Chien-chang Yang

Chien-Chang Yang has held teaching and research positions at National Chiao Tung University and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, before joining the faculty of National Taiwan University in 2006. He earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2002 with the dissertation, “Music as Knowledge: The Foundation of GermanMusikwissenschaft and Hugo Riemann’s Theory of Listening,” which won research grant support from the DAAD and the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation. He has published and presented scholarly papers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and the United States. His research areas include the intellectual history of music, critical theory, music historiography, and issues related to musical modernity. Chien-Chang Yang focuses his studies on the question of musical modernity in three directions.

(1) By examining writings on music psychology, physiology, and philosophy, he proposes that the view of music as energy was one of the starting point of music’s gradual departure from a linguistic model around the year 1800 that made the idea of autonomous or absolute music possible.
(2) Through a theoretical re-examinations on the idea of musical technics, he also proposes to view musical technology from a broader historical and social co-operation which is impossible to consider from a pure musical point of view.
(3) His recent research also involves in a rethinking of the historical writings in the 20th century music.

In particular, he argues that it is necessary to view the contemporaneous events as co-eval history so that to avoid a Eurocentric historiography. Chien-Chang Yang’s recent research topics include the interaction between experimental sciences and music aesthetics in the late 18th century, Adorno’s conceptions of historical time and compositional techniques, and historiography of 20th-century music.