Music Forum: Makoto Takao

Thursday, October 22nd at 5pm Lewis Music Library Please join us for a light reception in the Lewis Music Library after the event. The King’s Singing Orphans: Music, Mission, and Japan’s Hidden Christians What do a sixteenth-century Marian hymn, a fishing island off Nagasaki, and UNESCO have in common? In 1551, a group of orphaned boys boarded a ship in Lisbon. Chosen for the quality of their voices, they were dispatched by King João III along the trade routes of the Portuguese Empire. Traveling through Mozambique, Goa, and Malacca, two of them eventually landed on the shores of southern Japan in 1556, carrying Catholic song into a country that would soon outlaw Christianity altogether. Four and a half centuries later, on the small island of Ikitsuki, the last descendants of Japan’s “hidden Christians” still chant prayers whose words no longer belong to any singular language and whose melodies sound, to the casual ear, like Buddhist sutra. In 2018, UNESCO recognized their villages and churches as World Heritage sites, but not the endangered oral traditions kept alive within them. This talk follows the global lives of the king’s singing orphans to ask what connects these two worlds and what we stand to lose if we fail to listen before the singing stops. About the Speaker Makoto Harris Takao is an Assistant Professor of Music and the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor at MIT. Working at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies, and musicology, Takao maps Japan’s entanglement with other world regions over the past 500 years. His current book project, The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan, asks what early modern Japanese Catholicism sounded like and how it was understood and expressed through Buddhist frameworks of sound, music, and movement. His work to date has appeared in such venues as Early Music, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Religious History, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Zeithistorische Forschungen, and Oxford Bibliographies in Music. A player of the viola da gamba, Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. About the Music Forum Series The MIT Music & Theater Arts Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and presented in partnership with MIT Libraries, the MTA Music Forum Series gives the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison, Julia Wolfe, Terry Riley, Don Byron, and others.