Martial Sound

Abstract Martial Sound is an ethnographic book examining the music of traditional Chinese martial arts. More specifically, the book investigates the gong and drum percussion used to accompany the lion dance and kung fu, as practised by the Hong Luck Kung Fu Club in Toronto, Canada. Hong Luck’s history and character are distinctive, but the club’s practices and approaches are typical of many styles of Southern Chinese martial arts, both in China and abroad. The book proposes a theory of martial sound, which is the way we can hear music as martial arts and listen to hand combat as musicking, providing a way of discussing fighting rhythms in musical terms and a conceptual framework for analyzing how music can function as a form of self-defence. Participant-observation fieldwork for the book was undertaken over the course of eight years and spanned a time of significant transition. Both of the founding masters passed away, marking the end of an era and a time of reflection for the membership. The first female lion dancers also began performing during the fieldwork period, which reconfigured traditional constructions of gender. The book argues that while kung fu practitioners have traditionally used their interdisciplinary performances as a ritual to disperse negative energy for patrons, they extend that martial function in diaspora to become an empowering performance that challenges a history of race-based discrimination in Canada. Some audiences, however, now treat the ritual as an entertaining performance or a marker of identity, revealing multivalent meanings.