The singing public in Hong Kong : choral music as social life

Abstract

This thesis focuses on politics of identity in Hong Kong through the lens of choral music. Choral music, in this context, refers to any collective singing activity, organized or spontaneous, amateur or professional, of any musical styles and practices in Hong Kong, from its founding in the mid-19th century to the present. While Hong Kong’s choral music has its roots in the European choral traditions and Christian missionaries, this study explores how people localize choral music through performance and through new compositions.

This thesis emphasizes the corporeal aspects of choral music, that is, the intersection of bodies and voice, and it reconsiders how collective music-making realizes and enacts processes of social formation. I argue that the choral music scene in Hong Kong offers nuanced insights into how singing cultivates social life, especially in terms of how notions of identity are negotiated. As this dissertation shows, the process of formulating narratives of identity through collective singing is filled with tension and compromises.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic cases in which the people of Hong Kong participate in public life through singing, I aim to challenge the tendency to frame choral music in Hong Kong according to national and colonial frameworks of analysis. From the cases of Singfest and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Chorus, who constantly find their “own voice” through performances of foreign and local repertoires, to historical cases like the Hong Kong Oratorio Society, Hung Hung Chorus, Iron Stream Chorus, Pastoral Chorus and composer Lin Sheng-shih, who struggled to position themselves within changing definitions of Chineseness in the colonial context, this thesis aims to go beyond the well-worn models of coloniality and modernity in order to understand choral music as an artistic practice that allows for the creation of communal spaces for voices and bodies in a cosmopolitan city.

This thesis also tries to make sense of what it means to sing collectively, and how one’s “own voice” is constituted through embodied performances in the civic realm. The examples from Hong Kong’s choral community in this study are manifestations of how collective singing cultivates senses of belonging, solidarity and identity, and they demonstrate the many possibilities in understanding collective voices in social life when they are free from the influences of ethnic and national approaches.