Music Studies Colloquium Series | Brooke McCorkle Okazaki (Carleton College), musicology

Brooke McCorkle Okazaki (Assistant Professor of Musicology at Carleton College) is giving a talk in the Music Studies Colloquium Series. 

"Searching for Wagner in Japan"

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Richard Wagner’s music and prose captivated fans across the world, including those in Japan. While reception studies have traditionally focused on Europe and the Americas, Brooke Okazaki shifts the conversation to consider Wagner’s operas in East Asia. In her book talk "Searching for Wagner in Japan," Okazaki invites attendees to consider how Japanese Wagnerism participated in a global phenomenon that suited an array of socio-political agendas over the course of the long twentieth century. In addition to documenting premieres of Wagner’s operas, the project draws on mass media including film, magazines, and comics to explore the syncretic unfolding of modernity and Wagnerism in Japan. Employing methodological approaches from global history, Japanese cultural studies, as well as musicology, Okazaki investigates how issues of nationalism, gender, and cultural capital emerged in tandem with local Wagnerian movements.

This School of Music event is free and open to the public.