JAPAN MUSIC EDUCATION SOCIETY
Introduction
The purpose and activities of Japan Music Education Society
The Japan Music Education Society (Society) aims to conduct research and discussions on music education, promote international exchange, and contribute to the academic promotion of music education.
To achieve this goal, the Society engages in the following activities and initiatives:
・Holding academic conferences and research meetings related to music education.
・Editing and publishing the academic journal “Music Education” and other publications.
・Collecting and investigating research materials.
・Exchanging research materials with foreign organizations.
・Carrying out other necessary activities to achieve its objectives.
The Society is an academic research group that collaborates with the Science Council of Japan.
Greeting
The President of the 27th Term: Tadahiko Imada (Hirosaki University)
To define what music education studies is risks, rather, effacing the very movement and fluctuation of thought. This is because music education studies is neither a discipline that converges upon a single methodology, nor one whose object or domain is fixed in advance. Its contours are, instead, always maintained in a certain ambiguity.
We might, provisionally, divide it into three terms— “music,” “education,” and “studies”—and explore their intersections. Yet this is not to determine each term definitively, but merely a tentative procedure for observing how they relate to one another while remaining in flux. To begin with, “music” can no longer be grasped as an object that constitutes a single, unified system.
Frameworks once taken for granted have already been relativized; within diverse practices, environments, and relations with bodies and technologies, music continually emerges in different forms each time. We often classify music with prefixes such as “classical,” “folk,” “ethnic,” “traditional,” or “popular,” yet before asking what such distinctions capture, we must first consider to what extent “music” itself can be named at all. The totality of music cannot be fully grasped as a pre-given object; it constantly slips beyond our understanding.
At the same time, when we look back on music education thus far, we can see a tendency to treat music as an object to be organized and efficiently transmitted. Frameworks such as notation, theory, and stepwise skill assessment are, in principle, effective tools; yet when they come too much to the fore, music is often treated as something to be “correctly reproduced.” As a result, emphasis is placed on whether one performs well or avoids mistakes, while the sense of wonder in encountering sound, the immediacy of improvisational engagement, and relationships with surrounding sound environments tend to recede into the background. There are not a few instances in which music is treated as if it were written language and fixed as a system of signs.
“Education,” too, is not merely the transmission of knowledge or skills; it is opened as a process in which “I” may be transformed through encounters with something. “Studies,” for its part, is not simply the accumulation of established knowledge, but also a movement that sustains questioning and endures its uncertainty.
Seen in this way, “music,” “education,” and “studies” do not appear as independent entities, but as a field of intersections that resist definitive articulation. Sound arises without a fixed determination of what counts as music; through engaging with it, “I” am transformed; and its meaning continues to be called into question—music education studies is situated within this very overlapping.
Children, in particular, continue to engage with sound at a phase prior to being subsumed under such acts of naming. If so, what we ought to face is not music as an already named system, but the very expanse of the earliest experience of music that has not yet been named. To encounter this unknown sound together with children, and to approach it, however slightly, through practice—perhaps only a form of music education studies that neither confines “music” within parentheses nor restricts it through prefixes can bear this possibility.
It is my hope that our society will remain not a repository of established knowledge, but a place open to the very generation of thought itself. By fostering new reciprocities between research and practice, I would like to continue, together with you, to question the possibilities of music education as an ongoing endeavor.
Membership Registration and Fee Payment from Overseas
Please enter the required information by downloading the following registration form, fill in the required information, and submit it to the JMES office by email attachment, fax, or mail.
Please transfer the annual fee ( ¥ 7,000 )― in Japanese yen to the following bank account: Please note that the handling fees for currency exchange and beneficiary bank charges will be borne by the remitter.
Bank Name: MIZUHO BANK, LTD.
Address: 5-13-3 Honcho, Koganei-shi, Tokyo 184-0004, Japan
Telephone No. :+81-42-381-6301
Swift Code: MHCBJPJT
Branch Name: KOGANEI BRANCH
Beneficiary’s Account No.: 114-644777 Current account
Beneficiary Name: NIHONONGAKUKYOIKUGAKKAI
Please follow the instructions in Japanese from the URL below.
日本音楽教育学会 第57回大会（年会費支払専用） (tobutoptours.co.jp)
Membership registration will be completed by transferring the membership fee. Check the reply from the secretariat.
Please note that to apply for a presentation at the research conference held every fall, you must complete the membership registration and annual fee payment by the end of May.
Japan Music Education Society Office
For membership applications and payment of fees from outside of Japan, please contact us at the following address:
remus.dti.ne.jp Link to Related Organizations
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