Jennifer Milioto Matsue, professor of music and East Asian studies, has been awarded a prestigious $35,000 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to complete a book about identity and meaning within contemporary Japan music scenes.
The yearlong fellowship will fund Matsue’s field research in Kansai, Japan beginning in January 2010. The council received 1,007 applications and awarded 57 fellowships to American scholars for 2010, according to the award letter.
“I’m still amazed that I won,” Matsue said. “My project will compare traditional and popular music styles found today in Japan and will offer new approaches to the study of identity and meaning in music.”
Specifically, her research will deal with how varied music scenes in Japan, generated by genres such as nagauta (a type of chamber music), trance-electronica, or wadaiko (Japanese drumming), share similar ideological grounding, processes of identity building, and performance practices. Matsue’s next book will build on her previous monograph, Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene, published in 2008 by Routledge.
The American Council of Learned Societies supports “major pieces of scholarly work” in the humanities and humanities-related social sciences, according to the group’s Web site. The council was created in 1919 by representatives of 13 separate scholarly societies who saw the new group as a “combination of America’s democratic ethos and intellectual aspirations.”
Prior to beginning field work in Japan, Matsue will teach a Union term abroad in Osaka. Matsue will return from her field study in August 2010 to complete the book. She will then resume teaching at Union in the winter of 2011.
Matsue has been at Union since 2003 and completed her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago in 2003. She teaches courses in Japanese and East Asian music and culture, ethnomusicology, American music and anthropology and leads the College’s Taiko Ensemble.