Marian Anderson’s 1953 Concert Tour of Japan: A Transnational History

Katie A. Callam is completing her PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. In her dissertation, “‘To Look After and Preserve’: Curating Musical America, 1905–1935,” she explores ways in which histories of musical life in the United States were narrated aurally and tangibly during the early twentieth century. Her research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and she is a recipient of the Mark Tucker Award and the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship, both from the Society for American Music.

Makiko Kimoto is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Graduate School of Human Development and Environment of Kobe University in Japan. She received the PhD for her doctoral dissertation, titled “Sergei Prokofiev’s Music Cipher and Artistry: The Composer’s Anagram of Musical Lines and Code in Piano Sonatas.” Her research focuses on the analysis of Sergei Prokofiev’s piano music and performance interpretation, based on her own practical experiences of classical piano performance.

Misako Ohta is an associate professor of the Graduate School of Human Development and Environment, Division of Human Expression, at Kobe University. Born in Tokyo, she studied musicology at Tokyo University of the Arts (BA) and German Literature at Gakushuin University (MA). Her PhD in music history (University of Vienna, 2001) examined artistic intention and its public effects in Kurt Weill’s musical theater from the 1920s into the 1930s. She teaches Western music history within its cultural context and transnational perspective and has been a music critic for the regional edition (Kansai area) of the Yomiuri shinbun since 2003. She is preparing a critical biography of Kurt Weill in Japanese.

Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard. Her Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (2014) won the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society, and her Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music. She has served as president of the Society for American Music, Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic, and chair of the Pulitzer Prize committee in music. She is currently writing a book about Marian Anderson and the racial desegregation of classical music performance.