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Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Margaret Mehl, "Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert" (Open Book, 2024)
Description: Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or “art”) music contributed to Japanese nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mehl’s analysis of this critical half-century or so in modern Japanese history is sensitive to the power of the participative “musicking” in shaping shared understandings of national and local community and their place within a larger world. The book, which is split into the global, national, and local, also demonstrates that as much as Western art music shaped Japan, Japan shaped back. I...