Education
- Ph.D., Ethnomusicology and Music Theory, CUNY Graduate Center
- M.B.A., Stanford University
- B.A., Music and Mathematics, Yale University
Noriko Manabe is professor of music in music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She is also affiliated faculty for IU’s East Asian Languages and Cultures Department, East Asian Studies Center, and Cultural Studies Program.
She previously served on the standing faculty in music theory at Temple University and in music at Princeton University. She holds a Ph.D. with a double concentration in ethnomusicology and music theory from CUNY Graduate Center. Before academia, she worked in the financial industry and was an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst in the internet and videogames industries.
Manabe’s research centers on 1) music and social movements; 2) music and language; 3) popular music, especially in Japan and the U.S.; and 4) the music industry. Her work blends musical analysis with ethnography, linguistics, and the social sciences.
Manabe’s first monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015), addresses the obstacles that musicians face in political messaging and how they express themselves in the performance spaces of cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. The book won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, the Book Award from the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and Honorable Mention for the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Her article “We Gon’ Be Alright? The Ambiguities of Kendrick Lamar’s Protest Anthem” in Music Theory Online 25.1, analyzes the meter, intonation, and meaning of Lamar’s song in the contexts of video, live performance, the album, and protests. It won the Outstanding Publications Award from the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Popular Music Interest Group of SMT.
She has also published articles on rap, rock, and the linguistic features of Japanese; Japanese DJs; music about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez. A list of her publications with links can be found here.
Manabe’s second monograph, Revolution Remixed: Intertextuality in Protest Music, constructs a classification of intertextuality as it pertains to protest songs and analyzes how sociopolitical circumstances impact reception.
She is coediting The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott). Additionally, she is series editor for 33-1/3 Japan, a series of books on Japanese popular music from Bloomsbury Publishing and an extension of its popular 33-1/3 book series.
Manabe has served on the editorial or advisory boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Twentieth-Century Music, Music Analysis, and Music and Politics, and the book series SOAS Musicology (Routledge) and Music and Politics (Routledge). She is a contributing editor for the Asia-Pacific Journal.
She has served as chair of the Publication Awards Committee and a member of the Program, Investment, and Race and Ethnicity committees for the Society for Music Theory; treasurer, council member, and chair of the Investment Committee for the Society for Ethnomusicology; a member of the Finance Committee for the Association for Asian Studies; and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Society for Japanese Studies.