WE'RE ALL APPLIED ETHNOMUSICOLOGISTS NOW: THE CASE OF THE CHINESE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT COLLECTION AT THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG AND ITS DATABASE PROJECT

It is commonplace to acknowledge that musical instruments provide an important and unique source for ethnomusicological studies, making it essential for us to document, research, and learn to perform during our fieldwork. But what should we do if we inherit a stock of instruments at our home institute that were not collected from the field, yet remain undocumented and unstudied systematically? No doubt one would suggest beginning work on them as soon as possible, but the question is 'how?' By using the Chinese instrument collection in the Music Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an example, this paper shows how studying instrument collections in our own institutions can offer valuable information as well as stories about a historical past that may have been previously unknown. At the same time, it raises a challenge to, and a critical question about, our ethnomusicological nature: how can we balance or make sense of the 'pure' and 'applied' aspects of the field? The instruments embody not only an individual agenda and research idea, but also the collective memories and histories of institutions, captured through the process of collecting. This paper reports on several stages and outcomes of a project that involved our own students and department members contributing collectively to a project revolving around the instrument collection. The plan included a postgraduate seminar, a catalogue publication entitled Captured Memories of a Fading Musical Past: The Chinese Instrument Collection at the Music Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2010), individual and group research, and an online database. The case touches on several research issues including the preservation, interpretation, translation and knowledge transfer of 'musical culture' in the age of globalisation, and the associated knowledge produced by academic institutions by means of musical instruments. This study explores a case of applied ethnomusicology; that is, researchers not thinking 'for' the community but putting ourselves 'in' the centre of the community. It further encourages us to consider how to make ethnomusicology not merely a discipline for the study of distant indigenous cultures, but one that is meaningful for our own institutions and for ourselves.