Oxford Music Online notes, since the discipline’s inception, music studies (ongakugaku) in Japan has shown a sustained preoccupation with Western classical composers and especially Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach, known in Japan as the “Father of Music,” and whose portrait hangs in the music classrooms of elementary and middle schools, has become a central figure in Japan’s musical modernity. This talk provides an ethnographic account of how Japanese academic institutions use, teach, imagine, and disseminate knowledge about Europe and European culture through classical music such as Bach’s.
I argue that Japanese understandings of music traditionally considered “Western” are mediated by society, culture, histories, epistemologies, and specific institutional aims. Based on dozens of interviews with academics and musicians, and six years of fieldwork at Tokyo University of the Arts, I discuss global, institutional, historical, and sociocultural configurations that have afforded Japanese individuals opportunities strategies to produce knowledge about a European Other through music. I also explore what classical music, as an idea and historical symbol, still offers Japanese forms of knowledge production and Othering today.
Thomas is a George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge University, in Social Anthropology. He publishes work on music from an anthropological perspective and has spent the past decade researching Japanese musical cultures, global and cultural reception histories of European baroque music, affect theory, popular culture, ritual and religion, and material anthropology. He received the William H. Sheide Prize in 2024. As a Japanese MEXT scholar, and a scholar for the Japan Foundation, he worked on an anthropological reception history of J.S. Bach’s music in Japan and the related Japanese imaginary of Europe. This research formed the basis for his PhD thesis at Cornell University.
