China’s First Recital and Recording Pianist Ding Shande: A Critical Examination of His Performing Career and Performance Style DANNY ZHOU Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China Abstract Musical biography, particularly that which focuses on non-Western performers, has long been mar- ginalized in musicology. This article critically examines the performing career and performance style of China’s first recital and recording pianist, Ding Shande, by scrutinizing written documents and analysing recordings. It was found that Ding’s performing career was short-lived, peaking in 1935 and ending in the 1950s, and that he tended to play with fast and even tempo, emphasize metrical organizations, and highlight structural divisions through long-range dynamic variation. These findings shed light on how the changing concept of semi-colonialism influenced the career trajectories and performance styles of the earliest Chinese pianists, and hence offer insights into early history of piano performance in China. This article shows that performers’ performances are just as important in biographical writings as is the story of their lives, and that interweaving the two helps develop a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of a performer’s biography. Introduction The writing of biographies of musicians has been a standard dimension of musical study since its inception. 1 However, accused of addressing the popular market, musical biography has long been a peripheral genre of musicology. 2 Recent research identifies it as an important area that remains to be explored. Christopher Wiley and Paul Watt suggest that musical biog- raphy is ‘a significant gap in existing scholarly discourse . . . [and] can and should be front and center of the musicological arena’. 3 Having reviewed a substantial body of literature, they con- clude that ‘there is still much more work to be undertaken in the area, especially in relation to the complexity – and also the nuances – of the methods utilized in musical biography’. 4 Among the variety of approaches to musical biography, those that interweave the life and per- formance of individual performers, as opposed to composers, are particularly neglected and Email: prof.dannyzhou@hotmail.com 1 David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2004), 19. 2 Christopher Wiley and Paul Watt, ‘Musical Biography in the Musicological Arena’, Journal of Musicological Research 38/3–4 (2019), 187. 3 Wiley and Watt, ‘Musical Biography’, 190 and 192. 4 Wiley and Watt, ‘Musical Biography’, 189. Twentieth-Century Music 20/2, 187–214 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press doi: 10.1017/S1478572222000330 187 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572222000330 Published online by Cambridge University Press