Exploring Musical Assemblage from Asian Perspectives

Panel Convenor(s)

• TY

  Tatsuya Yamamoto

  Shizuoka University, Japan

Panel Chair(s)

• TY

  Tatsuya Yamamoto

  Shizuoka University, Japan

Presenter(s)

• KK

  Kodai Konishi

  Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan
• FK

  Fumiko Kobayashi

  Tamagawa University, Japan
• AH

  Akiko Hirata

  Aichi University, Japan
• HS

  Hidenori Samoto

  University of Tsukuba, Japan

This panel analyzes musical events and participants’ musical experiences mediated with multiple actors, including both human and non human, under the concrete time and space in Asian countries such as India (Konishi), Japan (Kobayashi, Samoto) and Thailand (Hirata) from the perspective of “musical assemblage”. Since the 2000s, some well-known scholars such as Tia DeNora, Antoine Hennion and Georgina Born have convinced us of the usefulness of the concept “mediation” when analyzing musical events. Although T. Adorno and some predecessors had already argued about music with the concept, these scholars mentioned above have rearranged the concept to destabilize existing dichotomies such as subject and object. For instance, in order to see co-productive relations between music and social life, DeNora insists to simultaneously analyze the things outside music and regards music’s role as the mediator of the social. Likewise, Born proposes that “music exists in and through its complex and shifting mediations” (Born 2005: 33) and she defines “a musical assemblage as a particular combination of mediations (sonic, discursive, visual, artefactual, technological, social, temporal) characteristic of a certain musical culture and historical period” (Born 2005: 8). These previous studies also paid attention to the bilateral effects of both diverse elements mediating music and music mediating those diverse elements, in order to avoid and overcome the idealist understanding of music, social reductionism and sorts of determinism. Participants of this panel, including cultural anthropologists and a music pedagogist, follow this current and focus on musical issues such as production, consumption and succession of musical repertoire, and players’ and audiences’ practices at musical performances.


In addition, this panel explores how people experience music and these experiences construct new musical culture in Asia in the 21^stcentury. By relying on concepts of “mediation” and “assemblage”, it analyzes diverse actors and factors constructing musical experiences. Based on the above analyses, it attempts to show the “singularity” possibly appearing in Asian ecology which could lead us to different findings from what the above-mentioned scholars pointed out, and the “universality/ universalities” which we could find out among musical events in the 21^st century through the glass of the musical assemblage. 

Presentations:

• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Brooms and Music: Mediation and Creation in the Educational Practices of the Aruna Jharna Museum in Rajasthan, India
  

  Presenter: Kodai Konishi – Tokyo Gakugei University
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Tradition and derivation of the “Kamitsuki-Kiyaridaiko”
  

  Presenter: Fumiko Kobayashi – Tamagawa University
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Emotion and Reason-Supremacy of Music Educational Institutionalization —Invariant and Persistent Creativity and Play in Local Performing Arts of Northeast Thailand
  

  Presenter: Akiko Hirata – Aichi University
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  To live by means of Kagura: The contemporary Kagura performance as a theory of mediation in semi-mountainous areas in Shimane, Japan
  

  Presenter: Hidenori Samoto – University of Tsukuba