The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will host Marc Moskowitz and his talk "Sonic and Visual Trajectories: Taiwan's Pop Music in Chinese-Speaking Asia" on September 26.
Taiwan's popular music has shaped China's music and culture to a surprising degree. The roots of Taiwan's music industry can be found in the 1930s Jazz era in Shanghai. Sixty years later, Taiwan was the hub of the Chinese-language pop music industry--a sonic movement that shaped CHinese understandings of music, gender, and individuality in the contemporary age. Today, music videos and mash-ups that are posted to YouTube (and its Chinese counterparts Youku and Tudou) demonstrate cultural proximity between China and Taiwan that reveals both shared cultural understandings and ongoing regional tensions that arise out of their distinctive pasts.The talk starts at 5:00 pm in 144 Cathedral of Learning and is free and open to the public.
