TCC 39. Social Movements and Protest Scholarship - Professor Noriko Manabe

[Aaron] Welcome to the Theorist Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series highlighting modern composers and music theorists. My name is Aaron D’Zurilla. I'm the host of this podcast and also a music theorist myself. Today I will be talking with the music theorist Noriko Manabe, professor and chair of music theory at Indiana University. Known for her research in the music of social movements, popular music, and the music and language in Japan and the Americas, it is an expressed honor of mine to welcome Professor Manabe to the podcast. How are you doing?

[Professor Manabe] I'm doing fine, Aaron. Thanks for inviting me.

[Aaron] You know, Professor Manabe, as I said in the introduction, is an absolute honor to have you on to the podcast, something I expressed to you before hitting record. I'm a great admirer of your work and have been for a good amount of time, and I'm very thankful to have you on. But for people who are not familiar with you or your work, can you please introduce yourself personally, professionally, academically, whatever you choose?

[Professor Manabe] Sure. So I have a rather unusual background for a music theorist. I had received my bachelor's in music and mathematics from Yale. And after that, I actually worked in business for the first part of my adult life. I got an MBA from Stanford Business School and I worked on Wall Street in New York, London and Tokyo for many many years. I primarily worked in the Japanese stock markets, and I also worked as an analyst covering various kinds of technology companies from the consumer electronic companies like Sony to game software companies like Nintendo and Sega and Square and I was also known as an analysts who covered internet and software companies and media companies. So that was my background and then I decided to go back to graduate school in music and I first started by going into a PhD program in ethnomusicology and because I was at Cuny Graduate Center which has a terrific music theory department I also ended up finishing a PhD in music theory as well as in ethnomusicology. And so, my work tends to blend a certain level of field work and ethnographic, socially, social context-oriented study with the study of music, theorizing music, thinking about the notes and the kind of thing that you might expect music theorists to do more of. So, I blended two. And I also work in Japan studies. So, because I did most of my financial work in Japan, a lot of my early work in music studies actually drew from that experience where I knew a couple of executives in the music industry. And so, a number of my early publications, and in fact, I have another publication coming out pretty soon that talks about the Japanese music industry and how it did or did not adapt itself to music technologies.

[Aaron] Wonderful, wonderful. You know, obviously, as you stated, you come from a very unique background for the world of music theory, and particularly when you went back into your graduate studies for music theory, I'm wondering, so, you know, when you go into graduate music studies, people go with all sorts of different life experiences, but especially when you have such expertise and length of experience as you did in financial markets. What was it like to bring that, like, very worldly non-academia sort of headspace going back into the academia headspace? What was that transition like and also bargaining between your different experiences when doing research

[Professor Manabe] Well going back to graduate school for me it was a very interesting experience because um I had actually wanted to go to graduate school in music after I got out of Yale, but you know I had student loans and stuff. And so I couldn't really afford to do it. And so, for me, I saw going back to graduate school as kind of a dream come true after having made my money, if you will. And so, I think the experience of having worked, particularly as an analyst, so when you're a stock analyst, you are writing reports all the time on various companies. You collect information, you know, in kind of interesting ways. And you know, I, in particular, in my work on Nintendo, which is a notoriously tight-lipped company, I found creative ways of finding data and modeling data, which Nintendo was then quite interested in seeing. If you're a stock analyst, you snooze, you lose. And so, you're kind of out there trying to be the first person out with the news and the first person to come out with this conclusion and the best conclusion and that kind of stuff. And so, I have that mindset. And the other thing that I think having that particular job really kind of served me well in graduate school is that one, if you've ever worked in business, you know that you actually have to sell your ideas. The minute I had a new idea, I was very quick to publish it. I was very quick to go out to conferences and sell my idea. And you know how important the way you present an idea is if you've worked in business. And so, I've been quite conscious of that.

[Aaron] Certainly something I've been learning through attrition on the podcast side. So, one of the most well-known parts of your scholarship published is your work on protest and protest music in the context of various different social movements. And so, two-pronged question, where did that come into with your different experiences? And where does the personal interest in that uh area come from?

