Takao received a joint PhD in history and musicology from the University of Western Australia as a doctoral fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions. Before joining MIT, he held posts as an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions), and as a lecturer for the Global History program at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Takao’s research pursues transregional and transcultural stories of entanglement, with a commitment to foregrounding Japanese—and more broadly, non-European—contributions to and ownership of “Western” forms of music-making. His work has appeared in Early Music, Journal of Musicology Pedagogy, Journal of Religious History, Contributions to the History of Concepts, Zeithistorische Forschungen, and Oxford Bibliographies in Music, among others.
Takao’s current book project, The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan, asks what it meant to sound Kirishitan (Japanese Christian) and in what ways these practitioners “sounded” their belonging. Making connections with Nagasaki’s “crypto-Christians” today, it traces the hidden musical, vocal, and theatrical practices through which Japanese Christians made sense of Catholicism through largely Buddhist frameworks. A second project, Cowboys of the Rising Sun: A History of Country Music from Tokyo to Tennessee, embarks on a revisionist retelling of the genre in Japan by shifting focus to the “unsung” histories of those artists who relocated to Nashville and Memphis in the 1970s and 1980s to pursue country music on their own terms. Through oral histories and the recovery and study of kantorī ephemera, this project seeks to problematize ideas of “Americanness” and “Japaneseness” in country musical practice past and present.
At MIT, Makoto regularly teaches 21M.030: Introduction to Musics of the World and 21M.299: Studies in Global Musics: Japanese Popular Music, and is a co-cordinator of Music Across Borders, a pillar of MIT’s Comparative Global Humanities Initiative.
Takao’s research has also informed his practice as a player of the viol (viola da gamba) in performance projects in Australia and Europe, including the Australian and UK premiere revivals of Mulier fortis, a musical drama about the Japanese noblewoman Hosokawa Tama composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt in 1698.
Related Events
Related Subjects
Advanced Seminar in Music, CI-M: Global Baroque
21M.500 / 21M.526