Ya-Hui Cheng examines the emergence of popular music genres – jazz, rock, and hip-hop – in Chinese society, covering the social underpinnings that shaped the development of popular music in China and Taiwan, from imperialism to westernization and from modernization to globalization. The political sensitivities across the strait have long eclipsed the discussion of these shared sonic intimacies. It was not until the rise of the digital age, when entertainment programs from China and Taiwan reached social media on a global scale, that audiences realized the existence of this sonic reciprocation. Analyzing Chinese pentatonicism and popular songs published from 1927 to the present, this book discusses structural elements in Chinese popular music to show how they aligned closely with Chinese folk traditions. While the influences from Western genres are inevitable under the phenomenon of globalization, Chinese songwriters utilized these Western inspirations to modernize their musical traditions. It is a sensitivity for exhibiting cultural identities that enabled popular music to present a unique Chinese global image while transcending political discord and unifying mass cultures across the strait.

This book explores the postmodernist aspects of Puccini's operas and focuses on his female protagonists-Mim�, Musetta, Tosca, Butterfly, Turandot and Li. Combining a Schenkerian analysis with dualism, I present their complementary dialogue in my analysis. Mim� focuses on the subdominant to present her futile attempts to escape from death. The subdominant in Musetta displays her attractiveness. Tosca concentrates on the submediant that presents the boundary of her world. Floria Tosca can do no harm to anyone. Yet, the diva will act out through the device of deceptive motion killing Scarpia. Butterfly is both an insider and outsider in her life. The Japanese Ying and Yang system portrays that she can never abandon her inherent Japanese identity. Turandot explores Western tonality as it is interwoven with the Chinese pentatonic system and demonstrates how Turnadot is possessed by Lo-u-Ling. Li's sacrifice is prefigured through pseudo-pentatonic writing. The book concludes with an examination of Puccini's overall harmonic evolution, showing how weakened hierarchic relationships in the music of these six female characters allows exotic borrowings to be subsumed in a tonal framework.