[Professor Manabe] Well okay so there are a couple of things that happened I mean the first thing is that, you know, I have an experience as a minority and as an immigrant into the United States. And so, you know I have seen things as an otherwise minority and so, so that is part of what is kind of behind my interest in social movements. I also lived in the South for much of my childhood where I saw various attempts at going through with civil rights or rolling back on civil rights and kind of the process of consensus and dissensus that drives these kinds of democratic processes. So those are things that I have. interested me for a long time. But the other thing that that happened that was more specific to the trajectory in which my career went was that I was in Japan in late 2011 and 2012 to finish a book on Japanese club music where earlier on in my career I had done a lot of work on Japanese hip hop, Japanese reggae and Japanese EDM. And so, I was trying to put that together into a particular book. And, you know, during that time, the 311, which is the tsunami, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster happened in Japan in 2011. And there were a lot of protests that had to do with the response of the government to that crisis, particularly the nuclear accident and the way it was unexpected and the way it rained radiation on vast parts of the country and you know 160,000 people had to evacuate the Fukushima area and you know they went through a lot of problems and that kind of thing and so a lot of the artists that I knew and in particular Rankin' Taxi who is a Japanese reggae singer and ECD who was one of the pioneer rappers, you know, I knew them from my work in hip hop and reggae, and they both told me that what was happening in terms of these protests was actually more important or bigger than hip hop, if you will. And that got me interested. And so, I went along to a couple of protests, and then I, you know, read, you know, looked at what was happening in the media. And you know, basically protests were being underreported in the media it was very difficult to find articles on protests on in major Japanese newspapers they just about never got on television, even though you can see all these journalists running around at these protests. So you knew they understood that these protests were big and were happening, but it just never got on the news, you know, they were being kind of edited it out of the system one way or another. And so that's why I came up with this title which is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised because there was a rapper in, a Japanese American rapper named Shing02 who wrote, you know Gil Scott-Heron had died in May of 2011 and so he wanted to do an homage to him. So, what he did was he took Gil Scott-Heron's original premise of just listing everything that happens on television in regards to African Americans and showing how all these indexes showed a very stilted view of African Americans on TV. And so, he transfers that same technique to talk about how the whole debate about nuclear power is being distorted in the news media and so that's where the title of that book comes from and that's why I was inspired to do that.

[Aaron] Wonderful very, there's so much to unpack there I don't know if I have the knowledge or the capability to do so. But that that is very powerful. And about I’m so glad that you brought up the book title The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in the origins of that because a very famous contribution that you have or well-known contribution that you have in protest music is your award-winning article on Kendrick Lamar's All Right, and the performance of it in the context of protest. I've read that article many times. It's one of my favorite music theory academic articles, and I would be amiss if I didn't take the chance to ask you what your thoughts were on Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl performance. Obviously a very big thing in this past year. And I ask this specifically because, you know, I'm aware of your book. I've not read it, though Kendrick Lamar, not as part of a song, says at the beginning of the Super Bowl performance, “the revolution about to be televised, you pick the right time, but the wrong guy.” And that really caught my ears at the time because I was aware when I watched the Super Bowl, I knew about your book. I was like, oh my gosh, is that a reference to that or of some sort? But I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that, on the Super Bowl performance, the whole display of it and the phenomenon of it.

[Professor Manabe] Yeah, I was very intrigued by that remark because it's obviously about Gil Scott Heron. I personally read it as a comment on the burden that is often inscribed on people like Kendrick Lamar or Sly Stone or anybody. And Questlove's movie on Sly Stone, which unfortunately I haven't seen yet, kind of talks about this, which is the burden of Black genius. And the burden of always having to say something for your people, that's actually kind of a burden. And in a much smaller way, I've often felt that, you know, as a Japanese American in the United States, I was always kind of made to represent my people in a kind of way. And it becomes very tiring very quickly. So, you know, that's kind of the way I resonated with that. But the Super Bowl generally, I thought, was a very interesting piece because, you know, the imagery was quite stunning, you know, between, you know, the performance of Humble where the black dancers form the American flag. And, you know, you can take this to mean all sorts of things like, you know, America was built on the backs of black people is one way you could take a look at that. And then you know in the second you know then there you have Samuel Jackson yes you know coming out as Uncle Sam you know who of course is a very prominent figure in the entire Butterfly album. So you know that that has a lot of meaning also. And then you have the metaphor of the video game. You know, there are some guys out at a lamppost and Samuel Jackson says, subtract one life, you know, as if it were some sort of video game that they were playing, you know, which kind of talks to the undervaluing of black life. And, you know, then you have the set in the second half of the performance that has all this imagery where I wasn't sure if I was looking at a Nintendo imagery or if I was looking at Squid Game imagery, but the whole idea was that you're making all these people, these Black people, participate in a game that they weren't designed to win. You know, so there was that whole thing. And then, of course, you know, his very provocative rendition of Not Like Us, which was actually quite fun. Also, you know, yeah, that was quite fun. Yeah, so there was a lot to unpack in that particular performance.

