Lectures in Musicology: Joshua D. Pilzer, University of Toronto

Joshua D. Pilzer, associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, presents "Voices and Authority in Everyday Japan." This lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Music and The Ohio State University Libraries.

Japanese everyday life is characterized by the mundane and ubiquitous presence of voice types specific to particular genders, vocations, and social situations. This presentation overviews the speaker's third book project, about the role that these voices play in the moral education of contemporary Japan. Pilzer focuses on four categories of voices: voices to children, service voices, professional announcers, and voices of law, which together constitute an unending chorus of pedagogical voices that propel people through everyday life, and teach obedience to social order and to the law. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate that the pedagogical power of the voice arises not only from what these voices say, but from the prosodic features of the voice — uses of timbre, pitch, dynamics, textures and rhythm, features which arise from a confluence of voice production and its complex technological and spatial mediation.

Joshua D. Pilzer is associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. He has explored these topics in two books, Hearts of Pine (2012), about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, and Quietude (2022), focused on the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority.