In 1551, a group of orphaned boys boarded a ship in Lisbon. Chosen for the quality of their voices, they were dispatched by King João III along the trade routes of the Portuguese Empire. Traveling through Mozambique, Goa, and Malacca, two of them eventually landed on the shores of southern Japan in 1556, carrying Catholic song into a country that would soon outlaw Christianity altogether.
Four and a half centuries later, on the small island of Ikitsuki, the last descendants of Japan’s “hidden Christians” still chant prayers whose words no longer belong to any singular language and whose melodies sound, to the casual ear, like Buddhist sutra.
In 2018, UNESCO recognized their villages and churches as World Heritage sites, but not the endangered oral traditions kept alive within them. This talk follows the global lives of the king’s singing orphans to ask what connects these two worlds and what we stand to lose if we fail to listen before the singing stops.
The MIT Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and presented in partnership with MIT Libraries, it gives the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison, Julia Wolfe, Terry Riley, Don Byron, and others.