The performance of ‘Chinese music’ in Australian has a long and varied history. Performances of sonic arts which display a Chinese origin or connection range across various genres including classical, folk, opera, popular and sacred music. The performers are and have been equally diverse, including immigrants, international students, visiting artists and cosmopolitans from mainland China, the Sinosphere and the population of ‘Chinese overseas’, as well as people born or permanently residing in Australia of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage. This chapter focuses on contemporary practice of different genres and on ethnographic examples from our own experience, but as space and historical records allow, we also look back in time. Our discussion illustrates some of the main ways that music has served to enhance social connections within and beyond Australia’s Chinese community, including within an Australian sociocultural fabric that has increasingly acknowledged and valued cultural diversity and multiplicities of cultural identity.

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.