| This thesis examines cultural performances of music in Taiwan in the arena of the music and entertainment industries during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) in Taiwan. This was a period of tremendous change as the Japanese government took political and economic control over the island, implementing new educational and cultural policies but also bringing with it Japanese companies, policies and institutional structures. I argue that musical recordings, performances, and discourse in this period reflect the complex ways that Taiwanese social actors negotiated changes in music making and in society. People working within the music industry both responded to and mediated changes---including new forms of technology, artistic forms, media, and institutions---in relation to contemporary discourses of modernity, colonialism, and nationalism. I employ a performance-centered approach to examine historical music recordings from the period and the intertextual relations between texts. My aim is to understand the ways that cultural specialists, particularly female performers, negotiated these broad social, ideological, and artistic transformations (including new musical genres and changes in the technologies and institutions of recording and performance) and how these, in turn, transformed the roles and status of female performers in the Taiwanese musical world during the colonial period. |
