Event details
Musicology Colloquium with Edwin Li
The Musicology Colloquium presents a talk by Edwin Li (global music theory, semiotics) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Ticketing
Free, Unticketed
Abstract
Title: Fictionalizing Mahler
This talk offers a mythopoetic meditation on rhizomatic historiography of listening—a non-linear, anti-hierarchical model of history-writing—in light of its decolonial critiques. It performs historiographical acrobatics—oscillating between past and present, history and fiction, the national and the local, as well as their dynamics and hierarchies—across stories of listening to Frère Jacques from the third movement of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony in Hong Kong and mainland China. Embracing contingent narratives drawn from an array of historical, fictional, and archival sources from the 1920s onwards, the talk interrogates the intersection of place, listening, and conditions of truth-making in relation to emerging decolonial discourses from Hong Kong. It argues that decolonization, when it is enmeshed in regimes of opportunity and coercion, can sustain friction between the nationalization and provincialization of the city’s history/fiction of listening.
Bio
Edwin Li is Assistant Professor of Music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research spans a wide range of topics—from timbre and Chinese contemporary music to philosophy of video games—and has been published (or is forthcoming) in journals such as Analytical Approaches to World Musics, Journal of Sound and Music in Games, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Music & Letters, and Journal of the Royal Musical Association. His article “Cantopop and Speech-Melody Complex” (2021) was awarded the Adam Krims Award from the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group. With Chris Stover and Anna Yu Wang, he co-edited a special issue of Music Theory Online (2024) on translations of music-theoretical sources from under-represented languages, which was recognized with the 2025 Citation of Special Merit from the Society for Music Theory. His monograph, Border Listening: Decolonizing Western Art Music from Hong Kong (under contract with Oxford University Press), theorizes contingencies of decolonial listening through stories of historiography, translation, joy, and love. He earned his PhD in Music Theory from Harvard University.
University programs and activities are open to all eligible participants without regard to identity or other protected characteristics. Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.
View physical accessibility information for campus buildings and find accessible routes using the Princeton Campus Map app.