The Shanghai Conservatory of Music and its Rhetoric: Building a World Class Musical Institution with Chinese Characteristics

ABSTRACT: The Shanghai Conservatory of Music has as its principal mission the production of world class performers of “Western classical music” through a highly competitive training programme. This process of “globalisation” involves measures that are more explicit and more developed than in European or North American conservatories. The apparent absence of culturally-specific differences in this globalised model is more subtle than meets the eye, however. The globalisation is only partial, targeted, and above all accompanied by a form of appropriation involving two distinct mechanisms: the one devoted to the development and transmission of a standardised international performance technique, and the other concerned with the composition of pieces with particular Chinese characteristics, putting a nationalist discourse into music. KEYWORDS: Shanghai Conservatory, Western classical music, globalisation, institutional rhetoric, nationalism, songs.