AMSGNY Meetings

 

 

Abstracts and Biographies
“Every Day We’re Grilled on an Iron Plate”: The Peculiar Success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun”

Tristan Wilson (The New School)

       In December 1975, the song “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” (“Swim! Fish-Shaped Cake Boy”) became the first single to debut at number one on the Oricon Singles Chart, and eventually sold over 4.5 million copies, making it the best-selling physical single in Japanese history. This is even more remarkable for a “gloomily allegorical” insert song (Drexler 2024) initially written for Hirake! Ponkikki, a children’s television program comparable to Sesame Street.
       In this paper, I propose that the unprecedented success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” resulted from its dual function: as a children’s song and a leftist, anti-corporate statement. Indeed, an article in the widely circulated newspaper Mainichi Shimbun described the song as “[appealing] to adults’ desire to set themselves free from the life of a white-collar worker” (“Taiyaki-kun rikieichū” 1976; translation mine). This strongly suggests an identification of the titular taiyaki (fish-shaped cake) with the working class, an idea which I will explicate through analysis. I argue that the song’s subversive undertone distinguishes it from typical children’s songs—the music’s formal aberrances and use of the minor mode, alongside the singer’s crooner-like performance, reinforce a reading of the lyrics as a complaint about aggressive workplace practices.
       Despite being neglected by existing scholarship, the unprecedented success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” made it a landmark song in Japanese music history. Incorporating James C. Scott’s idea of hidden transcripts, this paper will reveal how the song resonated with left-wing viewpoints, and offer a blueprint for coding political messaging into popular culture.

 

Biography: 

From Tradition to the Concert Stage: Virtuosity and Pianistic Nationalism in Ananda Sukarlan’s Rapsodia Nusantara 

Edy Rapika Panjaitan  (Ohio University)

Ananda Sukarlan is recognized as one of Indonesia’s most influential pianist-composers, whose contributions have significantly shaped contemporary classical music and music education both nationally and internationally. Among his most important works is the complete set of Rapsodia Nusantara, a collection of 44 piano compositions that demonstrate a remarkable synthesis of Indonesian musical idioms and Western classical traditions.

This study examines the Rapsodia Nusantara as a whole, with particular attention to its virtuosic and artistic technical demands. I argue that Rapsodia Nusantara represents a form of pianistic nationalism in which virtuosic technique and compositional design function as aesthetic strategies to transform Indonesian musical repertoire into a global classical piano literature. By analyzing how traditional Indonesian musical elements are transformed within a Western pianistic framework, this study highlights the composer’s ability to construct a unique musical identity that is both culturally rooted and globally resonant. The research focuses on Sukarlan’s aesthetic approach, exploring both the pianistic techniques and the compositional dimensions that define the cycle.

Through a critical and interpretive lens, this thesis aims to deepen understanding of Indonesian classical repertoire while offering insights into Sukarlan’s compositional artistry. It further proposes an interpretive framework that may serve pianists, composers, and educators in approaching this significant work.

Bio:

Algorithm Panic and the Adverse Geoblocking of Chinese Funeral Brass Band Videos on Douyin amid US Restrictions

 Joseph S. Kaminski (College of Staten Island)

 

Westernization brought marching brass bands into mainstream Chinese culture on the mainland and through the diaspora. Bands are common now and used at funerals, hired to perform sorrowful and military music. Outsiders’ unknowingness about Chinese funeral marching bands is because the Douyin short-video app is restricted to users with Chinese phone numbers. US phones prevent its download, geoblocking it. In 2026, TikTok, the American version, was finally sold to a new conglomerate of mainly American investors for fear of data harvesting of American users. This is not a concern of the presenter since few Chinese brass band videos even appear on American TikTok. Douyin’s commercialism in China is in algorithms targeting mainland Chinese users such as through funeral brass band advertising and algorithms around brass band cultural marketing. This is not a threat to US users at all since it is not in their cultural interests. US officials though fear Chinese algorithms of “techno nationalism” and “soft power,” bringing Chinese culture to the American public. The result is that Douyin’s marching funeral band videos are inaccessible in the US, with all of Douyin. Hundreds of videos of bands marching around courtyards and up and down village streets appear on Douyin daily. Bands were introduced to China in the nineteenth-century by foreign powers and performed at funerals during the late Qing Dynasty. These marching bands remain recondite in the West and often are misperceived as dislocations in an altered realm, or a backward aspect of an aspiring modern culture, both etic perceptions of Sino-Orientalists. Disregard comes despite their modern commonality with bands around the world. The presenter traveled to cities in China to observe and document performing marching funeral bands, comparing and contrasting them to bands in New York’s Chinatown with whom he performs. New York Chinatown musicians have Douyin, and so does the presenter, in a phone purchased in China with a China mobile account. Videos collected from Douyin depict widespread semi-amateur band cultures of mainland townspeople integrated with the community, as in New York’s extended community.

