Naamyam, Creative Music, and Immigrant Act: Meditations on Jon Jang’s Musical Setting of Genny Lim’s “Burial Mound”

Abstract

Abstract Jon Jang, an American composer, bandleader, and activist of Chinese descent, begins his five-movement Island: The Immigrant Suite No. 1 (1995) with a musical setting that is sonically and stylistically unconventional. He introduces a curious adaptation of naamyam (“southern tones”)—a Cantonese genre of narrative singing that originated in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong—into this musical setting of Genny Lim’s Chinglish poem “Burial Mound” so as to make audible the politics of representation concerning Sinophone Americans of particular ancestries, generations, and immigration histories. Not only does he associate this setting with Chinese laborers of the transcontinental railroad and naamyam in American Chinatowns, he also demonstrates in this setting his embrace of “creative music” as an American framework of cultural performance.