Commentary

I was reminded, in reading the opening chapters of Li Tsing-chu's in Edwin K. C. Li's elegant English translation, of my experience, in the late spring and early summer of 2018, of visiting Hong Kong for the first time-how that city's built environment, natural setting, mixture of cultures, babel of languages, range of foods, and so on could seem (to someone born and partly raised on the west coast of Canada-not irrelevantly, in this context, another former British colony) at once profoundly familiar and exceedingly strange.Li Tsing-chu's book is, among other things, a call-if not, perhaps, entirely to abandon received Chinese ways of conceptualizing music, then at least to supplement these with ideas borrowed from "the West" (), by which he essentially means Germany, where he lived and studied between 1911 and 1922.So for a reader like me, whose grounding in academic musicology was still largely shaped by these same Germanic traditions, a striking feature of the text is how it reflects familiar tropes and themes back through the glass of a very different intellectual sensibility.