[Aaron] Thank you for your take on that. It's so interesting to hear something so relevant, too. And I want to back us up just a little bit, to your background and your entrance into the field. So I'm also sparked to think about this with what you were saying about the burden to speak for your people and how it can be very tiring. As a minority in America, also within the field of music theory especially, it's not unknown that it's predominantly male and white, becoming more diverse, but that's just the reality and certainly has been. Especially with the line of research that you do. It's not only protest music, but let's take that as an example. What was the response that you got when you first were putting it forward? Now, see, I've only been in the music theory field formally for a little bit. I'm only 23. And when I first saw your articles about protest music, I was like, what? Who's studying protest? I've never heard of this before. And it was so novel to me, even when first reading it. I'd never thought about that as an avenue for musical analysis. And then, of course, social from that. What was the initial stages of putting forward your research and your work within the field of music theory in particular? Where I feel like those issues might be stereotyped more to musicology or ethnomusicology?

[Professor Manabe] Yeah, so I would say that the, you know, my first couple of My first, in fact, many of my publications are actually more in the ethnomusicology field. And certainly my first, the first five years that I was presenting, I was really presenting almost exclusively in ethnomusicology. So I think my first, no, actually that is not correct either because I presented a theory paper in 2005. But certainly my first publications were mostly in the, were really pitched at ethnomusicology because certainly in, you know, the mid-2000s, the people who were really interested in musics outside of, you know, Western Europe and North America, you know, were tended to present at ethnomusicology conferences, even if their work was more, analytically oriented. So, you know, one of the articles that I published in 2006, for example, is about Celia Rodriguez, who is a Cuban singer-songwriter. But that paper is really a theory paper because I'm really looking at the way certain harmonic patterns recur in certain kinds of affects. And, you know, and so I built this corpus of about 135 songs and, you know, did all this analysis and said, you know, this is how he progresses through the years. And, oh, look, I did the Schenker graph of this song and this song. And look, they're kind of very, very similar. And he's talking about very similar things. And so, you know, so that was really a theory paper, but it was, you know, it tended to be, but I tended to present more in ethnomusicology at that point in time. So I think the, when was the first time I presented an SMT? I think it was either 2008 or 2009, I presented a paper that had to do with text setting in Japanese music. And then the following year, I presented something that had to do with producers versus rappers, actually, and talked about how the producer is not getting enough credit. A lot of what he does here is actually from the producer, not from the rapper. And it was really based on interviews that I had with a number of producers, but in particular, DJ Crush from Japan. And so I kind of looked at some remixes that he had done. So I started doing, you know, doing that in 2009, 2010 at SMT. And since then, I've probably presented at least every two years at SMT. And I've also tended to present every year at Ethnomusicology, SCM. Yeah, but at this point, I'd pitch different papers to them because now it's gotten easier to present papers on non-canonical works at SMT.

[Aaron] Wonderful. Now, I'm going to ask this. This might be a little bit of an eye-roll-y question, maybe, but this is something that I've thought about in recent months because of the readings and music theory class I took at Florida State with Professor Lumsden. We discussed this sort of thing pretty frequently. Even though, given you are the head of music theory at Indiana University, what label do you attribute to yourself? Ethnomusicologist, musicologist, music theorist. And second question, does it matter in the grand scheme?

