Music Forum: Makoto Takao
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Thursday, October 22nd at 5pm Lewis Music Library Please join us for a light reception in the Lewis Music Library after the event. The King’s Singing Orphans: Music, Mission, and Japan’s Hidden Christians What do a sixteenth-century Marian hymn, a fishing island off Nagasaki, and UNESCO have in common? 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 villag
