This course explains tonal and melodic correlations between Cantonese language and Cantonese music and accounts for their socio-cultural and political meanings. Using these correlations as a methodological basis, the course provides an historical overview of Cantonese music, from early nineteenth-century Canton to early twentieth-first century Cantonese regions (including Hong Kong, Guangdong, and parts of San Francisco, Vancouver, and New York). The course ends with positioning the broadly defined Cantonese music in the twenty-first century global context.
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In the media
Interview with Dr. Hedy Law (PRESS MINI)
Learning a new language – your mother tongue (On The Coast with Gloria Macarenko)
Cantopop ballad with COVID-19 twist co-written by UBC contest winner (CBC)
Around the World in Six Tones: Exploring the Global Phenomenon of Cantonese Music (UBC High Notes Blog)
UBC大學廣東話音樂課程 (part 2 | 3) (Fairchild TV)
卑大明秋辦粵語音樂課英語教授 讓不同背景學生了解粵語文化 (Ming Pao Daily [Vancouver])
Instructor
Hedy Law graduated from the University of Chicago in 2007 with a Ph.D. in Music History and Theory. In 2005 she received the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship of the American Musicological Society. In the same year she won the best student paper of the Midwest chapter of the American Musicology Society. She was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago from 2007 to 2009. From 2009 to 2012, she was Assistant Professor in Music History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she won a university-wide teaching award. Dr. Law’s essays have appeared in Cambridge Opera Journal, Musique et Geste en France: De Lully à la Révolution, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Censorship, and The Opera Quarterly. She is currently working on a book on music, pantomime, and freedom in eighteenth-century France.