Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories and classical music performance competitions. In the first book on the subject, Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at age 3. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households. Against this historical backdrop, Yoshihara interviews Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan and Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be.
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Middle-class Japanese and Korean familes leave their lives behind and bring their talented children to study music in New York City. Asian American families all over the United States register their pre-schoolers in local Suzuki method classes, intiating them into years of classical music training. On concert stages Asian faces are suddenly conspicuous. In the first book to account for the growing prominence of Asians in the world of Western classical music, Mari Yoshihara grapples with the significance of this trend. Yoshihara explores the history of East Asian nations' adoption of Western music to explain why the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese are the most visible Asian groups in the field today. Interviewing established and aspiring musicians, she develops a complex picture of the Asians and Asian Americans who have dedicated themselves to classical music in the United States. As a serious pianist, she understands that for them the power of the music transcends the issues of identity (such as race, gender, and sexuality) that loom large for cultural critics.
This is a book about the about the social and cultural origins of this trend but it is also about the lives and work of individual musicians devoted to their art.
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