May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada. This is a time to acknowledge and appreciate the many Asian communities that exist around the world. At the Music Library, we are specifically dedicating our monthly display to Asian composers and musicians, and their experiences in Canada and beyond.
We want to note that this is a very small sample of what is a wide-ranging and diverse field. We are by no means representing all voices, but instead offering a snapshot of the many communities in Asia and their contributions to music that can be found in our collection.
We drew on the BIPOC Canadian Composers dataset to support the curation of our materials this month. You can find the work of Asian-Canadian musicians Vivian Fung, Alice Ho, Minna Re Shin, and Kiran Ahluwalia featured in our display.
We have also included several materials related to ethnomusicological studies. In Musicophilia in Mumbai, Tajaswini traces the influence of music on the built environment and population. Tausig details ethnographic fieldwork of sound and music in protest in Bangkok, Thailand in Bangkok is Ringing. In Korean-Canadian folk song: An ethnomusicological study, Song details research on musical behaviour in Korean immigrants in the Toronto area.
In addition, we have included several historiographical perspectives. Decentering musical modernity: perspectives on East Asian and European music history looks at the understanding of modernity in both Europe and Asia in a series of essays highlighting the dichotomy between the two. Vamping the stage highlights the ways that female entertainers have navigated popular music and modernity.
Finally, we have included a variety of contemporary narratives within our collection highlighting the diversity of the region. The anthology Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage examines the way that music is intangible cultural heritage at multiple levels within policy and ideology. This is echoed in Broken Voices by Maliangkay in the Korean context specifically. Vocal music and contemporary identities investigates the forms that contemporary music takes in Asia vs the West. Mongolian sound worlds looks at the ways that historic practices have mapped onto music-making today.
In addition to the materials in our display, here are a few online-only resources that we subscribe to:
- Homeland echoes: music, sound, and devotion among the South Asian Hindu diaspora in Edmonton, Canada
- Jamming in the third space: South Asian fusion music in Canada
- Routledge handbook of Asian music: Cultural intersections
- Presence through sound: music and place in East Asia
- Butch bodies, big drums: Queering North American Taiko.
You can also find research being done in this area by the Faculty of Music community.
- Joshua Pilzer's Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of "Korea's Hiroshima"
- Chan Ka Nin Among friends: for clarinet, cello and piano: 1989
- Kevin Lau's Fountain of Dreams
There are also a few resources outside of the library we wanted to share:
- The CanAsian Arts Network is a community for Canadian Asian artists to showcase their work and network.
- The Canadian federal government's website that highlights Asian Heritage Month events and figures.
Thank you so much for viewing our display this month!