Anna Yu Wang Is Making the Study of Music More Inclusive

Anna Yu Wang originally thought she’d follow in her parents’ footsteps — her father is a physicist and her mother was a computer programmer — and become a professor in a STEM field. But Yu Wang’s plan changed one day in 10th grade, when, on a whim, she decided to turn up the volume on a CD that her longtime piano teacher had given her. 

“I never did that before because I wanted to protect my hearing,” she says. “But I did it that day, and I felt like I heard colors I’d never heard before. It was like an entire palette just opened up to my senses. I was really enchanted by those sounds — and I wanted to center my life around music.” And so she did — Yu Wang went on to study piano performance, and music theory andanalysis, at McGill University and earn her Ph.D. in music theory from Harvard. Now at Princeton, her research focuses on diversifying music theory and listening across cultural lines. 

“What matters most to music theorists in the U.S. may not be what matters to music theorists in, for example, China,” she explains. “Seeing how those answers vary, yet also resonate with each other, can open up the questions we ask as a field and also challenge us to develop different methodologies and networks of collaboration to work on those questions.”

Quick Facts

Title
Assistant Professor of Music

Time at Princeton
1 year

Recent Class
Topics in Global Music Theory

Yu Wang’s Research A Sampling 

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Illustration by Mikel Casal

Diversifying The Language of Music 

From notes and scales to rhythm and harmony, music theory is the terminology used to help musicians interpret pieces and share perspectives. Yet research in music theory traditionally is written only in German and sometimes French. To diversify and broaden this repertoire of ideas, Yu Wang has partnered with several professors around the globe to create a “multilingual platform” that will offer both human and computer-assisted translations of sources. Called Music Theory in the Plural, the project aims to accommodate and encourage a truly global discourse about music. She says: “What is really exciting about this project is that inevitably it will also challenge our preconceived notions of what music theory is.”

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Illustration by Mikel Casal

Learning To Listen

In graduate school, despite having studied music intensively for years, Yu Wang realized she felt ill equipped to understand the music of her ancestry: Huangmei opera, a music theatrical tradition with roots in Anhui province, China. “It was my grandmother’s favorite music, but I couldn’t begin to wrap my ear around what was going on in it,” she says. “I wanted to get to the bottom of why it is that music theory, the kind of music theory that I’d been learning for so many years, doesn’t do justice to music that my grandmother loves.” For her dissertation, which she is now converting into a book, Yu Wang interviewed practitioners of Huangmei opera, as well as Taiwanese opera, to develop key language and principles for appreciating, analyzing, and discussing these Sinitic operas.

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Illustration by Mikel Casal

Hard To Hear

Yu Wang began to wonder whether there were parallels between political, racial, and cultural polarization in the U.S. and the struggle to fully understand music from different cultures. “I am looking into the notion of sensibility and having our sensibilities offended. That happens both musically, in the aesthetic world, and in the political world,” she says, noting her own initial difficulty in appreciating Huangmei opera. Her current project focuses on developing strategies for listening to and engaging with content that challenges us. “I’ve been interviewing political figures, community leaders — people who make their living thinking about how to listen across those lines of difference.”