Recent years have witnessed a growing consensus that although the Macartney Embassy marked a turning point in Sino-Western relations, the negative views of China that later won popularity in Europe can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the making of European modernity. In Listening to China, Thomas Irvine joins this conversation by offering readers a refreshing perspective on sonic interactions between China and the West. In this remarkable work, Irvine explores how European musicians and music theorists incorporated real and imagined Chinese sound into their construction of modern European music. He argues that the European perception of Chinese music was essentially a construction, reflecting their struggles to come to terms with their own music in the global network of knowledge production.

Thanks to the Jesuit missionaries, China largely enjoyed an important and favorable status in the eighteenth-century European imagination. As discussed in chapter 1, early musicians and scholars such as Christian Wolff, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot spoke positively about Chinese music and used it as evidence to claim that their music theory had resonance in the Far East. Although, as Irvine points out, these scholars may not have really understood Chinese musical concepts, what mattered was the underlying universalist worldview, which recognized the significance of Chinese music on equal ground.

The rise of “new anthropology,” however, called such a universalist worldview into question. New anthropologists such as Johann Gottfried Herder argued that universalism did not exist, since each culture was unique. Hence, the musical Enlightenment that emphasized cultural essentialism closed off the space for European and Chinese sound to communicate with each other. As indicated in chapter 2, the closing of such a space started with the creation of texts documenting Western visitors’ firsthand experiences in China. Irvine notices that most surviving records failed to appreciate Chinese sound in Canton, the most important trade port before the Opium War. Such observations, Irvine contends, reflected fewer facts than the listeners’ self-perception, due to the absence of Western music there and the unwillingness of the writers to understand Canton in its own terms.

Chapters 3 and 5 further explore how such texts actively participated in the construction of world music history in the West. Charles Burney, who had never been to China, found support from such texts to announce that Chinese music lacked functional harmony and therefore was inferior to its European counterparts. Yet, Eurocentric as he was, Burney believed in the ideal of a musical republic that all members, “be they ancient Greeks, Renaissance Italians, or contemporary Britons, came together to determine which music ‘rose’ and which music ‘fell’” (p. 158). Although Burney's liberal fantasy of a global republic failed to survive the sweep of Western imperialism, it showed contemporary readers a path that history could have stepped onto.

The sound texts that really set the tone for China's low status in modern music history, however, were produced by members of the Macartney Embassy. In chapter 4, Irvine examines the soundscape in Jehol, the Qianlong emperor's summer palace, where musical pieces brought in by the embassy and Chinese officials met each other. For Irvine, both parties’ lack of mutual understanding and appreciation of music contributed to the mission's failure. Once they traveled back to Europe, these negative records about Jehol, together with the earlier ones about Canton, influenced not only the liberalist Burney, but also the more imperial German scholars Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Adolf Bernhard Marx. As explained in chapter 6, Forkel adopted an explicitly linear progressive mode of world music history and tagged China as primitive. Marx went further by arguing that China did not have music and consequently excluded it from his world of music history.

One thing I wish Irvine would have done is to rethink the concept of China as he explores the impact of Chinese music on the West. Irvine gives substantial space to the sound collected in Canton and Jehol, as the former represented the “Chinese” trade system and the latter, as a political center, witnessed the most important Sino-Western encounter of the eighteenth century. These two sites were crucial and convenient in framing the “Sino” aspect of the encounter, but they also ran the risk of seeing China as an inland power while overlooking its components at sea. One way to avoid that is to give Macao a position no less significant than Canton or Jehol, since Europeans lived there with Chinese music and probably brought it back to Europe in various ways long before the Canton system broke down. Macao would allow readers to see the Western construction of Chinese music not only as an institutional practice but also as a result of knowledge production in the global trade network. After all, it was the sound in Macao that Karl Friedrich Neumann curiously documented in 1830 that allowed Irvine to explore the extremes of sound collectors in the age of imperialism.

Overall, Irvine has successfully brought to life the long-lost historical soundscape and deepened our understanding of the roles chinoiseries played in the making of European modernity. This is a highly valuable work, appealing not only to students and scholars in sound studies but also to those interested in music history, Sino-Western interactions, and postcolonial studies.