As a scholar and teacher, Miki aims to increase meaningful conversations between researchers and practitioners of sonic and visual arts in order to address the relationship between politics, culture, and the arts in ways that reach beyond institutional boundaries. Trained in musicology and ethnomusicology, her research interests and publication topics include the transnational flows of experimental music, graphic scores, art and the everyday, and media ecologies in postwar Japan. Her current book project, titled “The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art and Postwar Japan,” is an ethnographic and historical study that uses intermedia (a kind of multimedia art) as a vehicle to examine collaborative artistic and social processes in postwar Japan. Previously, Miki was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and a C-MAP Mellon Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, where she was founding co-editor of post.moma.org.
Scroll down to see an annotated short list with a main focus on English-language texts on experimental music in 1960s Japan. This list is intended as a starting point from which we hope to develop a growing list of sources on experimental music in postwar Japan. This list is not an authoritative bibliography. It can…
Selections by Uesaki Sen and Miki Kaneda; Annotations by Miki Kaneda Graphic scores visibly and sonically changed contemporary music in the late 1950s and ’60s. The new notation unleashed a torrent of fundamental questions about music, sound, and composition: What counts as music? What distinguishes musical sound from non-musical sound? What is the time of…
In the second half of an extended interview with Tone Yasunao for post, the composer, artist, and writer discusses the trajectory of his work from graphic scores in the 1960s to his recent work with digital media.
Graphic scores tend to have multiple identities. Simultaneously, they can be design objects, artworks, and documents silently encoded with music whose future performance can depend, at least to some degree, on their existence. What can graphic scores tell us about music, art, design, and performance, and about their intersections? During the late 1950s and the…
An extensive two-part interview with Tone, together with documentation from a concert of his works that was held at The Museum of Modern Art in January 2013 in the context of the exhibition Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, and with material related to his output, since the 1960s, as a musician, artist, and critic.
The Sogetsu Art Center (SAC) in Tokyo was a major hub for avant-garde activities between 1958 and 1971, a period of concentrated energy for the experimental arts in Japan. Artists, musicians, designers, critics, writers, and performers gathered at the SAC to test out new experimental practices and to engage in dialogue about new directions in…
Pushing the boundaries of the meaning of music and performance, the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC) drew some of the most cutting-edge composers and performers from Japan and around the world to its stage. See scores, fliers, photographs, and other documentation related to music at the Sogetsu Art Center.
