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This study aims at the examination of interactive relationships between globalized “local music” and a “global audience,” on the example of Chinese music as to be found on Youtube. Distribution and popularity patterns of Chinese music videos are studied, as well as their public perception. The study is an attempt of pushing forward the boundaries of both ethnomusicology and internet research in the 21st century digital age. Since systematic research approaches to global audiences from an musicological perspective have been undertaken rarely with regard to internet music, this study can be regarded as an methodological suggestion, which might be taken further and adopted into other contexts.

This paper is concerned with the online representation of hua'er, a genre of mountain songs sung at the brink of the Tibetan and the Loess plateaus. The main performance happenstance of hua'er is at annual festivals, held according to the Chinese lunisolar calendar in the harvesting slack season. Due to this seasonal characteristic, hua'ercould not be heard everywhere, everytime, or by everyone. The seasonal limitation eventually lost its curtail with the rise of video sharing websites after 2005. Hua'er now can be heard in all its varieties throughout the year, by anyone with access to the internet. Video sites are at the intersection of media creation and social networking, they embed people in a participatory culture in which to create and share content. These virtual spaces are portals for communities where people bond with peers, engage in public discourse, explore identity, and acquire new, often musical, skills. Do Chinese video sites likewise have the potential to form strong participatory cultures? Is this aspect of participation also manifested in and through folk videos, e.g. the sharing of hua'er videos and in the comment section of the videos? This paper draws on the ethnographic method of virtual fieldwork, primarily videos posted on China's most popular video platform, Youku, are analysed. Beside theoretical reflections on how changing technologies of communication and dissemination reshape the ethnomusicologist's understanding of fieldwork, preliminary analytical findings point to a major change of hua'er culture, especially in the fields of musical representation, folk classification, and even its mode of transmission: from "hua'er festivals" to "hua'er video channels". These results may furthermore be relevant for other genres of China's folk musics, describing their development in the virtuality of the internet, which - as a socially embedded phenomenon - is by no means separated from reality, but rather is part of everyday life for musicians and audiences.

The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (万佛城) in Ukiah, California is one of the best-known institutions of orthodox Chinese Buddhism in the US. Founded in 1974 by the venerable Chan master Hsuan Hua, CTTB is famous for the study of and strict adherence to Vinaya precepts, as well as for its programs for spreading Buddhist teachings to non-Chinese audiences. In some cases, these two goals appear at odds with each other. For example, most monks and nuns at CTTB adhere to the precept requiring that they refrain from performing or listening to music, but senior monk Reverend Heng Sure has found that music is a very appealing and valuable way to help Americans connect with Buddhist teachings. Reverend Heng Sure, who was a folk singer prior to his ordination, plays guitar and banjo and sings what he calls “Country and Eastern Music.” His flexible use of music allows him to spread Buddhist teachings among people accustomed to engaging with religion through participatory singing. This familiar medium facilitates the teaching of unfamiliar or difficult Buddhist concepts, such as leaving home life and the transfer of merit. American Chinese Buddhist songs also resonate well with the progressive liberal Americans most likely to be drawn to Buddhism. In many cases, these individuals are accustomed to using music as a vehicle for political activism, and Reverend Heng Sure's musical style and lyrical content tend to resemble that of folk protest songs of the 1960s. It remains to be seen, however, if new generations of American Chinese Buddhists will carry on Reverend Heng Sure's work and continue to update the style of American Chinese Buddhist songs to appeal more to younger listeners.

Among China’s traditional musical instruments, the zheng (or guzheng) is the most commonly played; it currently enjoys tremendous popularity, particularly among urban Chinese girls. The art of zheng has overcome several significant hurdles in the twentieth century, including tuning which was considered incompatible for use in large ensembles such as Chinese orchestras, poor projection of sound, and a repertory lacking technically challenging solo masterpieces idiomatic to the instrument. The zheng’s most enduring—and most beloved—solo repertory consists of favored traditional or ‘classic’ works, most of which rely on nuanced melodic content. In these pieces, the left hand does not pluck the strings but rather refines and supplements the sounds created when the right hand plucks the strings. On close examination, much of the zheng’s basic repertory was derived from earlier vocal music (“folk music”), instrumental ensemble works, or solo music for other instruments transcribed or transplanted into the zheng repertory, and thus much zheng solo music is apparently relatively new (post- imperial). A more formal zheng repertory began to appear in the second half of the twentieth century, as solo compositions specifically written for the zheng were created; many of these pieces were the work of expert zheng performers and pedagogues teaching and/or studying in the music conservatories of the People’s Republic. The zheng’s evolution from an ensemble and accompanimental instrument in late imperial China to a solo concert instrument with virtuosic potential and an increasingly idiomatic repertory occurred as the instrument’s repertory was explored, notated, and recorded. As master zheng musicians—mostly male--began to teach in Chinese conservatories, structural changes were also introduced into the manufacture of the instrument. This project looks at how this process happened, and discusses why it happened. Why were “schools” of zheng established and what is a “school” (liupai 流派)? What do we know about the zheng’s solo repertory prior to the twentieth century? What role did improvisation play in zheng music before its repertory was notated, classified, and recorded? Did a gender switch happen (or is it happening now), with previously male masters being replaced essentially by women and girls? What has been lost and what has been gained in the zheng’s most transformative era: the past hundred years?

‘Real’ and ‘fake’ in filmic representation is a long-standing dilemma. Reality is an age-old anthropological and philosophical debate characterized by the dialectical tension within things as they appear through our representation and what they ‘really’ are. Film as an audiovisual representation of the world is a textual “construct” in the same way as the written text; writing on musical cultures as well as filming musical cultures are both unavoidably form of “creative” treatment of a (musical) reality. The ‘crisis of representation’ of the 1970s in visual anthropology studies brought inevitably to redefine the boundaries between fictional and documentary film, encouraging new audiovisual languages, such as the docu-fiction or "ethno-fiction", as result of the hybridization of the documentary-style languages and the narrative conventions of fictional-theatrical film. This article offers an overview of different ways of representing traditional music -with a particular enphasis on documentary, fictional and docu-fiction films dealing with traditional music in China - through the use of a variety of cinematic languages, interweaving brief historical notes of the development of early Chinese cinema with different theoretical approaches expressed in visual anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Between 1976 and 1982 the city and University of Durham, UK, hosted a series of three unprecedented festivals. Their aim was to introduce Western audiences to the traditional music of Asia by means of concerts, lectures, workshops, films and exhibitions. Countries represented by topclass artists and scholars were China, Korea, Japan, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Laos. Overcoming many difficulties, the Durham Oriental Music Festival acquired a worldwide reputation and successfully helped to promote Asian music and ethnomusicology in the West. In 2009 Durham University revived its aims by introducing a Festival of East Asian Music. More modest in scale, this annually promotes performance and study of musical themes from countries of East Asia, again putting emphasis on authenticity and high quality.