Wang Guangqi

Wang Guangqi was a Chinese musicologist born in Wenjiang, Sichuan Province, in 1892, who died in Bonn in January 1936. His career sits at the crossroads between early twentieth-century China, marked by social upheaval, and the growing interest in music as an academic discipline. He is regarded as the founder of comparative musicology in China, and his work built bridges in both directions between East and West.

As a young man he took part in various social movements in Sichuan and, from 1914 to 1918, studied law at Zhongguo University in Beijing. In 1918 he founded the Young China Association, which was oriented towards social reform, and during the May Fourth Movement of 1919 he stood out as an influential essayist and journalist. He also promoted a short-lived utopian project, the Mutual Aid Group for Work and Study, which aimed to spread a new style of urban life. After this initiative failed, he travelled to Germany in 1920 as a journalist, intending to study social reform, but he was soon drawn to music, on which he was already writing in 1923.

In 1927 he enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he worked with Ludwig Schiedermair, Erich von Hornbostel, I. Schmitt and Curt Sachs. In 1934 he obtained his doctorate in musicology from the University of Bonn, formally the Friedrich Wilhelm University. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he published numerous texts aimed at both Chinese and Western readers; he was the first scholar to present European music systematically in China and Chinese music in Europe. His works include a history of Chinese music (1934), a study of classical Chinese opera published in Geneva, and several treatises on poetic metre and the transcription of qin tablature.

His legacy lies in combining a profound knowledge of the Chinese musical tradition with a Western training in comparative musicology. His writings, reissued in China in the 1980s and 1990s, remain a reference point for the study of Chinese music from a comparative perspective.