劉長江教授

 

簡介：

Frederick Lau is an ethnomusicologist, flutist, and conductor whose scholarly interests include a broad range of topics in Chinese, Western, and Asian music and cultures.  He has published widely on issues related to music and identity, nationalism, modernization, politics, globalization, diaspora, musical hybridity as well as Western avant-garde music.

Lau has received numerous research grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Scholarly Communication with the PRC, Freeman Grants, and the German Academic Exchange (D.A.A.D.).  He served as the former book review editor of the Yearbook for Traditional Music and is editor of a book series entitled Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press.

He is the president of the Society for Asian Music, former president of Music of East Asia Study Group and the Association for Chinese Music Research, and former council of the Society for Ethnomusicology.   In 2009, he was awarded the College of Arts & Humanities Excellence in Teaching Award, and in 2010 the University of Hawai‘i  Board of Regent’s Excellence in Teaching Award.  Prior to coming to CUHK, he taught at Milliken University, University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire, California Polytechnic State University, University of Hawaii at Manoa.  He also directed workshops and summer institutes for the East-West Center’s Asian Studies Development Program.

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​講座摘要：

​When most people use the term authenticity, they use it to imply elements of truth, originality, tradition, and genuineness. Beside its common usage, the notion of authenticity commands a unique place in the study of music. The “authentic music movement” in European classical music is a case in point.  Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, this movement was an attempt to revive performance to the way it was originally done. In ethnomusicology, authenticity has been used to nostalgically refer to the pure and uncontaminated foundation of a musical culture before the onset of globalization and the focus on hybridity. Underlying the different usages of authenticity lies unspoken assumptions to do with authority, intention, and positionality. In this talk, I explore how authenticity has been used in various contexts. Despite the seeming outdatedness of this term, I argue that authenticity can still be a useful analytical tool if we avoid the temptation to define it and instead focus on how it has been used and its political implications in various contexts.