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For decades, the state-run music industry in Hungary has artificially isolated musical worlds. The 2010 album I’ll Be Your Plaything is a concept album comprising at times drastically re-imagined cover versions of Hungary’s most popular hits from the socialist era. As such it is a testament to music as a medium’s aptness to reflect on public and personal pasts. The album moreover exemplifies how rich and appealing synthesis of sounds and traditions can be concocted when folk, classically trained, rock, and jazz musical artists collaborate. Along with this freedom to blend and synthesize, the album opens up some long overdue space for women; playing with personas, voices, and singing styles, Palya reflects on issues of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and coupledom across generations.

Shonen Knife--an all-female punk trio from Osaka, Japan--has cultivated a global fan base that has included the likes of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. The 1998 album Happy Hour encapsulates the band’s allure via its fusion of punk rock and cute aesthetics in the service of lyrics focused on food. Saturated in lyrics about edibles from sushi to banana chips, the record initially appears to be a cute pop punk homage to girl power. Brooke McCorkle Okazaki explores how, embedded in the seemingly straightforward music and lyrics of the album, lies an aesthetic that challenges historical norms regarding gender roles in popular culture.

Composing Japanese Musical Modernity , by Bonnie Wade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. viii, 271 pp. Everything changed in 1868. That year Japanese rebels demolished the two-hundred-year reign of the isolationist samurai government and installed the youthful Meiji emperor as ruler of the island nation. Over the course of his reign (1868–1912) and well beyond, a project of rapid modernization defined Japan's political, industrial, and artistic pursuits.1 In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity Bonnie Wade explores the ways in which music, particularly Western-style art music ( yōgaku ) and Japanese classical music ( hōgaku ), participated in the project of modernization. Implicit in her argument is an understanding of music's continued role in the formation of a Japanese modernity in the years following the empire's defeat in World War II. Wade weaves together a history of music making in modern Japan, fourteen years of extensive field research, and individual accounts from composers and composer-performers. This synthesis of history and anthropology endows her monograph with a vigor not often found in previous scholarship on art music in modern Japan.2 Wade's concern with individuals' engagement with music as a modern practice allows her to home in on a distinctive quality shared by many Japanese composers. “Most Japanese composers,” she suggests, “have continued in some ways to maintain a relational sort of role in their society” (p. 2). Unlike many of their Western colleagues, Japanese composers of the twentieth century practiced an “artistic flexibility” that allowed them to work in a variety of spheres and genres, ranging from school songs to avant-garde …