I thought I was imagining things at first.
Shortly after I moved to Durham, North Carolina, in March 2020, I began hearing The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto whenever I walked around the neighborhood. It was always only the first ten or so minutes of the first movement: the trilling flute, then the oboe tenderly soloing over lush strings, the violin's glissando into a D—I could almost feel my left hand sliding into third position for that note, even though it had been more than a decade.
In my professional life as an ethnomusicologist, I think and write about how people listen to the din of everyday life in Sinophone Toronto. I spend a lot time treading the conceptual edges of “Chinese” and “sound.” But even with the saturation of sound bites about China in early pandemic days, it still seemed odd that I would be hearing (or dreaming) the Butterfly...