Listening to China explores how Europeans engaged with Chinese music in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This engagement took place in two ways: through first-hand observation in China itself, and through the circulation of literary accounts and reviews within Europe. The subject is interesting not only with regard to the history of music, but also as part of the long dance of cultural exchange and mutual (mis)understanding between China and the West.

An examination of these questions would be a sufficient and worthy topic in and of itself. However, Listening to China also argues that “Through its encounter with China, the West remade itself in sound” (p. 1), while seeking to explore “the conceptual foundations and limits of ‘Western music history’ itself” (p. 2). The ambitious path which it projects across this complex terrain might perhaps have justified more extensive treatment than that presented here across a comparatively modest 199 pages.

The opening and concluding sections of Listening to China address literary goings-on in France and Germany, where works pertaining to China and Chinese music circulated among musical cognoscenti. But most of the “earwitness” accounts of Chinese music and Chinese soundscapes were recorded by British diplomats and traders, and Irvine relies heavily on these: not only reports emanating from the Macartney Embassy of 1792–3, but also desultory writings left by British residents of Canton, the port where foreign trade was restricted during this period. These are the same sources used by Charles Burney (1726–1814), England's foremost music historian of the age who, while never visiting China, considered its musical traditions and knowledge to be sufficiently important that their investigation must be central to any universal treatment of the history or theory of music. The passages of Listening to China which deal with Burney's research are among its most stimulating and rewarding.

Enlightenment Europe held China in high regard, and Irvine explains how Chinese music became a source of significant interest for a small number of European literati who sought to incorporate its musical traditions within schemes of universal knowledge. For example, the attempts of Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683–1764) to develop a fundamental theory of music led him to dabble in Neo-Confucianism and Chinese cosmology (p. 33). The German philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) is also introduced as an early positive example who understood the playing of music in the Chinese tradition to be pregnant with moral meaning: “Musical sounds transmitted to the unborn children of the elite underpin the moral foundations of Chinese society” (p. 29).

Irvine writes knowledgeably and with obvious intellectual sympathy about the philosophical culture of the Enlightenment, especially its Spinozist strain: it was “not an Orientalist project through and through” (p. 14). The general picture which emerges from the evidence presented here conforms to the familiar pattern whereby learned Europeans of the late eighteenth-century generally esteemed China, with respect for Chinese culture gradually displaced by more negative conceptions during the decades leading up to the First Opium War (1839–1842). Irvine provides examples that show this was not a linear process, with some receptivity towards Chinese music, as to other forms of Chinese art, manifest in the “relative openness” of observers such as Sir John Francis Davis (1795–1890) (p. 187). Thomas Manning (1772–1840), who served on the 1816 Amherst Embassy to Peking and spent long periods in Canton and Macao, would have provided another relevant case. Manning noted that “Chinese music, though rather meagre to a European, has its beauties, and has, like most other national music, its peculiar expression, of which our musical notation, which we vainly imagine so perfect, conveys no idea whatsoever”.Footnote ¹

Readers lacking a musicological background have nothing to fear from this book: Irvine explains technical questions of music theory and practice in such a way that a layman might easily follow the arguments. However, other topics can be rendered opaque by abstruse concepts imported from other fields, such as “sound studies”. Irvine suggests this is useful because “Some, but not all, Western listeners treated music they heard outside formal contexts such as court theaters as they would sounds of the human and nonhuman environments” (p. 8). Meanwhile, postcolonial assumptions are implicit. Westerners “began to value their music for its ‘universal’ aesthetic qualities” at the same time they sought to order and map Chinese sound worlds: these efforts are therefore “impossible to separate from such assertions of hegemony” (p. 11).

Taken together, “sound studies” and postcolonial theory therefore provide the tools to fashion any European comment about Chinese sounds into evidence of cultural imperialism. Listening to China thus betrays the influence of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), Irvine holding that “all the Westerners I discuss who engage with Chinese sound” contributed to “imperialist regimes of knowledge” (p. 15). Here we see Western imperialism treated as an iron law of history, one of those few subjects which cannot be subjected to academic deconstruction. Indeed, Irvine uses almost exactly this image when discussing the scholarship of Charles Burney, whose “liberal perspectives, in other words, could not survive the iron processes of Western imperialism” (p. 158).

Within the pages of Listening to China, the fact that the British often compared Canton to London (p. 85) and Chinese music to Scottish (p. 97) would seem to argue against the uniform “othering” of China in the early nineteenth century. Elevating imperialism to a transcendent principle has negative consequences for scholarship, as when Irvine remarks on John Barrow's (1764–1848) comments about the rhythmic singing of Chinese sailors. Barrow thought the purpose of such singing “seemed to be that of combining cheerfulness with regularity”, as with British seamen. Irvine inexplicably interprets this to mean “They are merely cheerful workers. They are a resource like any other in China: ripe, perhaps, for Western exploitation” (p. 116).

Stepping beyond the echo chamber of postcolonial theory would have made it possible to present a more balanced view of British priorities and motivations, offering important perspective on the Macartney Embassy as well as the Amherst Embassy, which is only mentioned once in passing. Instead, the conventional narrative of Anglo-Chinese relations is rehearsed with excessive complacency, so that “in the decades running up to the Opium Wars, western violence toward China was at best tenuously suspended” (p. 12). It is regrettable that Irvine does not take advantage of the arguments and analysis in Stephen Platt's Imperial Twilight (2018), which showed that “If we revisit these events as they actually unfolded, rather than as they have been reinterpreted afterward, we find far more opposition to this war in Britain and America on moral grounds, and far more respect for the sovereignty of China, than one would otherwise expect”.Footnote ²

Conceding there was “no direct causal relation” between free trade and the general adoption of a philosophical attitude towards music, Irvine does show how European writers sometimes used Chinese music as a negative example “to illustrate what was right about music in Europe” (pp. 2–3). Nobody would disagree that those writing on this subject “did not do this in a vacuum”. But it does not automatically follow that such comparisons either reflected or furthered imperialist yearnings, and the evidence labours to support the intimate relationship between European imperialism and European writing on Chinese music which Irvine implies.

