella Chluy, whose parents were resettled in Kelso, Washington after the Khmer Rouge genocide. I ask the following questions: What is at stake in using humor to represent genocide and refugeehood? What is considered taboo and why? Who can use humor––is it limited only to survivors and descendants? Who can laugh? Ultimately, how can we see humor, comedy, and laughter as a form of care and memory?

Rebecca Chhay (she/hers) is a graduate student in the UCLA English department. She studies Cambodian American cultural production, trauma, and memory. She is currently a co-organizer of the UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies.