Michiko Toyama Disrupts the Historiography of Modernism

Bibliographic Data

ID21728443
AuthorsBrigid Cohen (New York University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume20
Issue3
Pages402-423
Publication date2023-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
Venuetwentieth-century music (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1478-5722 • E-ISSN: 1478-5730
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1478572223000191
OpenAlexW4387973319
LanguageEN
References cited20

The Paris-trained, Japanese composer Michiko Toyama (1913–2006) was appointed as the earliest foreign-born visiting composer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), the first institutionally supported studio of its kind in the United States. Yet she remains virtually unknown to scholarship, despite a growing literature on women pioneers in electronic music. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and the interpretive study of music, this article studies the conditions under which Toyama has found little remembrance to date; and it conceptualizes Toyama's own ideas of modernity formulated over the massive cultural and geographical dislocations of her lifetime. Within an intensely lyrical compositional practice, Toyama thematized hallmarks of traditional modernism studies: self-reflexivity, estrangement, exile, and exoticism. Racist criticism during her lifetime dismissed her music as a belated mimicry of Western models. Yet the modernist qualities and themes of her work emerge as a consequence of her life lived in intercultural contact zones of uprooting – the very conditions that make ideas of the ‘modern’ possible

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Criticism · Epistemology · Exoticism · Historiography · Literature · Media studies · Modernity · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy

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