Research Focus Group Talk: Inside Chinese Theater: Archive of the Invisible and the Sino-Soundscape in North America

The defining tunes of the Sinophone community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were those of the Cantonese opera performed in Chinese theaters. This history has been invisible due to the scarcity of materials about Sinophone community in archives. The sonic imageries were also imprisoned by the mounting derision in English newspapers and travelogues. Drawing from the diary of a Chinese laborer to piece together the history of vibrant Chinese theaters, this talk offers readings against the grain to consider how archives structure our understanding of the past and frame how we enter into the present and future.

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is Distinguished Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Her work bridges musicology, music theory, and Sinophone and Inter-Asia studies. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the author of Chinatown Opera Theater in North America. For The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, she contributed a chapter on East Asia. Her analysis of materiality in the sonic imagery of East-Asian composition recently appeared in Music Theory Spectrum. Rao currently serves as editor of the journal American Music. Her new book, Inside Chinese theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond, will be published in March 2025.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Interdisciplinary Sinophone Studies Research Focus Group, Department of Music, and UCSB’s Center for Taiwan Studies