IN technologically-advanced modern urban China, why would a young teenager wish to join the archaic world of Beijing Opera? For most Chinese it is a difficult art to accept, but for some it remains irresistibly fascinating, and both in the People's Republic and among expatriate Chinese it has a small but fiercely loyal following. While neophytes may respond to its visual exoticism, connoisseurs, like Western opera buffs, will already be familiar with their favourite operas and performers, savouring every gesture and eye movement, every syllable whether spoken or sung, and every twist and turn in the stories.

English lacks a good translation for what the Chinese call xiju. Customarily we translate this as ‘opera’, but that term carries inappropriate baggage from European tradition. Calling it ‘theatre’ suggests spoken drama, and calling it ‘musical theatre’ evokes images from Gilbert and Sullivan or the Broadway musical. None conveys the essence, because Chinese xiju is an amalgam of acting, singing, acrobatics, the visual arts and theatre. Lacking an alternative, we will follow convention in calling it ‘opera’.

▪ History

To address the question of whether any music in mainland Southeast Asia can be called ‘classical’, we must first consider the term. ‘Classical’ is an English word that not only denotes a vast corpus of European and American music but carries connotations of hierarchy, value and sophistication. Applied to music in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam, it risks creating inappropriate associations, especially in the case of Vietnam, yet commentators from both Southeast Asia and elsewhere have long used ‘classical’ to describe this music. Just as the European elite were the patrons of Western classical music, in Southeast Asia the aristocracy, and especially the extended royal family, performed this function too. Add to that local perceptions of this music in those same terms of hierarchy, value and sophistication, and you may conclude that ‘Thai classical’ and ‘Lao classical’ are indeed appropriate.

THIS book is a team effort, driven by a shared desire to illuminate and celebrate the world's great classical traditions. Its ancestry as a piece of crosscultural musical analysis goes back a thousand years, to the ‘science of music’ of the medieval Arab theorists. Its European precursors include the sixteenthcentury Swiss theologian Jean de Léry, who notated antiphonal singing in Brazil, and the Moldavian polymath Prince Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) who was enslaved by the Ottomans in Istanbul, became a de facto Turkish composer, and created the first notation for Turkish makam; also Captain James Cook, who made detailed descriptions of the music and dance of Pacific islanders in 1784. Meanwhile Chinese music was being admiringly analysed by French Jesuit missionaries – Chinese theorists had beaten their European counterparts in the race to solve the mathematics of equal temperament – and other Frenchmen were investigating the music of the Arab world. While serving on Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, Guillaume-André Villoteau made studies of Arab folk and art music, before going on to contrast those with the music of Greece and Armenia; his theories were then contested by the French composer Francesco Salvador-Daniel, who after a twelve-year musical sojourn in Algeria concluded, among other things, that Arab and Greek modes were one and the same. Long before ‘ethnomusicology’ was born in academe, the game was well established.

In recent years the ethnomusicologists’ findings have been magisterially presented in two great publications: in the ten massive volumes of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and scattered through the twenty-nine volumes of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But our book is, we believe, the first panoptic survey of the world's classical musics (I explain in the Introduction why we have settled on that somewhat contentious adjective). Although much of its information may also be found in Grove and Garland – many of its writers were contributors to, or editors on, those projects – its tight focus permits presentation in a single volume, rather than scattered through a six-foot shelf of tomes.

As editor I am deeply indebted to my writers, who have patiently put their chapters through numerous drafts in pursuit of non-academic accessibility, while in no way traducing their (often very complicated) subject-matter. I must particularly thank Terry Miller, whose resourceful problem-solving assistance has extended far beyond his own signed contributions; also his colleague Andrew Shahriari, for additional information on Persian classical music.