 

 Bio:

 

Talking about Sound: Conversation as a Tool for Timbre

 Juliet Pascal Glazer (Boston College)

 

Music scholars who research communication about tone or timbre tend to focus on lexical semantics. Timbre lexicons often include cross-modal metaphors such as “warm” “metallic,” and “clean” (Fritz et al 2012; Harkness 2017; 2013). Scholars note that these lexicons pose problems of vagueness (Barthes 1978; Dudley 2014). For example, “metallic” may refer to a range of timbres, and one person’s notion of a “metallic” sound may not match another’s. I demonstrate an alternative approach to analyzing timbre by listening beyond lexical semantics (Carruthers 2023). Instead, I follow ethnographers of recording studios (Porcello 1994; Meintjes 2003) to observe how people communicate about timbre in practice through extended conversations and non-linguistic interactions. I examine strategies used by New York City and Boston-based violin repairers (also called luthiers) when they collaborate with violinists to alter instrumental acoustics during “sound adjustment sessions.” Such sessions are opportunities for luthiers to physically adjust violins to improve their timbres. Luthiers begin by eliciting musicians’ descriptions of desired timbres, then work to make them sensorially real through an iterative and improvisational practice of testing, listening, talking, and adjusting. I build on Porcello’s typology of metapragmatic strategies for talking about sound (2004; 1994) to show that luthiers co-create violin sound with musicians through strategies for communicating about timbre that unfold not only through lexical semantics, but also through metapragmatics.

 

Bio

Genealogies of Korean Virtuosity: Politics and Global Circulation

MyungJin Oh  (Rutgers University)

 

            “I know in Korea they don’t sing,” “It’s almost too perfect,” and “Violin is not a machine,” remarks made by Pinchas Zukerman during a master class at the Juilliard School in 2021, circulate within a broader Orientalist discourse. These statements reproduce long-standing racialized assumptions that position Asian musicians as technically precise yet expressively deficient: their performances are perceived as overly perfect, insufficiently human, and ultimately “machine-like.” This logic extends beyond Western classical music into global popular culture. Discourses surrounding K-pop, for instance, frequently frame performers as “manufactured” and mechanized, reinforcing similar tropes about perfection, embodiment, and authenticity. Such narratives are best understood not as isolated instances of bias, but as symptoms of a historically and transculturally constructed discourse of virtuosity, in which technical perfection is treated as mechanical, bodily skill as suspect, and some performers as less expressive, thus less fully human.

            This paper traces the genealogy of Korean contemporary virtuosity, following its formation from European discourses on instrumental virtuosity to its transformation within Asian institutional frameworks. It examines Korean training systems and competition culture as key sites where virtuosity is produced, circulated, and evaluated. Focusing on the political dynamics of aesthetic hierarchies of taste, I argue that Korean virtuosity participates in reshaping the sociocultural stratification in the global contexts. In doing so, the virtuosic achievements of Asian musicians reveal and challenge Western hegemonic aesthetic authority, exposing the unequal structures of valuation shaped by colonial histories and modernizing discourses. 

 

Bio:

Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Nationalistic Prose’ and His Misinterpreted Early Operas

Carol Kitzes Baron (SUNY Stonybrook)

 

In recent years, German Jews working in the field of art music have been associated with political conservatism and nationalism, and with articulating xenophobic ideas stemming from loyalty to, typically, homogeneous European ethnic nations. Positive responses to authoritarian political structures by German-Jews may be beyond the comprehension of most Americans, but they are particularly abhorrent to American Jews whose ancestry was Russian.

The loss of a shared Jewish identity after the First World War has contributed to the misinterpretations of Arnold Schoenberg’s paired early operas Die glückliche Hand and Erwartung. Music scholarship and criticism have associated them with “German Expressionism,” “The Woman’s Problem,” “Male Castration Complex,” etc. Richard Taruskin, an American Jew of Russian descent with a Marxist orientation -- and the most prolific, prestigious, and honored musicologist and music critic of our time -- has both dismissed Schoenberg’s work and obsessed about it.

The referential sources for Schoenberg’s librettos, one written by the composer and the other by the medical doctor Marie Pappenheim, are actually from the Tanach (the Hebrew Bible), a Jewish mystical text (the Zohar), and modern Jewish history. They have eluded scholars sensitive, particularly, to Schoenberg’s conversion to Lutheranism. The sole singing roles in each opera are, respectively, “The Scapegoat” and “The Shekhinah” (the feminine manifestation of the Divine).  

 

Bio: Carol Kitzes Baron is an Affiliated Scholar in the Music Department of Stony Brook University, where she was Executive Director  of the Bach Aria Festival and Institute. Her articles have appeared in leading musicological journals. The University of Rochester Press published Bach's Changing World: Voices in the Community. Among her awards are the Sloan Urban Dissertation Fellowship, major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two A.S.C.A.P, Deems Taylor Awards for articles entitled "Dating the Music of Charles Ives:Facts and Fictions" (1991) and "Varese's Explication of Debussy's Syrinx in Density 21.5 and An Analysis of Varese's Composition: A Secret Model Revealed" (1984). Her forthcoming book is entitled Operas to Save A People: Arnold Schoenberg's "Die gluckliche Hand" and "Erwartung."