Beth Szczepanski

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.

My research focuses on Chinese Buddhist music. My book, The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan’s Buddhist Monasteries: Social and Ritual Contexts, was published by Ashgate in March of 2012. The book incorporates data I gathered in interviews with monks, pilgrims, and tourists during eleven months of field research in 2006 and 2007 as well as the work of Western and Chinese musicologists, historians, and Buddhist scholars. I examine how Wutaishan's monastic instrumental music has adapted to rapidly changing economic, political and social circumstances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how it continues to evolve to fulfill new political and economic functions in modern China.

I am currently working on a new project exploring the roles of music in efforts to spread Chinese Buddhism in the West.