Goze P

In a tradition extending from the medieval era to the early twentieth century, visually disabled Japanese women known as goze toured the countryside as professional singers. An integral part of rural musical culture, the goze sang unique narratives of their own making and a significant repertory of popular ballads and short songs. Goze activities peaked in the nineteenth century, and some women continued to tour well into the middle of the twentieth. The last active goze lived until 2005.

In Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan, Gerald Groemer examines the way of life, institutions, and songs of these itinerant performers. Groemer shows that the solidarity and success goze achieved with the rural public through narrative and music was based on the convergence of the goze’s desire for a degree of social and economic autonomy with the audience’s wish to mitigate the cultural deprivation it so often experienced. Goze recognized audiences as a stimulus for developing repertories and careers; the public in turn recognized goze as masterful artisans who acted as powerful agents of widespread cultural development.

As the first full-length scholarly work on goze in English, this book is an invaluable resource to scholars and students of Japanese culture, Japanese music, ethnomusicology, and disability studies worldwide.

Gerald Groemer began his studies of music as a pianist. After earning a Masters of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts in piano performance at Peabody Conservatory, he entered the ethnomusicology program at Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music where he earned a PhD in musicology in 1993, the first non-Japanese ever to do so. Since 1998 he has been professor of musicology, ethnomusicology, and Japanese music history at University of Yamanashi in K?fu Japan. He has authored several books on music and cultural history in both Japanese and English, including The Spirit of Tsugaru (2012), a translation Nishiyama Matsunosuke’s writings on Edo Culture (1997), and Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900: The Beggar’s Gift (2015). He was awarded the prestigious Koizumi Fumio Prize for Ethnomusicology in 2008.