The 50th anniversary of China's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) has inspired several publications that deepen our understanding of the “ten years of chaos.” Listening to China's Cultural Revolution is such a timely contribution, an edited volume that resulted from a symposium held in Hong Kong in 2013, dedicated to the sonic experience of this period. It was a particular period, unimaginable today, “when everyone listened to the same music and sang the same set of arias at political gatherings, in schools, and in their public and private lives” (p. 2). Despite this uniformity – as this volume impressively shows – it was also a period of diversity and creativity, individual and collective agency. The model operas (yangbanxi) feature as the dominant and official soundscape in this volume, yet music propaganda, its meaning and production, effects and penetration into the everyday are challenged by looking at continuities and the variety of choices, at alternative and unofficial soundscapes. More generally, the volume strives to “explain how the music was political and how politics also became musical,” and, secondly, seeks to illustrate the meanings of this musical culture “by exploring their interactions and mutual translations before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution” (p. 2).

The volume consists of three parts, beginning with “Temporality: continuity and change in Cultural Revolution music.” It opens with Dai Jiafang's history of the model Peking opera and a detailed account of the (musical) characteristics that define its three main stages of development. Tsan-Huang Tsai explores the survival of one of China's oldest instruments, the seven-stringed zither (qin), and enables us to follow the activities of a handful of qin players. We also learn that Jiang Qing – to please the Chairman – in 1974 ordered the recording of classic poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties with their corresponding melodies (p. 51). Laurence Coderre takes the reader deeper into the world of yangbanxi by looking at the widespread practice of amateur performances, on extreme standardization and the “molding” of heroes, on the gap between “playing” and “becoming” a hero, and the subversive power of the attractive villain. Ban Wang looks into Chinese film in the context of Third World internationalism, Cold War and the discussion of economic development versus social progress. Unfortunately, his eloquent rendering of film content and cultural transfer has only little to say about the sonic dimension of this exchange. Paul Clark investigates and illustrates the (strategic) collaboration between politics, film, music/song production and audience response. Due to organized mass attendance of film screenings and remakes of earlier films during the later years of the Cultural Revolution, many songs naturally found their way into people's collective memory.

Part two, “Geography: transplantation and the making of regional yangbanxi,” consists of three case studies that focus on an important attempt of national cultural unification and propaganda, officially announced in 1967. The authors concentrate on the areas of southern Guangzhou (Laikwan Pang), north-western Xinjiang (Chuen-Fung Wong) and north-eastern Yanbian (Rowan Pease), providing deep insight into the complex task of “transplanting” the model operas into the Cantonese, Uyghur and Korean cultural context. Artists, musicians, composers and experts were confronted with strict instructions, yet already the demand of no deviation from the original lyrics and dialogue was nearly impossible to follow. Notwithstanding the conflict between traditional local culture and socialist requirements, the authors agree – and demonstrate – that in the second phase compromise and creativity prevailed, producing highly sophisticated works such as the Cantonese Opera “Azalea Mountain,” the Uyghur version of “The Red Lantern” and “Song of the Dragon River” in Korean.

In part three, “Lineages and legacies: Cultural Revolution soundscapes beyond the Mao era,” John Winzenburg takes the reader back to Republican Shanghai, exploring the work of the Russian-Jewish composer Aaron Avshalomov and the fate of his dance drama “The Great Wall” (Meng Jiang Nü, 1945) as a possible model for the later model operas. Winzenburg identifies musical and ideological similarities and defines the relationship as “a political-generic trajectory” that continues with the new works today. The present, then, is addressed in the two final contributions. Nancy Yunhwa Rao investigates the impact of the model works on successful artists such as Tan Dun, Tian Hao-Jiang and Zhang Yimou. To her, the yangbanxi were part of a multitude of musical and cultural practices in society that brought together different audiences. The operas' significant “everydayness” and people's daily active engagement – as amateur or professional – added to the collective sonic experience, out of which the persistent sound of Chinese opera percussion has been most often re-used. Barbara Mittler further explores the Cultural Revolution's living presence by looking at remediations, the social life of sounds and iconoclastic “mash-ups,” such as a video-clip that combines “The Long March Suite” and Michael Jackson's “Beat It.” Mittler reminds us of the unpredictability of propaganda and alternative readings, and illustrates the existence of local and private soundscapes. Today's popularity of Cultural Revolution culture is not only explained by experience and previously active participation through embodied performance, but is also grounded in the fact that “propaganda soundscapes were determined by the rules of popular culture” (p. 262).

Listening to China's Cultural Revolution is based on newly accessible material, interviews and ethnographic research. It is a highly inspiring book that connects China's sonic experience between 1966 and 1976 with the past and the present. It emphasizes continuities and alternative readings as well as the different musical genres that were employed and performed, illustrated by numerous examples that are often easily accessible on the internet (also for classroom use). Most of all, however, the volume highlights the political and cultural importance of music throughout that period, indirectly arguing that we need to listen carefully to those sounds to understand the past and present popularity of Cultural Revolution propaganda music as well as future remediations.