Lüju (lü opera) of Shandong province as the major regional operatic genre and folk tradition in contemporary China, has been transformed and reconstructed as cultural heritage, educational, and propaganda tools of the party-state, attractions of cultural tourism, and trigger of nostalgic desires of both cultural practitioners and experiencers. In this sense, lüju theaters, museums, state-owned and founded troupes, and educational institutes have become the sites of memory, entangling with multiple actors and forces from political entities, cultural economy, and local initiatives. Those memory institutions insofar as vehicles participate in renewing and recycling the musical past and performing the cultural identity of Chinese society.
In this new cultural realm, the voices of individuals, who are the lüju fans, are rarely inscribed into the memory sites and official historiographies. Intending to anchor their voices, the lüju fans, especially the young generation, turn to social media. They built "digital archives" upon the Internet through remediating and recollecting memories and resources of lüju from various established mediums, including oral transmissions, onstage performances, opera films, recordings, and theatrical materials. The actions of lüju fans facilitate the formation of "digital cultural memory" of a musical tradition and enact intersubjectivities in their online and offline interactions. This article excavates the lüju fans in refashioning a folk tradition to inscribe their memories and voices into digital networked media and generate new circulations of lüju bypass the predominated metaphors of Chinese traditional music as the musemized past and national cultural heritage. Taken together, exploring the entanglements and contestations of the individual remembering and memory institutions as musical-memory-making processes are realigning sonic manifestation and memoryscape in contemporary China.
