Conjuring the Classical Otherwise (in person)

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Drawing on Weida Wang’s recent monograph, The Western Classical Music Industry in Twenty-First-Century China: A Dialectical Crescendo (Routledge, 2025), this talk examines how Western classical music has been reorganised in contemporary China as an institutional, industrial, and political terrain. Rather than approaching classical music via linear postcolonial paradigms that assume a hierarchical transmission from Western musical forms to local musical institutions and practices, the analysis foregrounds broader questions of decentring, institutionally produced subjectivities, and cultural governance.Processes often described as the reconfiguration of Western classical music do not necessarily dismantle power but instead relocate authority from European canons to state institutions, educational systems, and market infrastructures. Such shifts can be observed in institutionally significant moments, including the Beijing Music Festival’s China premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal in 2013 and the platformisation of classical music performance in China’s digital media context. Within this framework, musical subjectivities in China - performers, programme curators, audiences, and cultural intermediaries - are shaped through festivals, orchestras, venues, and media platforms, rather than emerging autonomously. By situating this music formation within debates on industry, institution, and politics, the talk invites a rethinking of classical music not as a neutral artistic tradition, but as a mediated and governable sonic form in contemporary China

Speaker:

Dr Weida Wang is an interdisciplinary musicologist based in London. He received his PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London. His research examines how sound and music are organised, governed, and valued within cultural and industrial systems, with a particular focus on East Asian and global contexts.

His work addresses the cultural politics and political economy of sound across a range of institutional and platform-based environments, including Western classical music, sound art, game music, and listening practices. His recent monograph, The Western Classical Music Industry in Twenty-First-Century China: A Dialectical Crescendo (Routledge, 2025), analyses how policy frameworks, institutions, and market forces have reshaped classical music in contemporary China. His research has also appeared in journals such as Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, as well as in edited volumes and journals engaging with sound studies, music industries, and game music cultures.

Alongside academic publishing, he is actively involved in curatorial and practice-based research projects that explore sound, mediation, and cultural governance. He regularly presents his work at global conferences and has taught and lectured on music industry studies, sound studies, and cultural studies at a range of UK and international institutions.

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