This dissertation is an ethnomusicological and historical exploration of intermedia art as an experimental artistic practice in Japan between 1958 and 1970. My research shows how intermedia art itself was a contested musical, aesthetic, political, technological and economic assemblage that negotiated complex plays of power particular to the social and historical terrain of postwar Japan.

In the first half of the dissertation I examine relations--both productive and ambivalent--between politics and experimental aesthetics in the collectives at the Sogetsu Art Center, a hub for experimental and avant-garde activities in Tokyo. I then turn to EXPO'70, the world's fair held in Osaka in 1970. Deemed a failure in terms of artistic innovation by many, EXPO'70 has come to be seen as a moment that divided artists working in the realms of experimental and avant-garde practice. I look behind these "failures" to examine the disruptions and disagreements that bring to the surface the limits of collective cohesion. In the last part of the dissertation, I examine forms of intermedia that depart from the dominant intermedia aesthetics that appeared at EXPO'70. Focusing on the acoustics of intermedia, I investigate examples of these "other" forms of intermedia that engage experiences of the liminal in the everyday in contrast to normalized senses of the "depoliticized everyday." I argue that experimental practices in intermedia productively questioned these normalized senses of perception and perceptibility through specific, local, creative responses to a volatile period in postwar Japan. Over the course of the dissertation, I consider the significance of transnational networks for intermedia. As a deeply transnational practice, I argue that intermedia engaged with aesthetic and political negotiations with the "West" and the US (both real and imagined) that by far exceed simple transactions of "borrowing" or "imitation."

Research methods for this project combine ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, musical analysis, and archival research conducted in Japan and the United States. Critical theory and analytic methods based in the fields of ethnomusicology, music theory, and music history, as well as art history, new media studies, history, anthropology, and sociology inform this study. Through the notion of the "collective" as a central analytic theme, I engage with a theoretical framework that is open to understanding the coexistence contradictions, ruptures, and the politics of ambivalence within collectives. The critical methodology of this dissertation departs from the existing majority of scholarship on avant-garde and experimental music that has overwhelmingly tended to focus on the framework of the innovations of composers or artists and their works.

More broadly, by presenting a study of original and innovative experimental music and art practices in Japan in the 1960s, I contest persisting echoes of Euro-American ethnocentrism that assumes the "belated" or "derivative" nature of avant-garde practices outside of Euro-American contexts in scholarship both within and outside of Japan.

This dissertation investigates the culture and cultural production of itinerant, professional Taiwanese opera performers in Taipei's temple circuit. I argue that the community of actors and musicians and their occupational and lifestyle practices constitute a subculture that is central to both maintaining and transforming Taiwanese opera. Drawing on ethnographic research, I characterize the opera subculture's idiosyncratic and fluid features, examine the major ways in which they are manifested--namely in improvisation, performance of gender, and selection of tradition--and discuss the cultural work they perform.

Full-time, for-profit troupes--the focus of my research--primarily work for temple patrons in privately contracted performances and occasionally in government-sponsored events. Performances in the former venue are improvised or, as the performers describe it, "alive," whereas the latter type privileges written practices and marginalizes oral conventions. I assert that improvisation, a distinctive and crucial attribute in the temple-contracted context, is an imperative performance skill for producing unscripted stories and a professional strategy for adapting to new circumstances. My analyses of improvisation as a performance skill highlight actor-musician interactions in song performance that shows spontaneous musical processes in opera production. Improvisation, or the ability to be flexible, is a professional strategy with which performers operate enabling them to maintain the appeal of a traditional art in a rapidly changing cosmopolitan society. In particular, I argue that the socioeconomic situation in recent decades and the developing hybrid opera style in the temple context opened a space for an alternative model of gender performance, one that expresses female masculinity. Moreover, improvisation as a professional strategy enables performers to adapt to the demands of recently developed government-sponsored events and participate in a hegemonically-constructed process for selecting a dominant version of the Taiwanese opera tradition. Through three case studies, I posit that the performers' flexible approach in this process constructs multiple versions of the opera tradition, thereby disrupting authoritative attempts at claiming a singular mode of production.

Through these analyses, I suggest that Taiwanese opera is a living tradition with continually shifting conventions and cultural meanings. The performers rapidly adjust to different and new ways of performance in order to capitalize on opportunities, ensure the cultural relevancy of their creative production, and secure their livelihood.

In this dissertation, I examine notions of tradition and fidelity to tradition in Indian classical music by investigating the development of musical judgment, categorical knowledge and aesthetic sense in the performance of Dhrupad - a genre of Hindustani music with medieval origins. Focusing on two contemporary performers of Dhrupad with very different histories of listening and practice, I show that categorical knowledge and strong notions of fidelity to tradition arise directly from the deeply dialogic and inter-subjective processes through which individual musicians develop and stabilize coherent aesthetic response to handed-down musical materials in situated practice. Specifically, I argue that strong notions of tradition and fidelity to tradition in Indian classical music are irreducible to a discussion of the disciplinary technologies of colonialism and cultural nationalism. Rather, I propose that tradition in Indian classical music has to be understood in dialogic relationship with intelligibility and individual musical judgment.

I develop an analytical framework to investigate the interactive basis of musical judgment and categorical sense in Dhrupad performance. I understand forms of knowledge produced in performance to be acoustemic: epistemologies produced through active sensing in and through sound. I investigate how formal structures of knowledge in a classical music system become available as human sensibility, affect and soma-aesthetic knowledge in the interactivity of musical environments - an intertwining engendered in part by the affordance of musico-aesthetic forms in Indian classical music. I show that musical objects develop both heterogeneity and ontological weight in the interactivity of Dhrupad vocal performance, rendering performance practice within traditional lineages systematic and heterogeneous, coherent and diverse. Based on this analysis I argue that heterogeneity and diversity are not antithetical to the existence of a Great Tradition of Indian classical music but a part of its sonic logic as a domain of creative human activity. In positing that the categories, codes, classifications and ontologies of the most hoary of genres in Indian classical music are constitutive of and constituted by the situated practice of classical music in particular communities, this dissertation stakes a claim to the intellectual history of traditions in postcolonial contexts.

In Sikh religious practice, listening to sung sacred poetry (sabad kīrtan) is the chief means of worship and a central part of everyday life for Sikhs around the world. While it is the sacred-text (sabad) that is held as primary and inviolable, and music is regarded as secondary and flexible, it is the musical rendering of sabad that is the most widely practiced worship activity. In this dissertation I explore the combined role of sabad and music in the lived experience of congregants participating in sabad kīrtan. Based on ethnographic research, I propose that sabad kīrtan listening is a primarily affective practice that also constitutes an epistemic site where ethicality is experienced as embodied sensation rather than as mentalist reasoning; that sabad kīrtan occasions are listening ecologies where affect becomes imbued with ethicality. My investigation explores how music heightens those ethically-imbued affective experiences—that is, the ways in which music works on the sensorium to deepen such sensations. I focus on three types of sensations that I found to be particularly intensified among congregants in different kīrtan occasions, namely feelings of affection, and of awe, and the experience of aura. I analyze the role of musical sound from the three main contemporary musical genres of sabad kīrtan – the most popular “light” genre, the fast growing AKJ (Akhand Kīrtani Jatha) genre, and the historical, in revival, “classical” genre. Thus, highlighting the contributions of diverse musical means in rich experiences among congregants, I critique the objectification of musical sound in recent scholarship on sabad kīrtan, and the binarized authenticity discourses among a few Sikh musicians as well as scholars focused on the classical genre. I argue that the multifaceted affective work of musical sound is contextual even within a tradition, i.e., in its different musical sub-collectivities. Shifting the focus from musicians to listeners, I draw attention to the crucial interpretive work of reception in the representation of traditions and assessment of change over time, proposing what I term “multiple authenticities in motion.”