Department of Music
Jennifer Matsue

Jennifer Milioto Matsue

Job Title
Professor of Music
Chair of the Music Department
Director of Global and Popular Musics Program
Taylor Music Center 201

Research interests

Jennifer Milioto Matsue is an ethnomusicologist specializing in modern Japanese music and culture. She has conducted research on a variety of music cultures in contemporary Japan including the Tokyo hardcore rock scene, nagauta (a type of traditional chamber music featuring the three-string lute shamisen), raves, the increasingly popular world of taiko (Japanese ensemble drumming), and Vocaloid Hatsune Miku. She is interested in how performers find meaning through participating in such worlds, with a particular focus on women’s roles in music making.

She is now embarking on new research entitled The Beat, Body and Brain: Musical Interludes with the Horse, which explores a wide range of ways that horses intersect with music, including European art music written about and for horses, music in hippotherapy (the use of horses for therapy or rehabilitation), and choreographing maneuvers on horseback to contemporary art and popular music as a competitive sport.

Publications

She is the author of the monograph Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene (Routledge 2008) and Focus: Music in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2015), as well as several articles on related topics.

Additional media

Distinctions

She is Director of the World Musics and Cultures Program, and serves as Professor in Music, Asian Studies and Anthropology at Union College.

Academic credentials

B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago