Foreword
When wring this foreword for Professor Yu Hui's book on multiple subjects of musicological research, Oriental Music in the Digital Age, my memory went back to the last two decades of the 20th century when I first encountered traditional Chinese music and music scholars in China. This followed the opening-up policy of the nation when Chinese music scholars were eager to be connected to the world and to ethnomusicology as an emerging discipline of music research, which had been recently introduced to China.
Professor Yu visited Australian National University's（ANU's）School of Music in Canberra, Australia in 1993 when I was teaching there. At the time he was a young faculty member at Shanghai Conservatory of Music. I was impressed by his enthusiasm and the sharpness of his mind, and I was not surprised to learn later that he was a graduate student at Wesleyan University in the United States and that he later graduated with a PhD in ethnomusicology from that famous and prestigious university. Over the years of his academic career in the United States and China, we have remained in contact with each other, and I have attended two conferences of the Society for Oriental Music, both at Ningbo University（2012, 2015）, organised by Professor Yu. Our long association has culminated in the co-editing of two books.
Professor Yu's visit to Australia in 1993 with Professor Li Minxiong was an important milestone in a longer association between ANU's School of Music and Chinese traditional music. The association began in 1987 with the visit of Professor Chen Yingshi of Shanghai Conservatory of Music as a Guest Speaker at the National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia, hosted by ANU, and the subsequent publication of his paper in the Society's journal Musicology Australia. This was probably the first scholarly publication in Australia on Chinese music. On that occasion, also, a visiting traditional Chinese music ensemble from Shanghai Conservatory of Music presented a public concert in the auditorium of the School of Music. On the program of the concert was a piece from the Tang Dynasty of China which was reconstructed and transcribed into modern notation from ancient Japanese sources by Professor Allan Marett of Sydney University, Australia. This was the first occasion that Professor Marett had heard the piece performed.
Another name in this complex story is Coralie Rockwell, a PhD student of Allan Marett. Coralie had spent a period of time in Shanghai accompanying her husband, an academic linguist and Chinese language specialist. Coralie had studied Chinese language in Shanghai and associated herself with Shanghai Conservatory of Music where she met Chen Yingshi and the traditional Chinese music ensemble. It was Coralie's contacts that led to their visits to Australia in 1987.
The year 1987 was especially auspicious in the history of the relationship between Chinese traditional music and ANU. In that year I was invited to deliver a paper to a Symposium on Musical Traditions of Asia and the Pacific in Beijing, sponsored by UNESCO and the Chinese Musicians Association. After the symposium I took a train to Shanghai to meet Chen Yingshi, Li Minxiong, Jiang Mingdun and others from Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where I delivered a paper on ethnomusicological research on Australian Indigenous music for the Society for Oriental Music, one of the earliest musicological societies in China and of which Professor Yu Hui is now the general secretary. An abiding memory of that visit to Shanghai was a performance of Chinese traditional music given by faculty members of Shanghai Conservatory of Music at the Tea House in Yu Garden.
Coralie Rockwell introduced the first Asian music course into the curriculum of the School of Music at ANU in 1990. The content of the course included Korean（the Republic of Korea）, Chinese and Indonesian musical traditions in which Coralie had done research. In the same year I introduced a course on Australian Aboriginal music. These two courses were the first world music courses taught at the School of Music. From the beginning we decided to include a performance component in each world music course. For some time, Indonesian gamelan music from Central Java was the only performance component of the Asian music course, and the possibility of a traditional Chinese music ensemble being a performance option for students taking the course only eventuated later. A significant impetus for introducing this possibility was the 1993 visit of Yu Hui and Li Minxiong.
Professor Li Minxiong was the Vice Chair of the Musicology Department and the Dean of Academic Affairs at Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and taught traditional Chinese music theory and musicology as well as percussion performance. While in Canberra he taught a class of percussion students in the same subjects. Keen to demonstrate the new skills of these students, we began to organise a public concert of traditional Chinese music using the musical resources available in Australia at that time. We turned to Dr Yang Mu, an ethnomusicologist who had graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, for contacts among traditional Chinese musicians who had settled in Australia. Bringing them together in Canberra, in addition to the student percussionists trained by Li Minxiong, a respectable ensemble was created and then moulded by Professor Li. The Great Hall of the University was packed to capacity for the resulting concert, which was recorded and later broadcast by Australian Broadcasting Corporation（the Australian Government's main broadcasting organisation）.
This visit of Yu Hui and Li Minxiong led eventually to the formation of a permanent traditional Chinese music ensemble at ANU. Nicholas Ng, a Chinese-Australian composer and Chinese music specialist, came to study under my supervision. In 2004, he began tutoring for ethnomusicologist Dr Hazel Hall, who for several years had been running the Asian Music course that Coralie Rockwell had started, and a related subject, Highlights of World Music. After submitting his doctorate in 2008, and with Dr Hall's retirement, Nicholas taught both courses with a traditional Chinese music alternative to Indonesian gamelan as the main practical component. The ensemble was the beginning of ANU's Chinese Classical Music Ensemble that continues to this day. In 2016 Dr Ng was appointed Tutor of Sydney Conservatorium of Music's Chinese Music Ensemble. This ensemble and ANU's Chinese ensemble have presented a joint public concert in Canberra in 2017.
These two traditional Chinese music ensembles have been built on the foundation laid down by the 1993 visit of Professor Yu and Professor Li. Their visit and the concert were part of a longer chain of events connecting Australia and China through traditional Chinese music, and the events of 1993 were a highlight in this long story. Were it not for Professor Yu and Professor Li, the chain might have been severed or at least weakened.
Following his visit to Australia, Yu Hui went to Wesleyan University in 1994. Upon returning to China, he was appointed Dean of Arts and Music at Shenyang Normal University, Ningbo University and finally Yunnan University. With his international background, he has made several important efforts to promote intercultural exchanges in music and fine arts, including establishing the first gamelan curriculum and jazz program in any comprehensive university in the Chinese mainland.
To my knowledge, Professor Yu is one of very few Chinese scholars of multi-disciplinary ability, who has been trained both in Chinese musicology and Western ethnomusicology in two well-known institutions in China and the US. As his writings in this book testify, his unique training and knowledge enable him to carry out research in multiple fields, including traditional music genres, history, literature, tuning systems and digital musicology, which offers varied perspectives of oriental music from an angle that not many scholars can offer.
Stephen Wild
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal ＆ Torres Strait Islander Studies
Adjunct Professor of Ethnomusicology, Yunnan University of China
Former Vice President and General Secretary of ICTM
Former President of the Musicological Society of Australia