Music Analysis and the Politics of Knowledge Production: Interculturality in the Music of Honjoh Hidejirō, Miyata Mayumi, and Mitski

This dissertation proposes a framework for analyzing musical interculturality—the processes through which musicians weave together multiple musical and cultural identities through performance—in twenty-first-century music. By attending to the specific sociopolitical contexts of the intercultural environment in which each performer takes part, I challenge multiculturalist assumptions of cultural purity, homogeneity, and authenticity that often undergird music theoretical analyses of non-Western music. My analysis of interculturality centers 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 three 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), performances by shō player Miyata Mayumi (宮田まゆみ), and the music of mixed-race Japanese American singer-songwriter Mitski present heterogeneous possibilities of national and cultural identity. Through close readings of musical recordings, videos, and scores, as well as through interviews and archival work, I demonstrate how cultural and musical identities are constructed through the particular historical and sociopolitical contexts within which performers operate. Focusing on how Honjoh, Miyata, and Mitski complicate and challenge strict dichotomies between Japanese and non-Japanese cultural, national, and musical affiliations, I pay close attention to how intercultural meanings are constructed through their performances, dialogues, and collaborations. 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, Western, and Japanese American as contingent categorizations that do not exist a priori but materialize through musical performance, I draw attention to the distinctive ways in which Honjoh, Miyata, and Mitski engage in intercultural music-making. This dissertation challenges essentialist narratives that continue to assume a rigid and homogeneous view of Japanese culture while fetishizing traditional music as a singular marker of authenticity. Given that oppositional binaries between the West/non-West and cultural insider/outsider continue to shape the interpretation of music by non-white non-Euroamerican musicians, I argue that it is crucial for music analysis to confront and complicate—rather than uncritically affirm—these narratives. First, I problematize monolithic and essentialist conceptions of Japanese music. Through analyses of performers who deviate from these narratives, I disconnect expressions of musical identity from ethno-nationalist assumptions and situate ethnicity as one of many factors that shape cultural identity. Second, I interrogate the underlying epistemological frameworks that produce reductive misrepresentations of Japanese music. This dissertation disrupts the underlying Eurocentric epistemological framework that essentializes—and therefore exerts control over—non-Western cultures. I therefore conceive of interculturality not only as an issue of representation, but also as a strategy for challenging the imposed authority of Western systems of knowledge. Third, by analyzing the agency of performers in negotiating and contesting dominant narratives of Japanese ethnic, cultural, and musical identity, I approach interculturality as an embodied and lived phenomenon rather than as only an intellectual analytical endeavor

Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization

Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally - a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st century. Christian Utz provides the foundations of a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. The relationship between music and broader changes in society forms the central focus and is treated as a pivotal music-historical dynamic

The Performance and Patronage of Baloch Culture through Music (and Related Arts) in the Eastern Arabian Peninsula

This dissertation is a study of Baloch musical—and ritual—idioms as cultivated (and variously innovated, embellished, patronized, and reconstructed) in the relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environments of the coastal Eastern Arabian Peninsula—the third major concentration of Baloch population after Balochistan and Karachi. Due to historical and geographic particulars, the origins of Peninsular Baloch communities lie primarily in the Makran region that extends along the Arabian Sea coast and across the political boundary separating Iran and Pakistan. If musical activities play a significant role in orienting Baloch communities socially and politically, what are the presentational strategies implied in the foregrounding of specific performance genres and how do social dynamics structure the relationships between performers, patrons, connoisseurs, poets, and publics? Relying on data from a series of fieldwork residencies from 2014-2017 in Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, I give close attention to the internal diversity in values, outlooks, and expressive domains found within Baloch communities as well as to relationships between Baloch and the other cultural groups that contribute to the demographic make-up of the region. In addition to its focus on musical genres and aesthetics, this is a multidimensional study of intellectual and literary activity. As cultural activism, the patronage and promotion of musical idioms is central to preserving and amplifying a traditionalist cultural consciousness as well as to framing impassioned contemporary political expression. This dissertation contributes to extant studies of Makrani Baloch music and culture and speaks to a growing interest in the political and ethnographic character of Baloch society in the Gulf states, adding an in-depth study of cultural performance to the handful of survey articles by distinguished scholars (Jahani 2014, Peterson 2013, al-Ameeri 2003). This work also contributes substantially to ethnomusicological scholarship on the Persian Gulf region as a complex and highly interactive sphere of culture and can be counted as one of many projects that address flows of culture that intersect in different ways across the Indian Ocean

Dynamics of Religion

RGVV(History of Religion: Essays and Preliminary Studies) brings together the mutually constitutive aspects of the study of religion(s)—contextualized data, theory, and disciplinary positioning—and engages them from a critical historical perspective. The series publishes monographs and thematically focused edited volumes on specific topics and cases as well as comparative work across historical periods from the ancient world to the modern era

Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin

Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A Neuchâtel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to Neuchâtel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics. During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the ‘East Indies’). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin