Conference Agenda

During the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), thousands of U.S. service members and their families were stationed in Japan. Their daily lives relied on the support of local Japanese labor. On the American military bases, requests for live jazz performances as a part of military recreation called for many more local musicians than otherwise were available as employees immediately after the war, not to mention that jazz had been banned in Japan as “enemy music” since Pearl Harbor. Consequently, Japanese instrumentalists with no experience in jazz, sometimes even beginners, were hired to provide live music for the American troops. On the other hand, playing for the American soldiers brought these Japanese players profitable incomes and helped them survive at a time when the nation was physically and psychologically suffering from postwar aftermath.

This paper examines the different Japanese methods of learning and performing jazz during the early years of the Occupation when music resources were extremely limited. My investigation grounds on the experience and practice of the Japanese by engaging with Japanese-language archival materials such as jazz critiques, audition announcements, and radio listening notes, in addition to personal accounts from Japanese veteran musicians. Tracing the transpacific relocation of sound technologies and objects such as records, radio, and music scores, I highlight the Japanese reappropriation of American materials for their self-education in jazz and self-navigation in the American requisitioned zones. I show how Japanese musicians reworked mediated sounds into embodied performing techniques using their ears, knowledge, and imagination, in the process reclaiming their agency and authority over the music they were asked to play. Following scholars like E. Taylor Atkins (2001) and Hiromu Nagahara (2017), I propose a decolonial narrative of Japanese jazz history in the post-war, and argue for its central importance against a more common globalization of jazz as Cold War diplomacy predetermined by U.S. military agenda.

A certain Professor Dimsdale's school for 'lovers of good music' was integral to transforming the 'primeval wilderness' of Montana into a 'full-fledged territory.' Or so says one of the state's earliest colonizers, Granville Stuart in his 1925 account, Forty Years on the Frontier. If, in the eyes of early settlers, 'good music' contributes to colonization—what does bad music do? And what, exactly, counts as bad music?

Relying on historical newspapers, I investigate who and what makes “bad music” in Stuart’s hometown of Helena, Montana via case study: sex workers clashing with the Salvation Army over “bad” music in the streets. In 1889, Josephine "Chicago Joe" Airey and her demimonde, as well as a group of white women and Chinese men led by Captain Nellie Keefe of the Salvation Army, fought to determine the city's sonic identity through musical parades up and down the red-light district. Eventually, these parades were the subject of a Montana Territorial District Court Case that decided the fate of noise ordinance jurisdiction across the soon-to-be state.

Investigating the circumstances before, during, and after these noisy parades reveals anxieties around the explicit gendering of minstrel tunes and art song performed in red-light districts' brothels and theaters. Specifically, they signal a belief in musicking as an unacceptable force for anti-colonial moral corruption. Strangely, when this same repertoire was performed in more “respectable” opera houses, morality was not at stake.

I argue that the proliferation of this “bad,” “sexualized” music posed serious issues for settlers seeking to dominate the pre-existing cultures in boomtowns. I examine how the notion of parallax (Byrd, 2011) and understandings of queer intimacies (Shah, 2001) are brought to bear on sex workers' relationships with their musicking and their "disidentifications" (Muñoz, 2001) with settler ideology.

The musical practices of working-class women in the Western United States hold a rich history worthy of further musicological investigation. Not only has their musicking shaped policy still in place today, their distinct performance cultures can also shed light on how intersectional perceptions of gender, race, and class found in music were fundamental in establishing settler power across the American West.

In the aftermath of Nazi occupation (1941-1944) and the Greek Civil War (1946-49), Mikis Theodorakis rose to prominence with the consolidation of a genre which became known as éntechno laïkó tragoúdi, or art-popular song, in the 1950s and 1960s. Art-popular song intervened into the cultural landscape to rival the cultural programme of the Greek National School which had dominated the musical establishment since the beginnings of the Twentieth Century. Though Greek and Anglophone scholarship on Theodorakis is plentiful in comparison with other Greek composers, much of this scholarly and popular engagement exists in the context of a kind of ‘watershed history’ which identifies art-popular song as sui generis. Theodorakis’s art-popular is represented as a pivotal musical turning point that emerged from a rupture in historical, political and cultural continuity, marking the beginning of a new era.

While this rhetoric effectively acknowledges the crucial formal and stylistic departures and innovations of art-popular, this watershed history can be seen to disrupt a coherent sense of artistic progression and continuity, leaving Theodorakis’s positionality within lineage of Greek composers and as the inheritor of a cultural-ideological legacy underexamined; thereby, and more insidiously, eschewing the legacy of Greek wartime music making and the cultural significance of andártika (guerrilla songs of the Greek resistance), for example.

This talk considers how art-popular could represent the realisation and culmination of the socio-political and musical concerns that occupied other Greek composers including Nikos Skalkottas and Alekos Xenos. These are concerns which were, I suggest, partly shaped by a cultural and ideological encounter with socialist discourse, Soviet cultural politics and political theory and practice that was being promulgated in Greece and promoted by the cultural left. I emphasise how similar concerns, adapted to the repression and censorship that marked the mid-twentieth century in Greece, converge and are (re)cast in Theodorakis’ art-popular song.

In this vein, I seek to bring to light a leftist thread running through a genealogy of Greek composers and works that comes to fruition in the politicised aesthetic doctrine of art-popular. Whilst art-popular songs and all the works mapped along this leftist thread are indivisible from the social, cultural and political forces that shaped them, there are also irreducible to a single explanatory ‘ism’ - whether it is modernism, nationalism or communism.