Approaches to Past and Present in Japanese Music : The Case of Female \u27\u27Biwa\u27\u27 Players

Globalization, Localization, and Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific Region : Past, Present, Future, シドニー大学, 2003年11月10日-13

The Forgetting of a Hero: The Antarctic Explorer Shirase Nobu

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the life and times of Lieutenant Shirase Nobu, in order to identify some of the factors responsible for the fact that his is a name that was once famous throughout Japan and yet is now almost entirely forgotten. For some explorers, fame has endured, and the glory that was theirs in their own time has lasted long after their deaths. For others, however, it has been an ephemeral status that soon faded. It is argued in this thesis that heroes are a product of the historical milieu in which they lived, as much as they are a product of their own deeds, and that changes in society can eclipse heroic status even within the lifetime of the hero. The historical period known as the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration, which occurred from the end of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, has become a topic of growing fascination for layperson and scholar alike. Despite this interest, Shirase Nobu, a Heroic Era Antarctic explorer once celebrated in Japan and whose name was known around the world, was forgotten even in his homeland almost as soon as his expedition was over, and his story still remains largely unknown even in that country. Although Shirase's story is a fascinating one, it is not the purpose of this thesis to rehabilitate a forgotten Japanese historical figure. Nor does this thesis investigate the "waves and troughs" in Shirase's fame over the past century, or attempt to explain why they have occurred, or are now occurring. Instead, this thesis is restricted to an investigation of factors that made Shirase famous, and, more specifically, the factors that swiftly put an end to that fame. At the same time, it is hoped that this thesis may function as a first stage in integrating into the wider field of Antarctic historical studies an event which has to date largely been ignored, and thereby serve as one small step towards giving the East a more eloquent role on the Anglo-centric stage of Antarctic exploratory history as it now exists

The Siren Subverted: The Role of Violetta Valery in Giuseppe Verdi's 'La traviata' (1853)

This thesis addresses a two-fold proposition: that Giuseppe Verdi used the term 'posizione' as a concept for which he designed musical strategies and that, in relation to Verdi's 'La traviata', the term 'posizione' can also be viewed within the broader context of its social implications for the character of the courtesan, Violetta, and for the singer of the role. Verdi's musical strategies provide signifiers for the social space as well as the emotional states and responses of Violetta as her 'posizione' changes throughout the opera. They also demand from the singer of the role a variety of vocal techniques as these changes occur. The initial necessity of virtuosic 'coloratura' control is relinquished by degrees and replaced by the necessity for other tactics during the course of the opera. It is my argument that there is an historical correlation between the social space of the courtesan and that of the female singer. The power of each has relied on the ability to seduce client or audience through elements of display which have also involved vocal virtuosity. This has assisted in causing a conflation of the identities of courtesan and female singer to be made by audiences of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The narrative and musical strategies of 'La traviata' as revealed by critical analysis require novel tactical responses from both singer and audience as the expected seductive qualities of the singer-as-courtesan have been overturned. The possibility arises that Verdi's use of these strategies functioned as a refutation of criticism and suspicion regarding female singers in general and his mistress Giuseppina Strepponi in particular

