@article{Acoustemologies:1844,
      recid = {1844},
      author = {Hu, Zhuqing},
      title = {From Ut Re Mi to Fourteen-Tone Temperament: The Global  Acoustemologies of an Early Modern Chinese Tuning Reform},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-06},
      pages = {490},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines what is commonly known as the  Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661-1722)’s fourteen-tone temperament,  a 1714 reform to Chinese musical tuning that effectively  uses the familiar Pythagorean proportions to divide the  octave into fourteen parts. Besides examining the  ideological and cultural contexts of the tuning reform and  correcting many long-held misconceptions, I argue that the  reform largely resulted from an epistemological shift that  rearticulated the empirical process of sounding and  listening vis-à-vis the historicist studies of texts and  records in producing musical knowledge. Besides examining  it in the context of traditional Chinese scholarship, I  shed particular light on the transregional and even global  scale of this shift. I argue that the series of experiments  and studies on which the fourteen-tone temperament was  based took place within the specific political structures  of the Qing Empire (1636-1912) as a conquest regime that  subjugated China under its minority Manchu ruling class. I  also show that the shift was itself inspired by a global  exchange of musical knowledge, in which the concept of  octave equivalence in Western music theory was  misunderstood yet appropriated to advocate an empirical  term in music theory and a reform to Chinese opera, both in  turn harnessed for Qing-imperial ideological purposes. What  is more, by comparing the fourteen-tone temperament to  roughly contemporary discourses on texts vs. sounds,  writing vs. speech, and historicism vs. empiricism, both  within the Qing Empire and beyond, I argue that the Qing’s  reform to musical tuning, despite its apparent  parochialism, potentially reflected a much broader  transformation that took place on a global scale, or what I  call the “Phonological Revolution.” In concluding this  dissertation, I make a case for further examining how  seemingly discrete rearticulations of the relation between  historicism and empiricism across different discourses and  praxes of language, music, writing, and songs may reveal a  coeval and co-constitutive epistemological shift on a  global scale in the early modern world.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1844},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1844},
}