Makoto Harris Takao

About

As a musicologist and a cultural historian with a background in Asian Studies, I approach my craft with an interdisciplinary eye, employing music to map Japan’s international relations from the sixteenth century to the present day. My research interests are accordingly varied, spanning work in and between the fields of Japanese religious history, conceptual history, popular music studies, global music history, and the history of emotions.

While a doctoral fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions, I completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. Prior to my appointment at UIUC, I was based in Berlin where I held a postdoctoral position and later a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions) and was lecturer at the Freie Universität for their Master’s Program in Global History.

My current book project (In the Mirror of the Kirishitan: Sounding Japanese Catholicism and Its Musical Worlding in Early Modern Europe) centers practices of sound, music, and movement to understand “where” Japan was located in the geographical and ideological imaginary of early modern Catholicism. Reading Jesuit missionary documents against the grain, I employ an intercultural methodology that captures a diversity of performance practices (from sung narrative traditions to devotional dance forms) that have fallen between the cracks of musicology and cultural history, as well as between historians of Catholicism and those of early modern Japan. As a counterpart to how this kind of transculturation produced knowledge in and about a “Christian” Japan, my book also examines how that knowledge moved, was manipulated, and became mythologized in European musical drama in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it explores how real and fabricated Japanese characters became central protagonists in a developing sense of geographical and spiritual intimacy between these world regions. The research for this book has also informed my practice as a player of the viol (viola da gamba) in a number of performance projects both in Australia and Europe, including the Australian and UK premiere revivals of Mulier fortis, a musical drama about a Japanese Christian noblewoman composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt in 1698.

I am concurrently working on a second book project (Never End: Amuro Namie and the Politics of Postcolonial Pop) that interrogates the politics of the song “Never End,” composed for the then G8 summit in 2000 and performed by the Okinawan-born singer Amuro Namie. It looks to the inter-East Asian mobility of this song through the artist’s touring activities with an emphasis on Korean-Japanese and Taiwanese-Japanese post/colonial and post/cold war relations and the shifting tides of cultural censorship at the turn of the new millennium. This book ultimately addresses “Never End” as interwoven with the vicissitudes of empire and the necessity of a broader global East Asian reading in order to loosen these knots of the song’s narrative.

Recent Publications

“Towards a Global Baroque: Unbinding Time, Temporality, and the ‘European’ Tradition,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy (forthcoming, 2023).

“Global Music History,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Music, ed. Kate van Orden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022)

“Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English: Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 18 (2021): 21-43. [Recipient of an honorable mention, Prize for Research in the Humanities awarded by the Humanities Research Institute at UIUC]

“Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū,” Journal of Religious History 45 (2021): 50–67 [Winner of the Bruce Mansfield Prize in Religious History]

“The Concept of ‘Religion’ in Meiji Popular Discourse: An Analysis of the Newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 16 (2021): 40–62

“‘In Their Own Way’: Contrafactal Practices in Japanese Christian Communities During the 16th Century,” Early Music 47 (2019): 183–198

Graduate Advising

I welcome graduate students with interests broadly in the following areas of research:

• Historical and contemporary approaches to Japanese musics
• Pop music in East Asia
• Historical and contemporary approaches to music and religion in East Asia
• Ludomusicology (particularly through Japanese game studies)
• Music and Catholicism in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (particularly in non-European geographies)
• Music and theater in early modern Europe

Recent Courses Taught

MUS 110
Introduction to Art Music: International Perspectives

MUS 410 (Period Studies in Musicology)
Global Baroque: Music, Power, and the (Not So) “European” Tradition

MUS 413 (Music and Performance)
Introduction to the Viola da Gamba

MUS 418/518 (Regional Studies in Musicology)
A History of Japanese Popular Music

MUS 523 (Graduate Seminar in Musicology)
Introduction to Global Music History

MUS 523 (Graduate Seminar in Musicology)
Music and the Early Modern Jesuits

MUS 523 (Graduate Seminar in Musicology)
Early Music and Its Movements