Art as everyday practice: A study of gongfu tea in Chaoshan, China

This study explores the place of traditional Chinese tea culture in a society undergoing changes both culturally, with the rise of consumerism, and structurally, with the growth of a market economy and globalization. It does so by examining tea drinking in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong Province. Chaoshan is the home of a style of preparing and drinking tea known as 'gongfu' tea, involving preparation of strong tea in small pots, and drinking repeated brews in small cups. As well as being an important part of the regional food and drink culture, gongfu tea has been adopted outside Chaoshan as a refined form of tea culture, and even represented outside China as an authentic 'Chinese tea ceremony'. It therefore provides an appropriate case study through which to examine both local practices and the processes through which local cultural objects are appropriated and transformed for use in other contexts. The study pursues two lines of inquiry. The first examines the development of a contemporary discourse representing Chaoshan gongfu tea as a manifestation of a continuous tradition dating back more than 1,000 years to the Tang Dynasty. I argue that, while tea has long been consumed in Chaoshan, this representation is not supported by historical evidence, and is an example of an invented tradition. The second line of inquiry is a study of contemporary gongfu tea-drinking practices, both among people born in Chaoshan, and among non-Chaoshan people who have taken it up as an acquired practice. Methodologically, the study uses sociological ethnography, in which the ‘field’ of research is not a specific locality but a field of inquiry defined by pursuing linkages relevant to the research questions. Findings are based on fieldwork involving semi-structured interviews with, and observations among, a snowball sample of 32 individuals plus one family that was treated, for analytical purposes, as a single unit. Fieldwork was conducted in four visits to the region between 2010 and 2017. The study found that, among people born in Chaoshan, gongfu tea is experienced as an integral part of everyday life, rather than a form of tea art. As a practice, it entails close attention to detail in preparing, serving and drinking tea, on the one hand and, on the other, a high level of creativity, rather than slavish adherence to a prescriptive model. People who have taken up gongfu tea as an acquired practice exhibit similar skills, but for them, gongfu tea is unlikely to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. Some people choose to cultivate additional knowledge and skills in order to enhance their gongfu tea practice as tea art. The study concludes by considering the relationship between Chaoshan gongfu tea as a cultural object created through discourse, and contemporary tea-drinking practices. I argue that the relationship is not as close as literary accounts imply. While each is informed by the other, neither is a mirror of the other, and each is a product of distinctive social processes: the discourse, by the activities of academics, entrepreneurs and others, each pursuing their own interests; tea-drinking practices, by the opportunities and constraints generated through economic and social processes emanating from the wider society

Taming the Reciting Voice: 'Satsumabiwa' Text-scores and their Roles in Transmission and Performance

In the history of Japanese music, in which the great majority of genres involve song or melodic recitation, there have been few attempts to precisely represent the vocal element in graphic form. Notations that specify instrumental performance in minute detail abound, but with the exception of 'shōmyō' (Buddhist chant) and the vocal repertories of 'gagaku' (ensemble music of the Imperial court and some high ecclesiastical institutions), most inscriptions of the vocal part take the form of text-scores, that is, inscriptions of text with some associated shorthand symbols for musical patterns. In the 'katarimono' (narrative recitation) traditions, the quantity and specificity of the symbols written beside the columns of text vary with each genre, and moreover, reflect the particular and historically contingent norms of transmission and performance that have had a bearing on the uses to which text-scores are put. While it would seem logical for there to be a correlation between the quantity and kinds of musical representation of the vocal line and the degree of freedom afforded performers to make each rendition musically different, the existence of highly specific text-scores should by no means always be taken as evidence that a performance tradition placed strong constraints on the reciting voice, and that the text-score itself therefore held the status of a 'daihon' (a score memorised or used in performance). Any text-score must be considered as a document produced by an individual performer-teacher, and the representative status of the notational record therein can only be assessed in light of other evidence about the circumstances of the document’s production and circulation among performers of the tradition in question

THE LAST BIWA SINGER: A Japanese Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance

This book concerns the traditions of Japanese blind musicians and ritualists who accompanied themselves on the biwa, as embodied in the music and identity of Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-1996). Yamashika was the last person to have earned his income from performing a repertory of musical tales, songs and rites with biwa (a four-stringed lute), and to many seemed like a twentieth-century apparition of the blind bards who first performed the Tale of the Heike and other canonical medieval narratives. Yamashika’s identity as a musician and individual was far more complex, but he became well known as "the last biwa hōshi" and was the subject of books, media programs, and a feature-length documentary film. An apparent living relic of a Japan long vanished, Yamashika even appeared in the New York Times in his last years. The author draws upon approaches from Japanese historical and literature studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology in an examination of history, which yielded on the one hand images of blind singers that still circulate in Japan and on the other a particular tradition of musical story-telling and rites in regional Kyushu, of representations of Yamashika in diverse media, of his experiences training for and making a living as a professional performer and ritualist from the 1920s on, and of the oral compositional process in performances made between 1989 and 1992