Catholic Music in the Snowlands of China: Sound, Ritual, and History in Tibetan Regions

note: translation during the post-talk Q&A (English-Chinese) will be facilitated by Karen Shi, an MA student in East Asian Studies.

A different history of Tibet, revealed through music and ritual.

This lecture draws on long-term fieldwork in Tibetan regions of China and focuses on a Catholic community that has sustained a distinctive musical and ritual tradition for over a century. Rather than treating Tibet as a single religious landscape, the lecture approaches it through sound and ritual, bringing into view historical layers that are not fully captured in written sources.

At the center is a rare music manuscript over one hundred years old, written in French, Latin, and Tibetan and notated in four-line staff notation. Discovered during fieldwork, it provides direct evidence of how Catholic chant entered a Tibetan context and was incorporated into local ritual life.

By bringing together field observation and historical materials, the lecture considers how such evidence reshapes existing narratives and reveals a more complex picture of religion and culture in Tibetan regions of China.

About the speaker:
Chenhui Sun (孙晨荟) is a musicologist and performer, a professor at the Institute of Music in the Chinese National Academy of Arts, and a 2026 visiting scholar at the Duke Divinity School.

Her research focuses on Chinese Christian music, Chinese traditional music, and Sino-Western musical exchange, bringing together fieldwork, archival research, and musical practice. She is the author of several award-winning monographs, held in over two hundred libraries worldwide, and a contributor to "The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China," with a chapter on Chinese church music.

She has conceived and participated in the large-scale concert Sacred Music in China since the Tang Dynasty, and has taught courses such as "History of Christian Music" and "Chinese Christian Music" at universities and seminaries in China and abroad.

Abstract and speaker information in Chinese:
本讲座基于作者在中国藏区开展的长期田野调查，聚焦一个延续逾百年的藏族天主教社区及其音乐与礼仪传统。讲座不将藏地视为单一宗教空间，而是以声音与礼仪为线索，呈现那些未被文本充分记录的历史层次。

田野中发现的一份百年音乐手稿，以法文、拉丁文与藏文并置书写，并采用四线谱记录，为天主教圣咏进入藏地并在当地礼仪中被实践提供了直接证据。通过结合田野观察与历史文献，讲座将讨论：这些具体材料如何构成对既有历史叙述的补充与修正，并呈现一个更为复杂的藏地宗教与文化图景。

音乐学者、演奏家，现任中国艺术研究院音乐研究所教授，杜克大学神学院访问学者。 研究方向为中国基督教音乐、中国传统音乐及中西音乐交流，结合田野调查、文献研究与音乐实践展开相关工作。出版多部获奖学术专著，被全球二百余所图书馆收藏，并为学术权威著作 The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China 撰写"中国教会音乐"相关章节。曾策划并参与"唐代以来的中国圣乐"大型学术音乐会，长期在国内外高校及神学院讲授《基督宗教音乐史》、《中国基督教音乐》等课程。