This book is an ethnographic study spanning more than two decades in East Asia – China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan – and several cities in Europe. The research details the significant achievements of, and the challenges experienced by, East Asia in Western classical music over the past few decades. There has been a phenomenal increase in the number of East Asians graduating from music conservatories in Europe and the US, and East Asian prizewinners in international music competitions. Yet very little scholarly works have examined the socio-cultural processes that underpin the hopes, desires, struggles and conflicts in the lives of individuals and families in relation to prevailing gender role expectations, or how the challenges they face are further complicated by the broader neoliberal economic environment. Together with the above, this book also meticulously documents the large number of new orchestras, concert halls, and music competitions that have emerged in East Asia over the past decades and explores the range of challenges and conflicts encountered by these institutions in their quest for global recognition that were problematized by the desire of East Asian states to drive economic growth by becoming ‘global cultural hubs.’ In terms of conceptual framework, this study adopts an inter-disciplinary approach to extending existing debates and discussions – in Anthropology and other fields – on the notion of precarity by examining the uncertainties and difficulties experienced not only by individuals and families in East Asia as workers trying to establish a steady socioeconomic life and stable self-identity, but also by organizations – corporations and state institutions – as precarious entities in search of security and sustainability of their operations and status in the global classical music industry.

Swee-Lin Ho is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include urban transformations in Asia; fieldwork methods; the global financial markets and increasing financialization of daily life; the global flows of Asian popular culture; emergent corporate cultures; changing labour practices; the commercialization of intimacy; political economy of sexuality; and social formations of gender.