Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei-hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem
dc.contributor.author | McGuire, Colin P. | |
dc.contributor.funder | Irish Research Council | en |
dc.date.accessioned | 2018-08-17T11:04:45Z | |
dc.date.available | 2018-08-17T11:04:45Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2018-05-04 | |
dc.date.updated | 2018-08-17T10:59:30Z | |
dc.description.abstract | Wong Fei-hung was a Cantonese martial arts master from southern China who became associated with a melody called General's Ode'. Since the 1950s, over 100 Hong Kong movies and television shows have forged the link by using this melody as Master Wong's theme. During fieldwork in a Chinese Canadian kung fu club, I observed several consultants claiming this piece as a Cantonese national anthema hymn for a nation without a sovereign state. Virtual ethnography conducted online showed that this opinion is held more widely, but that the piece also inspires broader Chinese nationalist sentiment. My analysis of speech-tone relationships to melodic contour in Cantonese and Mandarin versions of the song, however, has revealed a tight integration with the former that the latter lacked. By sharpening Anderson's concept of unisonance, I explore how this song has become an unofficial transnational anthem for Cantonese people, arguing that Master Wong's theme auralises an abstract sense of imagined community. | en |
dc.description.sponsorship | Irish Research Council (Grant GOIPD/2016/145) | en |
dc.description.status | Peer reviewed | en |
dc.description.version | Published Version | en |
dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | en |
dc.identifier.citation | McGuire, C. P. (2018) 'Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei-hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem', Ethnomusicology Forum, 27(1), pp. 48-67. doi: 10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 | en |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 | |
dc.identifier.endpage | 67 | en |
dc.identifier.issn | 1741-1912 | |
dc.identifier.journaltitle | Ethnomusicology Forum | en |
dc.identifier.startpage | 48 | en |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10468/6619 | |
dc.identifier.volume | 27 | en |
dc.language.iso | en | en |
dc.publisher | Taylor & Francis | en |
dc.relation.uri | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 | |
dc.rights | © 2018 The Author. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. | en |
dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | en |
dc.subject | Anthems | en |
dc.subject | Unisonance | en |
dc.subject | Transnations | en |
dc.subject | Diasporas | en |
dc.subject | Nationalism | en |
dc.subject | Imagined communities | en |
dc.subject | Music and martial arts | en |
dc.subject | Kung fu movies | en |
dc.subject | Hong Kong cinema | en |
dc.subject | Wong Fei-hung | en |
dc.subject | Huang Feihong | en |
dc.subject | Once Upon a Time in China | en |
dc.subject | Cantonese | en |
dc.subject | Identity | en |
dc.subject | China | en |
dc.subject | Opera | en |
dc.subject | Tone | en |
dc.title | Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei-hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem | en |
dc.type | Article (peer-reviewed) | en |