GEM E-Portfolio
GEM E-Portfolio
INTRODUCTION “Unhappy Refrain” is the title of Japanese musician Wowaka’s (1987-2019) first full-length album, released in 2011, which gained critical acclaim online and launched his successful music career. Written while he was still in college, the album has 14 tracks and features the then newly released musical software Hatsune Miku, colloquially known as vocaloid. Wowaka …
Satou-san was very connected in the local music scene and would often take me to various live folk music events going on. It was a wonderful experience, participating in a musical culture that I was familiar with but had only ever read about in academic papers while simultaneously recognizing that my Japanese had progressed enough …
When I lived in Kyoto while studying abroad in the spring semester of my Junior year, I frequented a little cafe near my host family’s apartment. I found it on Google maps (as I found most restaurants in Japan) and was immediately intrigued by the cozy atmosphere. So one day I made the 15 minute …
During my time at Wesleyan, I’ve been a part of 2 ensembles, the Chinese music ensemble and the introductory Korean drumming ensemble. These are experiences that I could have never had without Wesleyan and the incredible resources the music department has in sponsoring programs that go beyond the borders of typical western cannon that you …
INTRODUCTION This is an essay I wrote for my global coursework centered on Japanese popular music, I analyze how the repetition of musical history shows that society’s underlying structural frameworks can be more static than they first appear. This class taught me much of what I know about post WWII Japanese musical history and how …
INTRODUCTION During my sophomore year as part of my global coursework I took an interesting class examining Japanese popular music and its evolution since WWII. During the class I analyzed the pervasive concept of the “Japanese Woman” and her portrayal through music, noting how how it has evolved from WWII Gunka (war music) to the …
INTRODUCTION This was an essay I wrote for my Pop Music Revolutionaries in Modern Japan global coursework that later snowballed into a comparative research paper for another class I took. This first music class was a deep-dive into post WWII Japanese music and its intersection in the larger political movements of the time. When taking …
INTRODUCTION This was part of a larger research project I did for one of my global coursework classes, specifically Losers of WWII, a comparative history class analyzing Japan and Germany’s post WWII political and social structures. We were given relative free reign on our final research project and so I, of course, gravitated towards music. …
INTRODUCTION A piece of writing summarizing on my reflections from being in the Chinese Music Ensemble, one of the Global Coursework classes I took for the GEM Minor. At the end of the post is an updated entry, reflecting once again on my time in the Chinese Music Ensemble but connecting it to larger themes, …
INTRODUCTION This was a reflection written during the introductory seminar for the GEM minor. We were tasked with responding to an article written by writer and linguist Rosina Lippi-Green that spoke on the phenomenon of making the culturally unfamiliar familiar through things like dubbing or localization. This article got me thinking about the wider concepts …
