PhD Candidate, Music
Samurai to Composer: Sōkichi Ozaki ca. 1937
Time: Friday, March 1, 3-5pm CT
Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)
Abstract: The 1937 manifesto Kokutai no Hongi dictated the modern national mission: “to build up a new Japanese culture by adopting and sublimating Western cultures with our national entity as the basis” (Hall, ed. 1949, 183). Encapsulating the paradoxical joint projects of Japanism and Westernization, the text critiques “abstract thought” as the peril of “Western liberalism” and extols instead, “concrete creation” as a Japanese artistic practice—a distinction also found in musical discourse, which claimed composition in the realm of “creation” [創造/sōzō] rather than the homonymic “imagination” [想像/sōzō]. Curious, then, that a significant fraction of contemporary compositions were fantasy pieces, and that fantasy was theorized as one of three compositional types. Fantasy, to be clear, indexes a European art music category purporting a freedom of expression and fancifulness of thought that seems antithetical to the warring nation’s increasing regulations over the imagination and its expressions. How was fantasy conceived as an appropriately “Japanese” musical form?
In this paper, I discuss Sōkichi Ozaki’s Phantasie und Fuge (1936) and the theories on fantasy penned by his teacher Saburō Moroi. Examined relative to the Kokutai and Alan Tansman’s theory of “the rhetoric of unspoken fascism,” I argue that musical fantasy upholds an imperial philosophy of form that similarly distinguishes abstract from concrete form. As I demonstrate, Ozaki signals a formal topography using trite tonal conventions, deploying what he calls a “model form.” Form here functions as a fungible organizational and rhetorical device rather than an abstracted order of events, just as the Kokutai emphasizes “formal qualities” like repetition over “such matters as premises, transitions, or conclusions” (Tansman 2009, 152). Given Moroi’s claim that the “fantasy type” lacks formal expectations, I conclude that musical fantasy becomes justified as concrete creation by appropriating, or sublimating, Germanic Formenlehre. Ultimately, I propose that musical fantasy is both a fantasy of music and of the nation.
Presenter: Rina Sugawara is a PhD Candidate in Music Theory and History. Her dissertation project is titled, “Politics of Musical Fantasy in Twentieth-Century England, Japan, and the US,” in which she theorizes the sociopolitical work of fantasy as it informs compositional practices and defines the art music category of musical fantasy. Her scholarly commitments include musical form, aesthetic theory, issues on migrant identities and nationalism, as well as abolitionist university studies and active practices of anticolonialism.
Discussant: Hoyt Long PhD is Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. He teaches in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department and also co-directs the Textual Optics Lab. He has published extensively in the fields of modern Japanese literature, media history, and digital humanities. His current research interests include machine translation, computational approaches to world literature, and cultural production in the age of social media platforms.
