Shanghai Senses: Sounds
Listening to the Chinese Jazz Age
By Andrew F. Jones
Imagine turning the streamlined Bakelite knobs of a wireless radio to the ether above Shanghai circa 1937. As the vacuum tubes begin to amplify signals broadcast from that distant world, what sorts of sounds emerge?
What would you hear as you move up and down the dial, sampling from the sonic world of Republican China? The crash of gongs, the plucked strings of a sanxian, the rhythmic recitation of a drum song, the hypnotic drone of chanted sutras, the sharply nasal syllables of Peking opera? The warble of a sing-song girl? The lilt of Hawaiian steel guitar? The propulsive swing of big band jazz? Advertisements? Anthems? String quartets? Scholarly lectures? Official pronouncements? Symphony orchestras? In the cacophony of a multiply colonized metropolis of more than 3 million inhabitants, in which well above sixty radio stations operated by the mid-1930s, the answer would surely be all of the above, and much more.
How would we go about not simply listening but making sense of these diverse sounds? For a contemporary Chinese listener in Shanghai, this tour across the dial would almost certainly have evoked a complex cluster of associations, with each snippet of sound triggering a seemingly instinctive knowledge of both its particular historical, demographic, and ideological significance—Chinese or foreign? High class or low? Conservative, decadent, or progressive?—and the musical and extra musical codes governing its production and consumption.
Our imaginary listener, in short, would have understood what kinds of pleasures each sort of music afforded, what those pleasures might mean, and what place each station occupied in relation to the musical field as a whole.
As later born listeners, we are not immediately privy to such knowledge (or to the sounds themselves), and our grasp of the ways in which this sonic tapestry mattered to people living at that time will of necessity remain fragmentary and incomplete.
Selection used with permission from Andrew F. Jones’ Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age.
Jones is Associate Professor of Chinese literature and culture at U.C. Berkeley. His field of research includes music, cinema, and media technology, modern and contemporary fiction, children's literature, and the cultural history of the global 1960s.
