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CATEGORIES:Lecture / Talk / Workshop
DESCRIPTION:Waka is Japan’s oldest form of poetry\, dating from at least th
 e 8th century CE. What\, then\, to make of the appearance of music in an ar
 t form traditionally defined along literary lines? To answer this question\
 , Christopher Hepburn\, a postdoctoral scholar in East Asian Studies and Mu
 sic in the USC Libraries and USC Dornsife College\, will share his interdis
 ciplinary understanding of waka as musical artifact\, and position it withi
 n a framework of its oral\, written\, and performative aspects.\n\nThe trad
 itional treatment of waka as a solely literary artifact removed from music 
 has resulted in many prejudices about the interplay of music and words (tha
 t the musical mode of understanding and the written mode of understanding a
 re not mutually informative) and the misjudging of aesthetic issues (often 
 due to a failure to appreciate the nonconceptual aspects of music\, i.e.\, 
 those aspects that are analyzable such as pitch\, rhythm\, and so forth). I
 n all\, scholarship in the field of waka has arguably taken thirty years to
  make it to a point where it can truly be studied from an interdisciplinary
  perspective. This talk not only seeks to tease out many of the problems an
 d assumptions associated with understanding waka as a musical artifact but 
 how we can move past them.\n\nCo-sponsored by the USC Libraries\n\nFlyer\n\
 nBio\nChristopher Hepburn\, PhD\, is the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Postdoctoral 
 Scholar and Teaching Fellow of East Asian Studies and Music at the Universi
 ty of Southern California.\n\nAn American musicologist\, writer\, educator\
 , and critic\, his research covers a wide range of interdisciplinary topics
  from the Heian to the Edo period\, with particular focus on waka composed 
 on the theme of male love. A scholar of Japanese musicopoetics\, Hepburn is
  especially interested in premodern Japanese works of orality\, ideologies 
 of musicality\, performativity\, theories of embodied orality\, and generat
 ive theories of music and words.\n\nHepburn’s research comes from the schoo
 l of thought that the scholarly acceptance of unproven assumptions or state
 ments made in absolute terms should always be questioned and examined conte
 xtually.  It is for this reason he believes that those who approach history
  or historiography should do so by taking on the role of the skeptic and co
 ntrarian.
DTEND:20220930T010000Z
DTSTAMP:20260416T022948Z
DTSTART:20220929T220000Z
GEO:34.020197;-118.283725
LOCATION:Doheny Memorial Library (DML)\, Herklotz Room (DML G28)
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY:Christopher Hepburn - Defining Waka: Musically\; Or\, Some Thoughts
  on the History and Historiography of Japan
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_40907331691430
URL:https://calendar.usc.edu/event/defining_waka_musically_or_some_thoughts
 _on_the_history_and_historiography_of_japan
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