SONIC MOBILITIES: Producing Worlds in Southern China | By Adam Kielman

Guangzhou has a long and storied past as a cosmopolitan crossroads and hub of commercial and cultural innovation in southern China. Today, it is the region’s largest urban metropolis and home to a vital popular music scene that rivals those of Shanghai and Beijing in its scope and dynamism. Migrants to Guangzhou, who navigate precarity as members of China’s “floating population” (liudong renkou), catalyze much of the city’s creative ferment, (re)inventing novel cosmopolitanisms through complex musical practices of “worlding.” As ethnomusicologist Adam Kielman observes in the excellent Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China, “new mobilities and spatial transformations are at the heart of broader shifts in contemporary China, social transformations that resonate through the music of this cohort of musicians who float between Guangzhou and their hometowns” (13).

Focusing his investigation on the work of bands Wanju Chuanzhang (Toy Captain) and Mabang (Caravan), Kielman provides a fine-grained ethnographic account of the processes by which musicians reinterpret and repurpose local musical traditions and narratives in global vernaculars. These processes, Kielman argues, demand a reimagining of geographical and cultural boundaries, as well as shifting perceptions of core and peripheral spaces. Moreover, they contribute to evolving understandings of individual and community identity, spatial relations, public spheres, and state authority, as well as the interaction among these entities in contemporary China.

The question of place—how musicians make it and how it makes musicians—is a thread that runs through all seven chapters of Sonic Mobilities. Chapter 1 maps the book’s theoretical terrain and introduces Kielman, a jazz saxophonist with expertise in sound engineering and production, as the reader’s guide. Although Sonic Mobilities emerges primarily from Kielman’s 2014 doctoral fieldwork, his connection to Mabang and Wanju Chuanzhang pre- and postdates this period—he performed with members of both bands for several years prior to engaging them as research associates, and he continues to collaborate with them today. The depth of the author’s relationships with his interlocutors provides him with rich ethnographic data on which to base his more ambitious interventions, among them his argument for the utility of tianxia (“all under heaven”)—a precept of Chinese political philosophy variously mobilized over three millennia—as a framework for “thinking musical cosmopolitanism in China” (8).

Chapters 2 and 3 examine the creative negotiations and exercise of artistic agency entailed in composing, recording, and marketing. Kielman is especially concerned with matters of genre, and how creative collaboration “is inflected by interconnected concerns about musical genre and ideas of the local, national, and global” (25). He tracks the fascinating evolution of Mabang’s musical identity in chapter 2, from its early associations with minyao (folk), to its later associations with shijie yinyue (world music). Through meticulous documentation of choices made during a recording session, Kielman analyzes the band’s creative processes of incorporating and reimagining globally circulating knowledge about genre in popular music. A cursory discussion of the ways in which notions of masculinity and femininity map to sonic qualities generates critical insights but leaves the reader wanting to know more about the relationship between gender and genre in this musical world. Chapter 3 explores Wanju Chuanzhang’s construction of haiyang minyao (ocean folk)—which borrows from genres such as reggae, salsa, and flamenco—“as a form of cosmopolitan engagement with global island cultures” (52). Through close reading of a selection of songs, Kielman breaks down the musical and lyrical strategies that Wanju Chuanzhang deploy to invoke a deterritorialized “island sound” that represents the local lifeways of Nan’ao, an island that lies off the southeast coast of China and is home to several band members.

Kielman turns his attention in chapter 4 to the aesthetics and politics of fangyan (translated alternately as dialect, local language, and topolect). He continues here to unfold an argument that creative disjuncture in the music of Mabang and Wanju Chuanzhang—between lyrical content and musical style, language, and place—produces new conceptions of the local. Both bands perform frequently in fangyan that their audiences comprehend only to a limited extent. The sounds of language, however, affectively communicate ideas of place and identity even when they are minimally understood. Kielman’s careful attention in this chapter to the musicality of language, even when it lacks semantic content for listeners, is a welcome addition to the scholarship on language-music relationships. It fills a significant lacuna in Sinitic-language popular music studies, which have focused primarily on the interaction between linguistic tone and melodic contour.

Chapters 5 and 6 consider the biographies of the members of Mabang and Wanju Chuanzhang, respectively. Subjectivity is the ultimate object of Kielman’s interest, especially as it is shaped by emergent personal desires, which are in turn shaped by mobilities. The forms such desires and mobilities take, and the agency musicians exercise in claiming them, reveal much about “the lived experience of China’s political and economic transformations in recent decades” (94).

The granular focus of these chapters is counterposed by the expansive analysis of sonic infrastructure provided in chapter 7. Although this material feels somewhat less well integrated into Kielman’s discussion than that which precedes it, the chapter contextualizes the author’s discussion of Mabang and Wanju Chuanzhang’s activities in larger practices of listening that are inextricable from political and economic logics. Likewise, it makes a useful case for understanding how circulations of sound via infrastructure, including those generated by the music industry, are productive of both musical meaning and spatial relations. A brief epilogue follows, in which Kielman returns to tianxia, musical cosmopolitanism, and mobilities together, considering them in the “long history of thinking about music, place, and person in China” (168).

Sonic Mobilities is sharply observed and elegantly written, offering nuanced analysis of the ways that musicians navigate and reshape cultural flows at local, national, and global levels. By focusing on the creative processes and lived experiences of artists in Guangzhou, Kielman not only enriches our understanding of China’s cosmopolitan music scenes but also offers a compelling model for examining the relationships between artistic creativity, spatial transformation, and sociopolitical change in rapidly developing urban centres worldwide.                                                                            

Meredith Schweig

Emory University, Atlanta