[Professor Manabe] Does it matter in the grand scheme? Yes and no. I mean, I would say that. When I say I'm working as an ethnomusicologist, I really mean that I'm working in an ethnographic way. That ethnography and fieldwork are very central to what I happen to be doing. So things that I typically do in social movements are very tied to ethnography. Because I do feel that to really understand a social movement, you kind of have to be there and see things happen on the ground. And you have to understand why organizers do what they do to understand it. And you have to understand what are the systems of oppression, what are the systems of censorship, what are the copyright rules that might keep you from doing certain kinds of things. I mean, you can't just look at notes in isolation. You really have to kind of see what all the power structures are and why people do what they do. Now, some of the other work I do tends to be more oriented toward actual texts and notes. But even there, I guess it kind of depends on how you approach, how you analyze the notes. So I'm currently working on a couple of things having to do with Happy End, which was a pioneering Japanese rock band from the 1970s. And I presented a paper at SMT, which talked about how the band dealt with problems of syntax in setting Japanese to rock, you know, to rock music. So, you know, that's a very kind of music theory sort of thing, you know, to say, you know, how this form interacts with linguistic form or lyric, you know, form. But there is also another angle at which I've written about Happy End, and this is coming out, I guess, in about a year's time, which talks about how the lyricist in Happy End, whose name is Matsumoto, he was very influenced by modernist writers like proto-modernist Charles Baudelaire, you know, Walter Benjamin, those kinds of people and the way that they look at cities and changes in cities. And so he applies kind of a similar Flannery type of thinking to the way Tokyo changes because of the Olympics and things like that. So some of that is really kind of more of a literary analysis. So when I think of myself as a music theorist, I think of the ways in which I am theorizing about the structure of music. Sometimes the structure of music is related to social issues, in which case I will not relate to that. And then when I think of myself as an ethnomusicologist, I'm really thinking about fieldwork.

[Aaron] Interesting.

[Professor Manabe] So it's really a methodological issue.

[Aaron] Fair enough, fair enough. What do you feel of the criticism? I sometimes find myself partial to this, depending on the context. The sometimes lodged criticism against works in the music theory field that are notes without context, or notes, like, I'll give a small anonymized anecdote. I once saw a paper that was being presented that analyzed, that was about musical meaning and talking about how like the chords moving in a certain song symbolized X, Y, and Z, and how this could be related to this, and there was some talk of Adorno. Quite frankly, I don't remember all of it. But the issue that I found with the paper was that the song that was being analyzed was a Wu -Tang Clan song, and the only element that was not being discussed in the paper was the actual lyrics, which talked about the cycle. poverty and like the song had a very explicit meaning and the elements of that were not being incorporated into let's say the notes without context or something like that. Now you could just argue that was a poorly structured paper which I would too. But do you feel that it's more so that certain fields just have more of a primary methodology than others or is there like a, how do I want to say, isolating of different ideas?

[Professor Manabe] Well I think over the last couple of years the field of music theory is has been trying to get away from harmonic dominance right. I mean certainly there's been a lot of interest in rhythm and meter. There's been an explosion of interest in timbre, you know, particularly as it relates to the voice. I just came back from the TOPS conference at McGill where, you know, the entire conference, the entire, what was it, a three-day conference was about timbre and texture. And so I think the field is moving away from being harmony-centric.

[Aaron] Certainly. Certainly. Now, because what you work on deals very much with society and how society moves, changes, relates to the past and so on. How does your work of cultural movements and protest music, how has its relevance changed? I would argue even more relevant today than maybe people would popularly say, a handful of years ago, at least in the United States. What are your views on the changing environment of social movements and the importance of your work, given light of the U.S. in the past 10 or so years?

[Professor Manabe] Yeah, so I should emphasize that historically there has been a lot of work done on music and social movements. Sure. Often done first by sociologists, then by ethnomusicologists, then by musicologists and, you know, and music theorists. And there's people have been working on this stuff for centuries. So, you know, so it's not it's not new. I mean, we're, Eric Drodd and I are in the process of finishing the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, most of which is now can be viewed online. The way that we frame that particular volume is that, even though both of us are nominally music theorists working in music theory departments, both of us believe very strongly on the interdisciplinary aspect of doing a project like that. So you know so our contributors include several sociologists, and ethnomusicologists, historians, literary scholars, you know, area studies scholars, so on and so forth. And music theorists too. And working on musics that have to do with, you know, the 1600s in Britain going all the way to the present day. And I think all continents except Antarctica. So, you know, it has wide coverage. Of course, you could always get wider coverage, but, you know, there's always something. And so we try to think about it in terms of certain concepts that we wanted to address within the idea of music and social movements. So Eric has a chapter in there that really talks about what is protest music from a fairly philosophical point of view. And we have an article by John Street and others that talks about why 1979 turned out to be such an important ear for punk in Britain. And, you know, so, you know, these are the kinds of stories that we're looking at. But, you know, I think it's always been kind of an ongoing project. And, you know, different fields may pay attention to it more than others at various points in time. But political conflict is a, is an issue that has occurred in life, you know, through the centuries, you know, through most continents. So, you know, it's never going to go away.

[Aaron] That is certainly true. What are some of your observations from these recent movements? What's familiar and what's different?

[Professor Manabe] So I had written about the Women's March in New York in 2017. The vibe was kind of similar to that in terms of how many people were there and how angry they seemed to be and just the general vibe. One of the things that I had observed since 2017 was that there was kind of slow attrition away from these protests in the United States. And it had kind of reached a low ebb so that after Trump came back into office earlier this year, I got the sense that people were exhausted and kind of not up to protesting. And so I find it interesting that after six months of having him be in office, we've now finally got to the point where excitement seems to be building about protesting again. The other thing that I found to be kind of interesting about it is that there is better coverage of these protests in the foreign press than there is in the domestic press. So there's a lot more writing about the protests on the Financial Times which is owned by a Japanese company and it's headquartered in London,  le monde in Paris or el pais in Madrid about these protests. And you know whereas the New York Times wiped it from the front page of its web page on Sunday. You couldn't find it on Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, the web version of it. There have been a number of comments about that.

[Aaron] There's only so many inferences you can make with that.

[Professor Manabe] And so that kind of reminds me of the situation that I felt Japan was in in 2011, where the Japanese press, even though they were attending, the anti-nuclear protest wasn't really reporting on them, but the New York Times was. Or the AP was. So I think we kind of see a reversal of that particular situation. The way protests are framed is also kind of interesting. The way protests are being framed on American network news is that they are dangerous, that they are a nuisance, so on and so forth. Whereas I think the foreign press has been much more forthcoming in saying that these are largely peaceful protests and that people are expressing their dissatisfaction against the current government. So just the way that a protest is framed can actually have a big impact on as to how it ultimately impacts whatever social movement that that protest is trying to support.

[Aaron] Certainly, and going back to the connections with 2011 Japan. Was there also, with the minimized coverage, was there also a framing of more violence in the domestic press in Japan?

[Professor Manabe] Yeah so there's very little violence in protests in Japan for a couple reasons. The main reason being that if you're arrested in Japan you can actually be held in detention for 23 days without an indictment, you can't talk to anybody. So you know if you were ever to be arrested at a protest then you wouldn't be able to call your employer and you'll probably be fired by the time you got out of jail.

[Aaron] Oh, I did not know that.

[Professor Manabe] So people are disincentivized from A, attending protests, and B, causing any trouble if they go. That's not the case in the U.S. On the other hand, Japan has gun control, and nobody would bring a gun to a protest, and neither do the police. There are no rubber bullets. The worst that I’ve never seen tear gas at a Japanese protest the police don't have guns. And they don't have tanks. It's just them with their actual bodies you know telling you to stop doing something that's all.

[Aaron] Not an international reporter getting shot in the head with a rubber bullet for no reason.

[Professor Manabe] Yeah yeah that doesn't happen.

[Aaron] Well I don't really know how to segue out of this, but thank you for thank you for giving your perspective on that, something that is obviously ongoing. I guess we'll see where it all leads. We'd all be lying if we know what's going to happen, but thank you for giving your perspective on that. And so I want to pivot a bit to talking about music theory as a field, generally, the SMT. You have been a pioneer within the field of music theory. You were just talking about the history of talking about social movements and protests and so on. But it's not as much, obviously, in the field of music theory. And you've laid a lot of groundwork for music theorists in particular with that.

[Professor Manabe] But in all fairness, though, I mean, Patricia Hall edited an entire journal called Music and Politics for a long period of time.

[Aaron] Fair enough. Fair enough.

[Professor Manabe} And she was the former president of SMT so.

[Aaron] That I did not know so I suppose I’m learning. But thank you and so regardless though you have a great deal of experience in the field of music theory coming from outside of it to within it, you're the head of a department at a very large university. What movements in the field of music theory have you seen in the past years as very promising? And what would you hope for with the future to continue or maybe a slightly different direction?

