Musicians from a Different Shore

Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories and classical music performance competitions. In the first book on the subject, Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at age 3. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households. Against this historical backdrop, Yoshihara interviews Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan and Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be.

Mari Yoshihara is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.She is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism.