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Macau and Catholic Sacred Music Across the Sino-Western Divide
Jen-yen Chen
2026
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For three centuries, the former Portuguese colony of Macau served as the gateway into mainland China and the locale for the development of an Asian Catholic culture that encompassed distinctive musical practices and styles. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide draws extensively upon historical documents in Chinese and Portuguese for a polylingual approach to Catholic sacred music. Jen-yen Chen follows this music from the sixteenth century through the twentieth by reading literary accounts of sound, primary source documents, and musical notation to examine the impacts of linguistic, political, and cultural divides and the ways sounds have traveled across these divides. Chen covers Chinese responses to Western sounds in Macau and southern China, illuminating the strategies for the use of sounds and musicking adopted by Jesuit missionaries; and the complexities of identity formation negotiated by Macau Catholics who confront exceptionalist historical discourses of Chinese or Portuguese “greatness.” Drawing from sound studies and musicological methods, Chen argues that Chinese descriptions of Catholic sounds in Macau, including the ringing of church bells, the playing of the organ, and choral singing, illuminate spatial, sonic, and ideological mobilities that reconfigure Chinese and European identities. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide also extends to contemporary times to explore how present day members of Macau’s Catholic community position themselves in relation to the historical narratives often told about their city, cultivating a rich individuality of identity that refuses conformity to fixed notions of Asianness or Westernness.
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Keywords
- Age of Discovery
- Aureo Castro
- Catholic sacred music
- Catholicism in Asia
- Church of St. Paul
- College of St. Paul
- Doming Lam
- Global music history
- Guangdong
- Jesuits in Asia
- Macau
- Missionaries in Asia
- Multilingualism
- Music and colonialism
- Music and mobility
- Music and post-colonialism
- Seminary of St. Joseph
- Sino-Western exchange
- SinocentrismPortuguese overseas empire
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AV Music
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AV Music::AVA Theory of music and musicology
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AV Music::AVL Music: styles and genres::AVLK Sacred and religious music
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBS Social groups, communities and identities::JBSL Ethnic studies::JBSL1 Ethnic groups and multicultural studies
Links
DOI: 10.3998/mpub.13011740Editions