A Case Study of Music as Cultural Discourse. Music moves people\&##39;s hearts and minds with not only distinctive sonorities but significant cultural messages, a fact that music lovers in four corners of the world, past and present, have vividly described and passionately discussed. How music actually serves as cultural discourse is, however, a phenomenon that resists analysis in structural and cross-cultural terms. Many scholars have offered insightful case studies, but none has proposed an analytical theory/procedure that can be broadly and effectively applied to a diversity of musics. Using the U-M Symphony Band\&##39;s spectacular performance tour of China in May 2011 as a case study, this talk presents a new theory of “musiking.” For participants to musik is for them to advance their personal and cultural agendas by manipulating music as object, site and process in particularized contexts and with a vocabulary that they mutually accept.