More significantly, I think, it is further proof of how much there is to be learned more generally about Japan when historians and social scientists include and incorporate music as an object of analysis.Michiru Oshima is one of the greatest composers of the 21st century, the inheritor of the Golden Age of American cinema and in my opinion the greatest anime composer of this decade. It does justice to the quotidian details and expressive magic that contribute to a musical performance. I highly recommend this book to students and scholars of Japanese public culture. Wade’s critical attention to idiosyncrasies, discrepancies, and inconsistencies among their profiles and accounts never wavers, yet she also comes across as an empathic ethnographer who took clear delight in her fieldwork and its many opportunities to share and discuss experiences of music. Wade generously allows many of her informants to speak at length for themselves we see firsthand how intelligent, articulate, and broad-minded these composers, performers, entrepreneurs, and activists are. ![]() “An important and overdue study of Western concert music’s naturalized presence in modern Japanese life. In sum, this is a welcome-and overdue-correction to the literature on Japanese contemporary music.” In doing so, she charts elements of distinction, teasing them out in three broad sectional sweeps, each framed by a distinct environment-the environment of modernization (where composers and musicians create for government, education, industry, and commerce), the environment of a shared cultural space (in which Japan has adopted Western music systems and in which Japanese composers travel abroad), and the environment of specific instrumental and choral groups (and of music composed for these groups). Where other accounts have concentrated on either the traditional music of Japan (and those who create music relating to it) or on those who compose using systems associated with European orchestral and ensemble forms, Wade usefully brings both sides together. The latter means that Japanese composers today still connect to the people, creating music for social good rather than maintaining the outdated Eurocentric ‘art for art’s sake’ mantra. That does not make Japanese composers Western, and Wade finds distinction in the continuance of the age-old tradition of performer-composers and with an identity of place. And so it must be, since the Japanese music culture she describes is heavily enculturated by the precepts of Western art music. Although she situates her account within ethnomusicology, she brilliantly challenges the otherness embedded in much that is associated with this discipline. ![]() This is a welcome change to the approach adopted by other scholars. Her account is heavily informed by interviews and discussions with composers and their audiences and is theoretically grounded by affordance theory-how music is used and received-rather than analyses of music structures. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade takes us on what is essentially an ethnographic journey. “The concept of ‘composer’ was once alien in much of East Asia it is, largely, a part of modernity, and of the adoption of Western art music and its systems, part of something that in Japan can be charted from the Meiji restoration onwards. Articulating Japanese modernism in this way, Wade tells a larger story of international musical life, of the spaces in which tradition and modernity are able to meet and, ultimately, where modernity itself has been made. She shows that modernist Japanese composers have not bought into the high modernist concept of the autonomous artist, instead remaining connected to the people. ![]() Wade examines the short history of the composer in Japanese society, looking at the creative and economic opportunities that have sprung up around them-or that they forged-during Japan’s astonishingly fast modernization. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large and global cosmopolitan culture. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. For most of Japan’s musical history, however, no such role existed-composition and performance were deeply intertwined. When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra-someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper-and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate.
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