BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//CRE8//Events//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VEVENT UID:event-evt-provider-e248690152af301b2a0831f8e5cd7fb1@cre8.local DTSTAMP:20261003T182519Z DTSTART:20261022T210000Z DTEND:20261022T223000Z SEQUENCE:0 STATUS:CONFIRMED SUMMARY:Music Forum: Makoto Takao LOCATION:Lewis Music Library DESCRIPTION:Thursday\, October 22nd at 5pm Lewis Music Library Please join us for a light reception in the Lewis Music Library after the event. The K ing’s Singing Orphans: Music\, Mission\, and Japan’s Hidden Christians What do a sixteenth-century Marian hymn\, a fishing island off Nagasaki\, and UNESCO have in common? In 1551\, a group of orphaned boys boarded a s hip in Lisbon. Chosen for the quality of their voices\, they were dispatch ed by King João III along the trade routes of the Portuguese Empire. Trav eling through Mozambique\, Goa\, and Malacca\, two of them eventually land ed on the shores of southern Japan in 1556\, carrying Catholic song into a country that would soon outlaw Christianity altogether. Four and a half c enturies later\, on the small island of Ikitsuki\, the last descendants of Japan’s “hidden Christians” still chant prayers whose words no long er belong to any singular language and whose melodies sound\, to the casua l ear\, like Buddhist sutra. In 2018\, UNESCO recognized their villages an d churches as World Heritage sites\, but not the endangered oral tradition s kept alive within them. This talk follows the global lives of the king ’s singing orphans to ask what connects these two worlds and what we sta nd to lose if we fail to listen before the singing stops. About the Speake r Makoto Harris Takao is an Assistant Professor of Music and the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor at MIT. Working at the intersection of c ultural history\, religious studies\, and musicology\, Takao maps Japan’ s entanglement with other world regions over the past 500 years. His curre nt book project\, The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transcultur ation in Sixteenth-Century Japan\, asks what early modern Japanese Catholi cism sounded like and how it was understood and expressed through Buddhist frameworks of sound\, music\, and movement. His work to date has appeared in such venues as Early Music\, Journal of Music History Pedagogy\, Journ al of Religious History\, Journal of Jesuit Studies\, Zeithistorische Fors chungen\, and Oxford Bibliographies in Music. A player of the viola da gam ba\, Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the Universi ty of Western Australia. About the Music Forum Series The MIT Music & Thea ter Arts Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and pre sented in partnership with MIT Libraries\, the MTA Music Forum Series give s the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison\, Julia Wolfe\, Terry Riley\, Don Byron\, and others.\n\nEvent page: https://www.c re8.xyz/view/event/evt-provider-e248690152af301b2a0831f8e5cd7fb1 URL:https://www.cre8.xyz/view/event/evt-provider-e248690152af301b2a0831f8e5 cd7fb1 ORGANIZER;CN="CRE8 Sites":mailto:noreply@cre8.local END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR