Peter Keppy fills an important gap in Anglophone Asian popular music scholarship by investigating the musicians who created hybrid modernist—and, importantly for Keppy, middle-brow—popular music forms in the Philippines and Indonesia during the early twentieth century. Keppy surveys critical journalism in both locations, arguing that the role of interested audiences, or fans, helped shape these newly emergent forms in a mediated form of collaboration with popular artists of the day. Theoretically, he rallies pop cosmopolitanism and participatory pop as theorized by Henry Jenkins, as well as Joel Kahn's idea of popular modernism, to argue for the importance of these “non-elites in actively shaping and engaging in cosmopolitanism and modernity without associations of high culture and elite manipulation” (p. 7).
Keppy first explores the deep relationship between Luis Borromeo, a Filipino from an elite family who was formally trained in classical music, and an audience of middle- and upper-class fans who...
