Decentering Gagaku. Exploring the multiplicity of contemporary Japanese Court music

The word gagaku indicates a vast repertoire of music and dances brought to Japan through the Silk Roads from the 6th century CE. Japanese conservative intellectuals and international organizations like UNESCO often portray gagaku as timeless and immutable, equating it with the music performed by the Japanese Imperial Household. But gagaku is much more than “Japanese court music”. This thesis offers an alternative perspective on gagaku, presenting it as a “multiple object”, a dynamic genre with porous boundaries. The examination of the activities of professional musicians in Tokyo and of amateur practitioners in Kansai at the end of the 19th century forms the basis for two ethnographic sketches of gagaku in contemporary Japan: a portrait of Nanto gakuso, an amateur group based in Nara; and a discussion of the dispute concerning the threat to the materials used in the making of a gagaku instrument by the construction of a highway between Kyoto and Osaka. Theoretically ambitious and based on over two years of apprenticeship, this thesis skillfully combines historical, musicological, and anthropological approaches to music. Advocating a new ontological paradigm for the study of gagaku, it proposes to shift the question from what music is to what music can do.The Japan FoundationAsian Studie

Eremitic landscape dwelling in Confucian China and Enlightenment Europe: structuring the moral self in reclusion and performing public duty

This thesis explores how the experience of reclusion in free landscapes and private gardens of Confucian China and Enlightenment Europe contributed to people’s moral improvement by cultivating good passions such as temperance, encouraging introspection, increasing the sense of responsibility towards society and rendering erudite individuals prompt to perform their public duty as politicians and civil servants. The thesis is based on the comparative analysis of philosophical concepts, works of art, poems and cultural practices in order to highlight the similarities and divergences between Chinese and European – particularly British and French - eremitic landscape dwelling. Taking into account the historical context in which two important systems of thought were developed in different geographic regions, the research brings together the state-sanctioned Confucian ethics with Enlightenment Deism which, inspired by Roman Stoics, played a pivotal role in the promulgation of reclusive landscape culture and the creation of non-geometrical gardens used as retreats in the eighteenth-century Europe. Investigating human relationships with the natural environment and organized society, as well as views on interpersonal relationships, established religion and matters of cultural heritage, the thesis shows that gardens where Confucian literati and socially privileged Europeans, who had espoused Enlightenment ideals, liked to retire comprised mediating spaces between the private realm and the public sphere, solitude and public action. Eremitic landscape dwelling did not derive from a sentiment of contempt for the world or from a selfish desire to avoid hardships. Rather, this noble form of reclusion whose purpose was the cultivation of virtue and humaneness revolved around the greatest interest of individuals and the welfare of society

Chinese elements : a bridge of the integration between Chinese -English translation and linguaculture transnational mobility

[Abstract] As the popularity of Chinese elements in the innovation of the translation part in Chinese CET, we realized that Chinese elements have become a bridge between linguaculture transnational mobility and Chinese-English translation.So, Chinese students translation skills should be critically improved; for example, on their understanding about Chinese culture, especially the meaning of Chinese culture. Five important secrets of skillful translation are introduced to improve students’ translation skills

Return of the Soul: Inheritance and Innovation in the Process of Artistic Creation in Major Kunqu Productions in the People’s Republic of China, 2001-2015

Ph.D

Radical Vernaculars: Experiments with Tradition between Politics and Performance

This dissertation focuses on four collective projects that take “tradition” as a starting point for creative experiments in performance practice. All of these disparate projects are based in early 21st-century settler-colonial North America, and all of them have anachronistic, political, and playful qualities. Following a theoretical and methodological Introduction, the dissertation moves through close readings of four experiments with “traditional” practices. Chapter One looks at the Purim Extravaganza, a diasporic and queer version of the carnivalesque Jewish festival that takes place each year in New York City. Chapter Two addresses the mobile audiovisual performances of Ottawa DJ collective A Tribe Called Red, exploring Indigenous experiments with technology and tradition. Chapter Three gives an account of the Abandoned Practices Institute, a summer school in performance pedagogy based on forgotten or endangered everyday practices, run by former members of the performance collective Goat Island. Chapter Four investigates the North American revival of culinary fermentation practices, spurred in part by the writings of Sandor Katz, in order to examine the contradictions of vernacular revivals at the level of daily life. All of these collective experiments offer insight into the fate of “tradition” as that which is abandoned (and then recuperated in frozen form) during the modernizing process, especially in settler-colonial societies. By reactivating vernacular material that has been consigned to an unchanging past, these experimental projects work through complex histories of colonization, shame, and abandonment, moving toward a space of shared capacity and collective action. Drawing on both participatory and critical research, the thesis examines various performance strategies that experiment with vernacular forms across gaps in historical and cultural continuity. In so doing, it engages with key issues in contemporary political and aesthetic thought: temporality, community, coloniality, property, and collective practice

A Pattern Approach to Examine the Design Space of Spatiotemporal Visualization

Pattern language has been widely used in the development of visualization systems. This dissertation applies a pattern language approach to explore the design space of spatiotemporal visualization. The study provides a framework for both designers and novices to communicate, develop, evaluate, and share spatiotemporal visualization design on an abstract level. The touchstone of the work is a pattern language consisting of fifteen design patterns and four categories. In order to validate the design patterns, the researcher created two visualization systems with this framework in mind. The first system displayed the daily routine of human beings via a polygon-based visualization. The second system showed the spatiotemporal patterns of co-occurring hashtags with a spiral map, sunburst diagram, and small multiples. The evaluation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed design patterns to guide design thinking and create novel visualization practices

The social and political life of calligraphy at the Tang courts

Turning away from well-established traditions of stylistic analysis and biographical studies in the existing scholarship of art history on calligraphy, this thesis combines sociological, political and anthropological perspectives to examine the seldom mentioned social and political uses of calligraphy at the Tang courts. It focuses on five groups of calligraphic objects and the interpersonal relationships on which these objects functioned. I demonstrate that the meaning of a calligraphic work was not abstract; it was not intrinsically a work of art, but rather its significance emerged out of the concrete relationships between objects bearing calligraphy and the people who produced, received, and commented on these objects. It is the pervasive and multiple uses of calligraphy and its close alignment to the broader political, cultural, and religious contexts that contributed to calligraphy’s high position within the Chinese cultural matrix. Calligraphic interaction provides a lens zooming in on the relationship between Tang emperors and other court members, revealing the nature of court society as a network of interdependencies. As a means of self-presentation and a vehicle for social interaction, calligraphy facilitated court members’ various agendas and united individuals of various strata across court society. In addition, to enrich the understanding of Tang court society and the mechanism of rulership, the focus of some of my inquiries, as well as the notions of what constitutes ‘art works’ and ‘artists’, as employed in this thesis may also contribute to the diversity of art history, a subject that has been largely based on models and theories designed to explain western art

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