The Department of Music at Princeton University

BA, Yale University
MBA, Stanford University
PhD, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Noriko Manabe's research addresses the relationships between music and social movements, language and meaning, new media, and the music business, particularly as they relate to popular music and music in Japan and Latin America. Her publications have addressed the impact of the Japanese language on rap; the aesthetics of hip-hop DJs; propaganda in Japanese children's songs; the interaction of text and music in the songs of Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez; the reflection of vernacular musics in works by Cuban modernists; and the influence of Italian opera on Cuban zarzuelas. Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, Latin American Music Review, Transcultural Music Review, and several edited volumes. As her PhD was a double concentration in ethnomusicology and music theory, she draws on methods from both fields, as well as linguistics, economics, and globalization studies. In her articles on new media and the music business, she draws from her experience as an analyst of technology and media companies in Japan, for which she was ranked highly in Institutional Investor.

Manabe's research has been funded by the Japan Foundation, the SSRC/JSPS Fellowship, Princeton, and CUNY; her sponsors have included the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto and Tokyo University of the Arts. In addition to Japan, she has conducted archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Spain, Mexico, and Indonesia.

She is currently working on a monograph with the tentative title, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Music, Media, and the Antinuclear Movement in Post-Fukushima Japan (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). In addition, she is working on a book on Japanese children's songs from the Meiji Era to the Allied Occupation and another on transnational popular music scenes in Japan, including rock, hip-hop, reggae/dancehall, and electronic dance music.

Manabe teaches courses in nonwestern music and popular music from ethnographic and analytical perspectives:

MUS 250/ANTH 250 Musical Cultures of the World
MUS 254/EAS 254 Popular Music in Japan
MUS 255/EAS 255 Japanese Taiko Drumming in Transpacific Perspective
MUS 259/LAS 259 Music in the Caribbean
MUS 265 History of Rock, R&B, and Hip-Hop
MUS 509a Analysis of Popular Music
MUS 509b Issues is Global Popular Music

Manabe co-organizes the Popular Music and Non-Western Music Colloquia with graduate students. She is associated faculty with the Department of East Asian Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Program in Latin American Studies.

Manabe plays keyboards, sings, and writes songs for Wayside Shrines, a Princeton-based collective of musicians performing original songs based on lyrics by Princeton poet Paul Muldoon.

Selected publications:

• "Globalization and Japanese Creativity: Adaptation of Japanese Language to Rap." Ethnomusicology 50, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 1–36.

• "Representing Japan: 'National' Style among Japanese Hip-hop DJs." Popular Music 32, no. 1 (2013): 35–50.

• "Songs of Japanese Schoolchildren During World War II." In Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures, ed. Patricia Campbell and Trevor Wiggins, Chapter 5. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

• "Going Mobile: The Mobile Internet, Ringtones, and the Music Market in Japan." In Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, ed. Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland (New York: Routledge, 2009): 316–32.

• "Reinterpretations of the Son: Versions of Guillén's Motios de son by Grenet, Caturla, and Roldán." Latin American Music Review 30, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 1­–44.

• "Lovers and Rulers, the Real and the Surreal: Harmonic Metaphors in Silvio Rodríguez's Songs." Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006).

Appointments with Prof. Manabe during her office hours can be scheduled here:

https://wass.princeton.edu/pages/viewcalendar.page.php?cal_id=1856