[Professor Manabe] Well, you know, I think that the good thing about SMT is that it receives feedback and it often tries to do something about it. You know, so you had the 2019 plenary with Phil Ewell and Joe Strauss and Elie Hesama and Yago Everett. And, you know, they tried to, they really tried to make it more open to involve a diversity of perspectives and repertoires and methodologies. And, you know, I think it's, I think it's going in a good direction. I mean, obviously there's always something more you can do, but I think, I think it's certainly a very different society than it was five years ago. You've seen, you know, I was on the Publications Awards Committee in 2020 and 2021. And you've seen, you know, an increase in the diversity of the kinds of things that win awards in terms of the repertoires of the methodologies that they're dealing with. So I think the field is actually in a good trajectory. I think the challenge for the field is that, particularly since many music theorists work in conservatories where there is this kind of concerted belief and need to teach the Western canon and the ways that one has traditionally thought about the Western canon to try to balance that with kind of, you know, newer repertoires and newer methodologies. So, you know, there needs to be kind of a balancing act. But I think generally speaking, the field is actually in a good trajectory.

[Aaron] I would agree. I would agree. Something that I've shared on this podcast with people as this podcast has been going for the time of release, about a year and a half, my perspectives have changed over time in a very positive direction. I loved the past Society for Music Theory conference. I had an amazing time. It was my first time going, and I really enjoyed the diversity of individuals, of papers, and perspectives. And something that I've said, I keep bringing this class up, probably it was so instructive to me, the readings of music theory, learning about the history of the field, even recent history. I say about learning about the history of the field, I feel more and more negative about the past, but more and more hopeful about what's next, because I agree. I think we're in a great spot. And one of the most important changes or movements within music theory that I have found very important to myself is the concept of public music theory. I have a podcast that regularly addresses music theory. So of course, it would be important to me. But what is your opinion on the place and importance of public music theory in growing the field?

[Professor Manabe] I think public music theory as a concept is really interesting. And I think, you know, this idea of making music theory tools accessible and hopefully useful for people who aren't necessarily music theorists or even musicians, but may be interested in music. You know, I think that's quite important to try to find a way to, you know, to make the analysis of music, you know, relevant for people. So one of the things I do is I keep a blog of protest chants. And I wrote about that in the Spectrum Colloquy that just came out on Public Music Theory and my thinking about this back in 2017 when I went to the Women's March and saw a lot of these new chants just kind of bubble up from the crowd as if they were sort of spontaneous combustions. I found that to be quite interesting and so I put together a corpus of chants that I heard myself or that other people had sent to me or that I saw in videos. And then I kind of analyze them to see what sort of patterns they fell into. And I mean, generally speaking, I've transcribed them in regular staff notation simply because that is kind of the tool that I've always worked with and it's easiest for me to follow. You know, you might ask questions as to whether or not That is the most accessible way of doing it. Are there other ways of doing it? I'm sure there are. The reason why I happened to pick that particular way is speed. I don't know how to do this. But the other reason was that I also wanted to show pitch differentiation as well as rhythmic patterns. And so that to me was just the easiest and most communicable way where you know certainly enough people in the world know how to read notation so that it could be communicated to somebody else so that was my um you know that was my thinking in doing that. But generally speaking I think um it's important to find a way to make anything that you're doing relatable to anybody else. I think other musicologists are perhaps a bit more used to doing that because you're often working in the field with practitioners or you know with audience members or with other people and you're often doing public talks so you know certainly in my ethnomusicologist hat I’ve done a lot of public talks and bookshops and and so forth which are really interesting I mean you need a very different slice of the world doing that kind of thing. So you know that's it's worth doing.

[Aaron] Certainly worth doing I agree, and this is a related idea, but it's something that you've mentioned a couple times in the podcast here of expanding past or expanding, depending on what vernacular you want to say, the canon or canonical teaching and canonical literature in the music theory classroom. Something that Professor Michael Buckler talked about on an episode that I had him on at the time of release, perhaps a month or two ago, talked about was that an important part or an important outcrop that could come from music theory is being more progressive in the classroom of, let's say, AP music theory or freshman, sophomore music theory classrooms in expanding the literature that is shown. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.

