Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island

This book vibrantly demonstrates how the study of music allows for identification and interpretation of the forces that form Taiwanese society, from politics and policy to reactions to and assertions of such policies.

Contributors to this edited volume explore how music shapes life — and life shapes music — in Taiwan, focusing on subjects ranging from musical life under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) through to the contemporary creations of Indigenous musicians, popular music performance and production, Christian religious music, traditional ritual music and theatre, conceptions about sound and noise, and garbage truck music's role in reducing household waste. The volume’s twelve chapters present diverse approaches to their sounding subjects, some deeply rooted in the methods and concerns explored by Taiwan's first generation of ethnomusicologists. Others employ current social theories.

Presenting a window into the cultural lives of the residents of this multicultural, politically contested island, Resounding Taiwan will appeal to students and scholars of musicology and ethnomusicology, anthropology and Asian studies more widely.