Why do so many Asians devote their lives to playing Western classical music?

New from Temple University Press:

Now Available in Paperback:
Musicians from a Different Shore
Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music
Mari Yoshihara


Publication Date: November 10, 2008
288 pp., 18 halftones, 6 x 9 "
paper 978-1-59213-333-8 $22.95

Why do so many Asians devote their lives to playing Western classical music?

"[A] comprehensive cultural, historical and ethnographic study of Asians and Asian-Americans who pursue Western classical music in the United States’Ķ[a] probing authoritative survey." ’ÄìPublishers Weekly

"[Yoshihara] offers stunning insights, the most powerful of which concerns the ways in which Asian musicians have reinvented the Western repertoire." ’ÄìLeon Botstein, President of Bard College

Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories and classical music performance competitions, In Musicians from a Different Shore: Asian Americans in Classical Music (Publication Date, November 10, 2008), Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at age 3. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households, established Yamaha as the world's largest producer of pianos, and gave the Suzuki method of music training an international clientele.

Against this historical backdrop, she interviews Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan and Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be. Their personal histories and Yoshihara's observations present a snapshot of today's dynamic and revived classical music scene.

Mari Yoshihara is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is the author of Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism.