THE CLEF AND THE CROSS: MUSIC AND KIRISHITAN TRANSCULTURATION IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN

What did it mean to sound Kirishitan (Japanese Christian) and in what ways did these practitioners “sound” their belonging in the sixteenth century? These are the guiding questions that underpin Professor Takao’s book and its 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 with 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, Professor 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, Professor 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.