Aside from the Englishman Burney, Irvine focuses on two Germans, Johann Forkel (1749–1818) and Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795–1866). Their comments on Chinese music (which in Forkel's case were plagiarised from French) appeared at a time when Germany was not a modern nation state, let alone an imperialist power. Irvine claims that Marx's dismissal of China nevertheless expressed “a kind of German colonial desire avant la letter”, and that “it does not matter that China was not, in this era, the actual object of German colonial ambitions” (p. 161). Although Marx's “(musical) racism” developed when Germany had no overseas colonies, “there can be no other word but racism for the division of the world into self and other, and into those with agency (‘freedom’) and those without” (p. 180). Yet relying on generic ideas of self and agency seems to expand the definition of “racism” beyond any discernible basis in racial chauvinism. Elsewhere, it is Britain's imperial relationship with China which “coincided” with “the imperialization of Western musical thought” and lies behind Marx's dismissal of Chinese music (p. 196).

Irvine riffs upon Mary Louise Pratt's concept of colonial “contact zones” and proceeds from the claim that Westerners’ had “imperial eyes” to coin the idea of “imperial ears”. Imperial earwitnesses who listened to Chinese soundscapes with these offensive organs removed Chinese people from their own surroundings, so that sounds made by living people “often appear as autonomous, separated from the people who made them” (p. 6). Thus “Music experienced as noise became another feature of China's natural soundscape”, with a “depopulated” China becoming an “aural terra nullius waiting to be exploited for Western gain” (p. 7). The suggestion that Westerners were imagining China—then and since seen as synonymous with its vast population—as being “depopulated” in the sense of pre-Columbian America or Australia, is not convincing; and (perhaps wisely) is not pursued.

But this approach also points to a philosophical problem. It is undeniable that sounds sometimes do “appear as autonomous”: unlike colour or texture, for example, one can experience a sound without direct knowledge of the person, object, or event serving as its source. The acousmatic nature of hearing (viz., that we can hear sounds without such direct experience of their cause) means that what is “music” for the person listening to it might just as easily be “noise” to the person overhearing it at the same point in time. And there does not have to be anything culturally sinister about this. I might enjoy a certain style of music, but if my neighbour plays it loudly in the middle of the night, I am liable to consider that to be ‘noise pollution’, even while they enjoy it at the same moment as ‘music’.

From Pratt, Irvine also borrows the idea that Westerners could engage with “sites of colonial desire” in either “scientific” or “sentimental” fashion, both of which amounted to “cultural appropriation”. This is a form of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ logic according to which there could be no acceptable way for an English visitor to respond to 1800s Canton. Such a mindset can imbue any mundane observation with malign significance, as when the British doctor Charles Toogood Downing took pleasure in imagining a horseback ride across some attractive rice paddies. Far from being innocent, this “expresses Downing's desire to possess what he sees” (p. 58).

The strongest parts of Listening to China see its author set aside such rhetorical strategies. And there is plenty of interesting material, as when the wealthy Canton merchant Ponkequa invited British traders to a feast held in their national style. Both Chinese and English guests used knives and forks, and the event was rounded off with a play where a Chinese man, in the uniform of a British naval officer, “strutted across the stage, saying ‘Maskee can do! God damn!’ whereon a loud and universal laugh ensured” (p. 73). Here, theatre could lead to a kind of “mutual recognition” across cultures, albeit one shared only among a small elite.

Two centuries later, Western music, including classical music, is hugely popular in China. The anxiety to explain the popularity of Western music in modern China not as a free aesthetic choice, but as a psychological legacy of Western imperialism (“Does today's enthusiasm in China for the ‘universal’ values of Western music […] conceal, or carry within it, relics of this humiliation?”) suggests its own kind of Eurocentrism. That “the overwhelming majority of Chinese listeners around 1800 were utterly uninterested in Western music” (p. 19) might tell us nothing more than that few Chinese listeners were sufficiently exposed to Western music to form a taste for it. To the extent that subsequent generations have enjoyed more of an opportunity, that is just one consequence of a historical encounter which was certainly “hardly positive” in many other respects.

It is not inevitable that “The fabled ‘rise’ of Western music in China will always be a reminder of China's bitter past” (p. 197). If that proves to be the case, it will only be because enough intellectuals dedicate themselves to making it so. Western music was not opium, and wars were not fought in its name. Irvine points out that imperialism meant “free trade was never free. The only possible outcome of adopting its doctrine was Western dominance. I wish to establish a parallel to sound and music” (p. 19). More people ought to be asking whether this kind of endeavour is either productive or necessary: whether endlessly extrapolating episodes of genuine trauma into every dimension of human experience and cultural exchange is an appropriate objective for contemporary scholarship.

Irvine acknowledges dissenting voices such as Srinivas Aravamudan, who emphasised that European engagement with Asian cultures was more complex and multi-faceted before colonial bureaucracies emerged later in the nineteenth century. But such caveats are little more than speed bumps to the central polemic, and Listening to China is bookended with calls for the “decolonization” and “deimperialization” of anglophone musicology (pp. 11, 198).

For a variety of reasons, the classical traditions of European music (and, indeed, of art music and high culture generally) are sadly remote from large sections of the population whose lives they might otherwise brighten and enrich. It is deeply unfortunate when passion and erudition are applied to advance a perspective liable to alienate Western and Chinese audiences alike from our universal artistic inheritance.