LTCHC, EATRH, and APEA present:

Andrew F. Jones

Professor, EALC, UC Berkeley

Quotations Songs: Portable Media and Pop Song Form

in the Chinese 1960s

Social Science Tea Room (second floor)

Monday, May 2, 4:00-6:00

No paper will be pre-circulated.

Abstract:

As the Cultural Revolution reached its crescendo in the years between 1966 and 1969, a new and remarkable form of popular music saturated Chinese public space by way of a system of hundreds of millions of wired loudspeakers that spanned the country. ‘Quotations songs” set Chairman Mao’s writings to music, and were deliberately conceived as a musical analogue and mnemonic device for The Quotations of Chairman Mao. Surprisingly, these songs adapted from what is now known as “Little Red Book” were eventually proscribed by Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who objected to what she saw as their off-color propensity to set listeners into pleasurable motion. Yet what could possibly be promiscuous (or even pleasurable) about a choral march in duple meter entitled (to cite just one of the more than one hundred such compositions that were published and recorded) “Ensure that Literature and Art Operate as Powerful Weapons for Exterminating the Enemy”? The answer may lie not just in the ecstatic movement which sometimes accompanied the performance of such music, but also in the deliberate promiscuity of their form. By form, I indicate not only their musical, lyrical, and ideological characteristics, but also the way in which these qualities made use of the new technological possibilities and ever expanding reach of the socialist mass media in the 1960s. Quotation songs, in a manner not radically different from popular music in the same years in the West, were designed for promiscuous movement, for effortless portability. And as with the mass-mediated pop songs of the 1960s in the US and Europe, the revolutionary songs of the 1960s owed their popularity in part to the self-conscious crafting of a ‘hook’ — a ‘catchy’ melodic figure, catchphrase, or distinctive sound that rendered a song not only recognizable but also replicable in disparate media and contexts. One of the arguments of this chapter is that the rhetorical logic of the “hook” is already implied by the citational form of the “Little Red Book” itself. Quotations songs were in fact the product and the logical conclusion of a system of what we might now call “cross-platform marketing” or “media interactivity” that took shape in the Chinese 1960s, and their power was premised on the ease with which they traveled across different media, from print to performance, from radio to records, and from the revolutionary postures of the “loyalty dance” to poster art.

LTCHC and EATRH present:

Kwok-wai Hui

PhD candidate, History

Management and New Subjectivity: Opera Reform in 1950s and 1960s Communist China

John Hope Franklin Room, Social Science Building

Thursday, April 7

4:30-6:30 pm

Kwok-wai’s chapter is available for download on our papers page (above).

Please join us for light refreshments and lively discussion.

Xu Peng’s talk, originally scheduled for Thursday, March 10, will be held in the coming Spring quarter. Thanks for your understanding with the flexibility of our schedule;  previously postponed talks and screenings will take place this spring. LTCHC will resume workshops with an active schedule (to be posted later this month) on March 31st.

Thanks everyone for following our events, and see you in Spring.

LTCHC Presents:

Catherine Swatek

Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

Please note our unusual day and location:

Tuesday, February 15, 4:00-6:00 pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637

Documents to review for Prof Swatek’s presentation are now available on our papers page.

Everyone is invited to join us for dinner with Prof Swatek after her talk. Please RSVP to the coordinator to reserve a space.

LTCHC and VMPEA present:

Kao Chien-Hui

Independent curator and art critic

Transformation of Line and Form

The Linking Context of Chinese Figure/Narrative Painting and the Comic World

2:00-4:00 pm

Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 156

Please note our unusual time and place, with thanks to VMPEA for accommodations. A short paper can be found on the papers page above.

Join us for light refreshments and lively discussion.

Abstract:

The special subject exhibition of the 7^th International Ink Art Biennale of Shenzhen, ‘Com(ic)media on Line’, re-interprets the lines of comics and Chinese painting to form a broader aesthetic of lines across art media. This exhibition brings together Eastern and Western in order to investigate the similarities of this mass-oriented art form, examining the communication and transmission of simple brush and line drawings, while demonstrating the humor of these fascinating visualizations which metaphorically recreate the real world and the various vicissitudes of human life.

LTCHC presents the schedule of winter events:

Feb 3 Anne Rebull, EALC PhD student

Feb 17 Catherine Swatek, University of British Columbia

Feb 24 Xu Peng, PhD student, University of Chicago

Mar 3 Zhao Shanlin, Huadong Normal University

All events to be held in Cobb 301, Thursdays, 4:00-6:00 pm