[Professor Manabe] Well, certainly in our core curriculum, I mean, there's, you know, the instructors, the professors who teach those classes often make an attempt to introduce different composers from different parts of the world or elements of popular music or other kinds of vernacular music into teaching various kinds of concepts. And, you know, one needs to find a good balance between that and the kind of repertoire that the more classically oriented performers who are the bulk of our students at Jacobs are going to be playing. So, you know, so I think there's something to be said for diversifying repertoire and the students generally seem to like it. And also teaching them the repertoire that many of them will, you know, will play more of. And I think the other thing that one might want to think about is what do we prioritize in the teaching of music? Because, you know, most of the time in teaching a core theory course, we're going to be interested in things like harmony and form, for the most part. You know, would it be interesting to introduce more ideas about timbre or more ideas about texture, rhythm of meter? And, you know, I know that some other schools actually do emphasize some of these other areas earlier on in the core curriculum. I think Oberlin does that, for example. You know, it's great to diversify the repertoire, but I think the other thing you need to think about is what aspect of music are you really teaching and why?

[Aaron] The why. The million-dollar question, maybe not million dollar in music theory but it's important.

[Professor Manabe] But things like timbre and texture are actually quite important for vocalists oh yeah you know and certainly for me as a pianist I tend to like things like DeBussy where you can really kind of play with timbre as a pianist and bring out you know different aspects of something I mean .you know it does affect your technique to be really aware of these things.

[Aaron] Oh, it certainly does. It certainly does. And as a violinist, the period of the music that you're playing also can really influence, Baroque versus Romantic playing, very different, very different. All right. Well, we're coming to the close here. And you've talked a bit about some work that you have coming up, but just to surmise it all, what are some projects that are forthcoming on the horizon for you?

[Professor Manabe] Well I have a couple of you know book chapters that are coming out on Happy End and literary modernism. There'll be a chapter coming out in a in a volume by David Husbandel which talks about the Japanese music industry and why streaming didn't catch on in Japan so quickly. And I have another book chapter. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of different projects, but in terms of like big projects that I'm currently working on, the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music will be coming out soon. It's currently mostly online at this point. And then I'll be working on a monograph on intertextuality and protest music. And then I'll start work on a new monograph that really looks at language and music that goes beyond just English and German to look at a wider variety of languages based on timing issues. As a first step to that, I'll probably expand my work on Happy End. I might do a small book on Happy End to talk about. how they deal with Japanese and tax setting. Yeah, I think those are some like, yeah, and I'm editing 33 and a Third Japan, which is a book series on Japanese property visa.

[Aaron] Well, that's a lot and a good variety too. Looking forward to all those different items. And what would be a good way for the audience to contact you with any comments or questions?

[Professor Manabe] Well, I have a personal website at norikomanabe.com. And there's an email address at the bottom of that. So people can email me if they like.

[Aaron] Wonderful. And that contact info will be in the description of the episode. And I like to give the final word to the guests. And I'm going to let's send off this episode with a very general question. Professor Manabe, if there's anything else you want to say to the audience about music, research, music theory, social movements, anything, what would that be?

[Professor Manabe] Well, Joe Strauss always had this saying that music theory is what music theorists do. So I'm of the opinion that people should follow their interests in terms of research find the best way to follow that thread and use whatever tools that you think are going to be best at answering that question. So in my work, I don't just do ethnomusicology and music theory. I've delved into linguistics a lot, literary studies and criticism. Certainly, I've pulled a lot from historians of Japan and that sort of thing. So I think it's always, and sociology and anthropology. So it's always a good idea to think broadly about the questions that you are trying to answer and to find the mixture of disciplines that will help you to answer that question.

[Aaron] Wonderful. All right, Professor Manabe, thank you so much for coming on to the Theorist-Composer Collaboration. It was an honor to have you on here. I really appreciate it. Priceless perspective and advice and thank you very much.

[Professor Manabe] Well thank you.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again. I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Theorist Composer Collaboration. I also want to give another big thank you to Professor Noriko Manabe for coming on to the podcast. Professor Manabe's contact info is listed in the description. I would appreciate it if you could show her some support. For further updates and notifications on the Theorist Composer Collaboration, make sure to follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. You can listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. So make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. If you want to monetarily support the work of the TCC, you can click the link to our Buy Me a Coffee page. All donations are highly appreciated. All of the relevant links to listen to, follow, and support the show are in the description. TCC episodes are posted every other week on Mondays. and don't miss our blog posts, which go live a few days before a new episode is added. Make sure to follow our social media accounts and relevant streaming platforms, because you won't want to miss it. But, until then, this is Aaron, and thank you for joining the TCC.