Performing Empire: Music, Ritual and Statecraft in Pre-Modern Asia and Europe

Recent research in public or semi-public rituals asserting or contesting political and/or spiritual legitimacy of rulers, and in the deployment of music in such rituals, suggests astonishing and previously unnoticed parallels in the uses and functions of such performative events in East Asia and Europe. The independent genesis of such rituals in two separate geographic regions of the planet begs the question to which extent such parallelisms are to be considered accidental, and to what degree they may be grounded in the socio-anthropological exigencies of complex and highly stratified (agrarian) societies and thus independent of the (evidently differing) cultural surface layers. In this seminar, experts in both Chinese and European cultural history with a shared research focus on the interactions between politics, ritual, and music will explore this problem jointly, taking stock of both the (obvious) differences and the (less obvious) similarities between East Asian and European constructions of rulership in pre-modern times.

The seminar will begin with a survey of the entanglements between ritual, music and imperial power in late Antiquity and the so-called “Middle Ages”. Yinggang Sun (Fudan University, Shanghai) will analyse the role given ritual music in the political legitimisation of rulership in China around the fifth century. UU medievalist Mayke de Jong will speak to ninth-century Carolingian rituals that ‘went wrong’, while Cambridge musicologist Susan Rankin will examine how the Carolingians used the ‘correct’ performance of ‘Roman’ chant to sanction their claim to re-constitute a Constantinian empire. Karl Kügle (UU) demonstrates how early fourteenth-century polyphony served as a propaganda tool to legitimise or contest princely rule, using the late Capetian kings of France and the prince-abbacy of Stavelot-Malmedy in modern Belgium as his examples. – Turning next to the “early modern” period, Yu Siu-wah (Chinese University of Hong Kong) will trace the unstable position of non-Chinese music within the imperial system of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), while Yang Yuanzheng (University of Hong Kong) will reveal striking similarities between the musical politics of the Manchu (Aisin Gioro) emperors of Qing China and the contemporaneous shoguns of Tokugawa Japan: Both were enthusiastically seeking political legitimisation through invoking Confucian ritual music in the early eighteenth century. Against this background of re-inventing traditions, Matjaž Matošec (UU) will explore the contested place of castrato singers performing in Italian opera productions in early eighteenth-century London against the background of Continental absolutist and English proto-parliamentarian rule.