Attend in person or via Zoom: https://myumi.ch/79r92.

Datong Music Society, the most progressive native music group in Republican Shanghai and pioneer of modern Chinese music orchestra, produced many musical instruments during its heyday. Most were lost. A recent discovery (2023) of a set of its “ancient musical instruments” donated to the Deutsches Museum, Munich in 1925 has prompted new inquiries of the subtle relation between musical revivalism and reformism. This lecture probes Datong’s negotiation between historical allusion and experimental modification, theorizing its ancient music program as an invention of “heritage” that reveals the meaning and problematics of music in early Chinese modernity.

Joys HY Cheung (Ph.D. in Musicology/Ethnomusicology, University of Michigan; MM in Ethnomusicology, University of Texas) is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology, National Taiwan Normal University. Her research has focused on the field of “music” in Chinese modernity emerging from interwar Shanghai, including issues of translated modernity, networks, the sublime, qin listening, historiography, and heritage negotiations. Her recent publications include "The Art Song of East Asia and Australia, 1900-1950" (co-edited with Alison Tokita, Routledge, 2023), and “Making Chinese Instrumental Relics in Pre-UNESCO Modernity: Datong Music Society’s ‘Heritage’ Project” (Journal of Music Research 音樂研究, Taipei). Her article “Riding the Wind with Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony: The Kantian and Daoist Sublimes in Chinese Musical Modernity” (Music & Letters, UK, 2015) received the Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize in 2016. With her recent discovery of a set of Chinese musical instruments donated by the Datong Music Society to Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany in 1925, she has initiated a collaborative exhibit and research project between her institution and the Deutsches Museum. She was a scholar-in-residence at the Deutsches Museum, May to July 2025.