A Critical History of New Music in China (hereafter History) by Liu Ching-chih is an informative, thought-provoking, and urgently needed text on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese New Music. The author defines this music as a genre created “when a composer applies composition techniques, styles, form and musical language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to Chinese musical source material” (p. 9); it is thus new, and different from traditional Chinese music. Smoothly translated into idiomatic English, Liu's magnum opus provides an “authoritative” statement about New Music for world musicians and composers (“Translator's Note,” p. xxiii). A revised and expanded version of his Zhongguo xinyinyue shilun (A critical history of New Music in China), published in Taiwan in 1996, Liu's tome is based on thirty years of promoting and writing about New Music: between 1981 and 2006, Liu organized fourteen conferences on the genre, generating “numerous volumes of proceedings” (p. 1) with data and theories. Liu offers his History to help develop Chinese music composition and research. He hopes that his “modest work with its personal approach will prove a stimulus to many other and wiser accounts, thereby invigorating the study of music history” (p. 6).

The 911 pages of this tome—655 pages of text, and 354 pages of notes, appendices, references, indices, and charts—and the ninety portraits of composers and the numerous notated examples teach one a lot about New Music. After reading it all, however, one asks what critical and musical history Liu has told. What kind of music historian is he?

By his own description, Liu has written his History to present “a relatively comprehensive and objective account of the evolution of New Music in which the focus is on music and on Chinese culture” (p. 4). He wants to challenge both those music historians who kowtow to political authorities and those who “respect Europe and belittle China” (p. 4). Liu undermines both these goals, however, by failing to engage with any current theories or methodologies of international musicology or history, such as the extensive recent scholarship on the embrace of Western culture in twentieth-century China, which has made careful analyses of the translation and adaptation of imported ideas and practices. Reference to current scholarship on semi-colonial, urbanizing Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, for example, might have yielded a more nuanced and more detailed interpretation of Huang Zi's “European” compositions. Liu asserts that the “Chinese-ness of Huang's music does not lie in its external form, but within” (p. 137)—an assertion that begs musicological explanation.

Liu divides New Music chronologically into eight periods, each with its leading composers, dominant genres, representative works, and particular sociopolitical context. The periods are: 1885–1919 (school songs by Zeng Zhimin and others, chapter 2); 1919–37 (art songs by Huang Zi and others, chapter 3); 1937–45 (songs and instrumental works by Xian Xinghai and others, chapter 4); the civil war of 1946–49 and the first seventeen years of socialist China, 1949–66 (musical works and theories by musicians and political leaders, chapter 5); the Cultural Revolution, 1966–76 (revolutionary songs, operas, ballet, symphonic music, chapter 6); 1976–96 (New Wave music, chapter 7); and 1996–2006 (the latest works and activities of New Wave composers, chapter 10).

As Liu sketches the biographies of successive composers, and places the composers and their representative works in a historical and political context, he neglects to offer overarching themes that might identify New Music in China as a sustained cultural and historical phenomenon, and instead implies that New Music developed largely in reaction to political forces. Indeed, besides the arguments that New Music is Europeanized and that its creative practice was shaped by sociopolitical forces, Liu's tome lacks any overarching historical or musicological themes. Thus, his History presents no comprehensive or convincing historical explanations for New Music as a cultural and musical development. As a matter of fact, much of the tome reads like program notes for scholarly concerts. Important dialectical connections between cultural and political ideologies, music composition, performance, and education are evoked rather than historically explained (chapters 8–9).

A case in point is Liu's description of Jiao wo ruhe bu xiang ta (Tell me how to stop thinking of her), a seminal piece of New Music. The lyrics of this song, in fresh, contemporaneous vernacular Chinese, were written in London, in 1926, by Liu Bannong; its melody is by the famous linguist and avocational composer Zhao Yuanren. Liu devotes one and a half pages to this song. He states that it is a popular “masterpiece,” that only a limited number of performers can sing it “as it should be sung,” that its melody is “reminiscent of the xipi music in Peking opera,” and that its “lyrical central part also has a native Chinese flavor” (pp. 147–49). To substantiate his critical assessment, Liu quotes the composer's own extensive comment on the work (p. 149). He concludes by declaring that if Zhao's “composing skills and his artistic conceptions were superb,” his works “do not seem to touch the deepest parts of the soul (they can be almost pedantic—they are tasteful, flawless, well-judged)” (p. 151)—a critical assessment that requires historical and musicological explanation.

The same applies to Liu's argument that political control in socialist China limited music composition and scholarship until the late 1980s. Although many who are familiar with twentieth-century Chinese culture and history would agree with Liu, many would also ask if twentieth-century Chinese music and music culture can be assessed in such simple terms of cause and effect. If the history of twentieth-century Chinese music were strictly linear and political, for example, the revolutionary operas, ballets, and songs of the Cultural Revolution would have disappeared entirely from Chinese concert halls. Instead, many are still remembered, and not infrequently performed. Some are actually gaining renewed popularity in this second decade of the twenty-first century. It is therefore premature for Liu to describe “model” works from the Cultural Revolution only in negative terms, and to assert that the damage it inflicted on those “who were affected will never be forgotten” (p. 435). Even if this were true, the assessment requires substantiation. One might even argue that without the forced mixing of Chinese and Western musical elements in those works, the internationally successful New Wave music of contemporary China would never have emerged.

Such counterarguments expose also the selective, if not partial, scope of Liu's historical narrative. The History fails to acknowledge, for example, that compositional and performance practices of traditional instrumental music in twentieth- and twenty-first-century China are in many ways as “Europeanized” as the New Music. Since the late 1950s, it has been common in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to group Chinese instruments into Western-style orchestras that perform hybridized compositions. The “Europeanness” of New Music cannot be fully historicized without adequate reference to traditional instrumental music as a music practice and as a cultural-historical phenomenon. Another example of the selective scope of Liu's purview is that he glosses over the international context of New Music, in particular of New Wave music. The mere fact that Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and other leading composers of New Wave music have had advanced compositional training in the West and have international careers points to the globalized nature of contemporary Chinese music, whether native or hybridized. Even if a China-centered history of New Music may help reveal the aesthetics and subjectivity of Chinese insiders, a comprehensive account of New Music requires a broader perspective. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese New Music is a global phenomenon!

Liu obviously realizes the limitations of his History. His call for more comprehensive and objective discussion of Chinese music history is no mere rhetoric, but a timely and urgent call from a scholar and critic genuinely concerned with Chinese music composition and scholarship.