This book is an ethnographic study spanning over two decades across East Asia, Europe and North America. It details the significant achievements and challenges of East Asia in Western classical music. 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 few 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 their experiences are further complicated by the broader neoliberal economic environment. This study documents the large number of new orchestras, concert halls, and music competitions that have emerged in East Asia in recent decades. It also explores how these institutions' quest for global recognition is problematized by state ambitions to achieve economic growth by becoming ‘global cultural hubs.’ In terms of conceptual framework, this research adopts an inter-disciplinary approach to extending existing debates and discussions – in Anthropology and other fields – on the notion of precarity in analysing the varied experiences of individuals, corporations and state institutions as precarious entities in search of a sustainable socioeconomic life and stable self-identity 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 the political economy of music, the neoliberal transformations of labour, urban ethnography, the financialization of daily life, the global flows of Asian popular culture, emergent corporate cultures, and the social formations of gender.