Review: Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, by Bonnie Wade

Abstract

Composing Japanese Musical Modernity , by Bonnie Wade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. viii, 271 pp. Everything changed in 1868. That year Japanese rebels demolished the two-hundred-year reign of the isolationist samurai government and installed the youthful Meiji emperor as ruler of the island nation. Over the course of his reign (1868–1912) and well beyond, a project of rapid modernization defined Japan's political, industrial, and artistic pursuits.1 In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity Bonnie Wade explores the ways in which music, particularly Western-style art music ( yōgaku ) and Japanese classical music ( hōgaku ), participated in the project of modernization. Implicit in her argument is an understanding of music's continued role in the formation of a Japanese modernity in the years following the empire's defeat in World War II. Wade weaves together a history of music making in modern Japan, fourteen years of extensive field research, and individual accounts from composers and composer-performers. This synthesis of history and anthropology endows her monograph with a vigor not often found in previous scholarship on art music in modern Japan.2 Wade's concern with individuals' engagement with music as a modern practice allows her to home in on a distinctive quality shared by many Japanese composers. “Most Japanese composers,” she suggests, “have continued in some ways to maintain a relational sort of role in their society” (p. 2). Unlike many of their Western colleagues, Japanese composers of the twentieth century practiced an “artistic flexibility” that allowed them to work in a variety of spheres and genres, ranging from school songs to avant-garde …