Public seminar: Morton Wan (University of Oxford)

Biography

Morton Wan writes about political economy and music across a range of historical and cultural settings, from the financial crises of eighteenth-century Europe to the global supply chains that have made the piano “Chinese.” These projects converge in examining music’s embeddedness in the economic realities and imaginaries of its time, and in showing how music can prompt us to think anew about the history of global capitalism. He took his PhD at Cornell, where his dissertation won the Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize. Since 2025 he has been a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford.

Abstract

In 1897 S. Moutrie & Co., an English firm that had sold European pianos in Shanghai for more than two decades, began manufacturing instruments under its own brand. Its Chinese name, Moudeli 謀得利, “scheming for profit,” was unabashed about the enterprise: source globally, manufacture locally, and undersell imports. Even before its first piano left the factory, the venture had attracted international attention. In the US Senate, a Colorado silverite held it up as alarming evidence that the gold standard was hastening Western deindustrialization and threatening manufacturers at home.

What did it take to make a piano in China? Rather than approach the instrument through the familiar paradigms of cultural diffusion, colonial imposition, or indigenous imitation, this lecture follows three intertwined histories of money, materials, and labor that made its manufacture possible. First, silver: as Europe and the United States moved to gold, silver depreciated, giving firms that manufactured in silver-using China a ready arbitrage and a cost advantage. Second, timber: through expanding imperial networks of extraction and trade, Moutrie sourced Siamese teak, Japanese beech, and British Columbian fir from British importers and Chinese compradors. The firm selected these disparate woods and worked them into pianos designed to withstand the demanding climates of the colonial markets they were bound for. Finally, labor: Moutrie employed Chinese workers who adapted their established skills in joinery and lacquerwork to the new demands of piano manufacture. Yet even as the firm relied on their craftsmanship, it barred them from tuning, voicing, and fitting the action, guarding the proprietary know-how against what it feared as technology leakage.

Bringing these financial, ecological, and social histories together, the lecture asks what kind of global capitalism Moutrie’s pianos reveal. Drawing on Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s account of capitalism as a patchy assemblage of uneven, improvised, and interdependent economic worlds, I argue that the first piano made in China was no European artifact simply transplanted to Asia and reproduced. It was global in its very making. Moutrie’s pianos thus expose both the promises and perils of Shanghai’s semi-colonial economy, while unsettling the diffusionist geography that has long governed the piano’s global history. By following the instrument through its supply chains, this lecture proposes a different cartography of musical globalization.