Makoto Harris Takao works at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies, and musicology to map Japan’s international relations from the sixteenth century to the present day. His research pursues transregional and transcultural stories of entanglement, with a commitment to deconstructing dominant, Eurocentric conceptions of “Western” music-making. He emphasizes Japanese—and more broadly, non-European—contributions to and ownership of these musical practices and their histories. Takao’s work reflects this perspective through his advocacy for intercultural methodologies and his engagement with the pedagogical and curricular implications of global music history. His research has appeared in such venues as Early Music, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Religious History, Contributions to the History of Concepts, Zeithistorische Forschungen and Oxford Bibliographies in Music.
Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia as a doctoral fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions. Before joining MIT, he held posts as an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions), and as a lecturer for the Global History program at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Takao’s current book project, The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan, asks what it meant to sound Kirishitan (Japanese Christian) and in what ways these practitioners “sounded” their belonging. These questions guide a reassessment of how scholars to date have understood the role of music during Japan’s so-called “Christian Century” (1549–1650). Emerging out of ethnographic work on Nagasaki’s “crypto-Christians” today, it looks to the vicissitudes of the Kirishitan faith as a mirror to reflect, if not refract, a more nuanced understanding of their devotional acts as transcultural formations of sound, music, and movement. To do so, Takao models a way of tracing multiple auralities in Eurocentric archives that reveals as much about Catholic ideas of musical practice as it does about the indigenous sound worlds of sixteenth-century Japan. Although this book offers a more informed understanding of the global mobility of “European” music, it does so as a way to probe at the disciplinary cracks between musicology and cultural history, as well as between the historiography of Catholicism and of early-modern Japan. Employing an intercultural methodology, Takao looks to these spaces between to reveal hidden histories of instrumental, vocal, and theatrical practices among the Kirishitan that made sense of Catholicism through largely Buddhist frameworks. Underlying these case studies is an argument that the “syncretism” of vocal traditions among Japan’s crypto-Christians today is not only born of their historical persecution but is also testament to a faith that had already embraced transculturation some four-hundred years ago.
Takao’s research has also informed his practice as a player of the viol (viola da gamba) in a number of performance projects both in Australia and Europe, including the Australian and UK premiere revivals of Mulier fortis, a musical drama about the Japanese noblewoman Hosokawa Tama composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt in 1698.
Takao currently serves as a member on the editorial board for Early Music and is a coordinator for “Music Across Borders,” a pillar of MIT’s Comparative Global Humanities Initiative.