2:00 PM

FREE and open to the public. No RSVP link.

Join us on February 6 for a Music Convocation lecture by Joshua D. Pilzer (University of Toronto), presenting material from his book project Voices in the Mirror: Voicing and the Power in Everyday Japanese Life. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, Pilzer examines everyday voices as powerful technologies for teaching authority, propriety, and subjectivity in contemporary Japan. Focusing on processes of vocal mirroring—how people imitate and create contrast with others’ voices—the lecture traces how power circulates through the voices of service workers, teachers, parents, and representatives of the law in everyday Japanese life.

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Abstract

“Voices in the Mirror: Genealogies of Voice and Authority in Japanese Speech and Music”

This paper presents some of the material from my third book project, Voices in the Mirror: Voicing and the Power in Everyday Japanese Life. That book, based in six years of intermittent ethnographic fieldwork, begins with the idea that different styles of voice in music and speech comprise vocal ecologies, “voice systems” that participate in the organization of consciousness, identity and the social (Bahktin 1984, Hill 1995). I then go on to investigate everyday voices as powerful technologies for teaching authority, propriety and subjectivity in a small contemporary Japanese city. I examine the pedagogical functions of the voices adults use when interacting with children; voices of professional announcers on radio and public service announcement; voices in the service industry; and the voices of police, judges, and other representatives of the law. Throughout, I focus on vocal mirroring, the process by which people imitate and create contrast with others’ voices in processes of social control, subject formation and the management of social relations. “Voices in the mirror” is a master metaphor to explain this expressive artistry, and the role that the voice plays in the conditioning of subjectivity and social behavior. This essay traces the relationships between several voices—the voices of female service workers, teachers, parents and voice actors—to understand the way that power circulates via the voice in contemporary everyday Japanese life.

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Joshua D. Pilzer is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching focus on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012. His second book, Quietude, was published in 2022 and is an ethnography of the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their children. Quietude won the Alan Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently writing an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on vocal imitation and the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority, tentatively entitled Voices in the Mirror: Voicing and Power in Everyday Japanese Life.