Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Fritsch, Melanie
• Wilcox, Felicity

Titel

Heroines Unsung: The (Mostly) Untold Story of Female Japanese Game Music Composers

Ist Teil von

• Women's Music for the Screen, 2022, p.177-191

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• When inquiring about big-name Japanese game music composers, one usually gets the same list, in which mostly male artists such as Koji Kondo or Nobuo Uematsu are mentioned. But as documentaries such as Nick Dwyer’s Diggin’ in the Carts or Karen Collin’s Beep have demonstrated, female composers have also played an important part in Japanese game music history. This chapter addresses a yawning gap in ludomusicological research by reflecting on the question: why, despite their often groundbreaking work, have female Japanese composers been overlooked in this field for so long? To offer a basis for future research, light is shed on 1980s and 1990s Japanese geemu ongaku (game music) culture, and potential topics for further investigation are introduced. In a second step, pioneering composers Junko Ozawa and Mieko Ishikawa are briefly portrayed, and their careers and influence on game music traced in the form of short case studies. In this way, the chapter focuses on providing an overview of the cultural context of women’s participation in video game music in Japan, to hopefully inspire more in-depth studies of single female artists, concise musicological analyses of their works, and more detailed studies of specific aspects of Japanese game music culture.