Towards a universal language : evaluating autonomy, identity, and the metropolis in the legacy of Japanese experimental music
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Towards a Universal Language: (Evaluating Autonomy, Identity, and the Metropolis in the legacy of Japanese Experimental Music) attempts to survey the rise and evolution of radical Japanese avant-garde music throughout the second half of the Twentieth century.Analysing the vast economic and social changes that have occurred within Japan's Metropolitan centre over the past half-century, the study draws together diverse areas of research including Japanese modernist composition, jazz, electronic, improvisational and experimental psychedelic music, examining each within the context of key social, political, and art historical issues.The legacy of avant-garde music in Japan, which began to take initial root during the post-Hiroshima era under allied occupation, embodied for the first time in centuries a progressive, indigenous form of Japanese music that relied neither upon bland mimicry of the West, nor nationalistic adherence to its own folk traditions.The research presented within this thesis focuses upon issues of creative independence, identity, and cultural autonomy, examining the pursuit made by successive generations of defiant, often anarchic avant-garde musicians and sound artists, to develop a creative language that was/is independent of dominant cultural and artistic practises in Japan.These dominant mainstream trends have, throughout Japanese history, been predominantly manifest in either its artists' nationalistic adherence to traditional folk culture, or unoriginal mimicry of European and American fashions.The study examines the relationship between Japan and the West at each point in history, and the effect both contemporaneous and residual historical-political factors have had upon cultural exchanges between the two.It also considers the attitude of individual Japanese artists to both traditional Japanese culture and that imported from the West, as well as the way in which the avant-garde communities of Tokyo have historically reacted to, been informed by, and evolved as a result of the specific conditions and changing nature of the city itself.The foremost aim of the study is to establish a modern historical lineage of radical avant.garde music in Japan, examining how the historical, political and cultural relationship between Japan and the West, as well as external political, social and cultural factors (historical and contemporaneous), have influenced the development of Japanese experimental music itself, and the possible reactionary nature of that work.Towards a Universal Language considers the extent to which Japanese experimental music at its most progressive, challenging, and anarchic, can be defined historically by it's autonomy from Japanese tradition and Western mimicryremaining throughout its multiple incarnations over the last fifty years, a statement of the new, the contemporary, and the independent.
Source: Liverpool John Moores University
Author: Gregory, M
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2605649484