Lecture: “In Honor of William P. Malm: Facilitating Global Musical Encounters,” Christine R. Yano

Name: Lecture: “In Honor of William P. Malm: Facilitating Global Musical Encounters,” Christine R. Yano
Start: 2025-09-20T14:00:00-04:00
Location: Britton Recital Hall

Schedule

Sat, 20 Sep, 2025 at 02:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Britton Recital Hall | Ann Arbor, MI

Please note: This event will be held in person at Britton Recital Hall and will also be streamed at https://smtd.umich.edu/live-stream-britton/
Join us for a lecture by Christine R. Yano, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Hawaiʻi and President of the Society for East Asian Anthropology.
What does it mean to encounter one another through unfamiliar musics? How do relative power dynamics frame the encounter? What are the contexts for the encounter and its numerous aftermaths? This talk takes Professor William Malm’s 1959 milestone book, Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, as a historical touchstone that allows us to consider various framings of the global musical encounter. Written while a graduate student in his fourth month of PhD fieldwork in Japan, this book became a classic, introducing the English-speaking world to various forms of Japanese music and its instruments, and remaining on the market from 1959 until 1993. In fact, it is still taught in many ethnomusicology classrooms.
Here, I ask, what can we still learn from Malm’s Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments? What kind of cross-cultural phenomenon has it been and perhaps continues to be? What is the nature of such global musical encounters, then and now? In the introduction to the updated version of the book, Malm says that he wrote it “with innocence and youthful enthusiasm.” What is the role of the naïve encounter, the improvisational encounter, the creative encounter, even the colonial encounter between musical systems and new audiences? I propose that we consider our numerous musical encounters, then and now (including perhaps tonight’s concert) as a juxtaposition of sound systems, aesthetic hierarchies, and affective frameworks. We are a jumble of differences striving for some tenuous legibility. Here is where Malm and other facilitators like him assist and even inspire in that bid to “get it.” Lastly, let us zoom forward to an era that pays rapt attention to both the message and the politics of the messenger, I suggest that we consider the contrastive and potentially dialogic role of the indigenous performer, the home audience, the knowing listener as our necessary interlocutors. In the process of considering these historicized musical meeting grounds, how do we embrace new and critical possibilities of global musical encounters?
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Presented as part of a series: "A Celebration of Japanese Music and Dance: The Ethnomusicology Legacy of Professor William P. Malm." View the complete schedule at: https://myumi.ch/79rM5
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Christine R. Yano has conducted research on Japan and Japanese Americans with a focus on popular culture. Her publications include Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song (Harvard, 2002), Crowning the Nice Girl; Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawaii’s Cherry Blossom Festival (Hawaii, 2006), Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (Duke, 2011), and Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty and its Trek Across the Pacific (Duke, 2013). In 2020-2021, she served as the President of the Association for Asian Studies, and in 2024-2026, she serves as President of the Society for East Asian Anthropology.
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Co-organized by: Center for Japanese Studies; Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments. Co-sponsorship from: School of Music, Theatre & Dance; International Institute; Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies; Nam Center for Korean Studies; Center for South Asian Studies; and Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Sponsored in part by the William P. Malm Stearns Collection Concert Series & Instrument Preservation Fund and the Virginia Martin Howard Lecture Series Endowment.