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This article focuses on historiographical accounts of electroacoustic music produced by Chinese composers and scholars in the first decade of the twenty-first century. According to a dominant view in this literature, the incorporation of traditional elements into electronic music has allowed Chinese composers to compensate for technological weaknesses and to catch up more effectively with the West. The strategic use of traditional art forms and techniques as signs or ‘topics’ in this context, contributing to the construction of a ‘national spirit’, has enabled composers to differentiate Chinese electronic music from other repertoires and practices. Alongside this historiographical analysis I examine the formation of a canon of works over the past three decades. Aesthetic discourse involving cultural oppositions, canonic works and the concept of approachability has not only attempted to grapple with this emerging practice but also shaped this practice by positing stylistic ideals.
In comparison with Europe, Japan and the Americas (including the United States, Canada, and South America), electronic music developed later in China, lagging behind the West by about 40 years. Scholars have located the mid-1980s as the turning point in this development. In this period, Chinese audiences had their first contact with electronic music, and Chinese composers began to experiment with the production of electronic music. Consensus is lacking among scholars when it comes to identifying the specific event that raised the curtain of Chinese electronic music. Lv Zhenbin (吕振斌), for example, has pointed to the visit of the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre to China as a defining moment (Lv 2006: 82).1 Jarre has been traditionally viewed as the first Western musician to make an official visit to China after the Cultural Revolution. Before this visit, according to Lv, Jarre’s album Oxygen, released in France in 1976, had already stimulated curiosity in electronic music among Chinese audiences. Between 21 and 29 October 1981, Jarre gave extensive concerts and lectures in Beijing and Shanghai. As Wang Jing (王婧) has recently observed, before Jarre’s concerts, Chou Wen-Chung (周文中) and Alexander Goehr had already visited the Central Conservatory of Music (Wang 2021: 98). Reports of how Chou and Goehr disseminated knowledge of new music and electronic music are largely absent in early accounts of Chinese electronic...