Events

Time: Friday, June 30, 2023, from 5:00PM to 6:30PM (JST)
Venue: DAICEL Studio, 1st floor of Science Commons Bld. (Center for Education in Liberal Arts and Sciences),Osaka University Toyonaka Campus (and online via Zoom)
Languages: Presentation will be held in English. Discussion will be held in both English and Japanese.

Registration:Please register fromthe URL or QR code on the flyer by June 28, 3:00 PM. The registration period for this event has ended.

【Presentation】
Toru, MOMII (Assistant Professor, Harvard University)

【Discussant】
WAJIMA Yusuke (Professor, Osaka University)
SUZUKI Seiko (Assistant Professor, Osaka University)

【Abstract】
This talk proposes a framework for understanding, analyzing, and listening to musical interculturality—the processes through which musicians negotiate multiple musical and cultural identities through performance—in twenty-first-century music. This analytical orientation, which I call intercultural analysis, challenges multiculturalist assumptions of cultural purity, homogeneity, and authenticity that often undergird music theoretical analyses of non-Western music. My analysis of interculturality focuses on musicians whose work risks being excluded from nation-state-based conceptions of cultural authenticity that have dominated music theoretical work on non-Western music. Through two case studies of active Japanese musicians, I explore how a collaborative project between shamisen player Honjoh Hidejirō 本條秀慈郎 and composer Fujikura Dai 藤倉大, and performances by shō player Miyata Mayumi 宮田まゆみ, challenge strict dichotomies between Japanese and non-Japanese cultural, national, and musical affiliations. In each case study, I argue that an analysis of interculturality necessitates a flexible, interdisciplinary, and transnational methodology that is tailored to the precise historical and sociopolitical circumstances in which the music is being created, performed, and interpreted. By understanding characterizations of “Japanese” and “Western” as contingent categorizations that do not exist a priori but materialize through musical performance, I draw attention to the distinctive ways in which Honjoh and Miyata engage in intercultural music-making.