Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Yang, Daqing

Titel

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945 by Kerim Yasar (review)

Ist Teil von

• Technology and Culture, 2020-10, Vol.61 (4), p.1233-1234

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Trained in cultural history and media studies with a background in music, Yasar demonstrates in rich detail how Japan's cultural elites crafted specific types of orality conditioned by the different electronic media at different moments in their technological development and reception in modern Japan. While Westerners visiting Japan often described Japanese music as an alien acoustic experience, even rejecting it as barbaric, Japanese elites quickly embraced Western music, initially through military bands and music education in schools. The recording and commercial duplication of popular entertainment in Japan such as naniwabushi and rakugo vividly illustrate the author's point that "Japan's oral performance traditions were not vanquished by modernity—on the contrary, they experience the renaissance while concurrently metamorphosing into new genres across new media and distribution platforms" (p. 7).