The Musical Autobiographing of the Chinese Composer WANG Xilin

This study focuses on the Chinese composer WANG Xilin’s (b. 1936) acts of musical autobiographing by drawing on two concepts: (1) “all art is autobiographical”; (2) musical autobiography is a self-performance in flux. I unravel how and why the composer has devoted himself to on-going self-initiated life-writings not only in music but also through other forms of autobiographical acts, memoirs, writings, interviews, online talks, letters, and even WhatsApp messages. I argue that Wang’s incessant musical-autobiographing is to give voice to sufferers like him, thus safeguarding his country’s collective memory of the Cultural Revolution so the same tragedy would not happen again.