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Paper short abstract:

This paper describes the circumstances of the composition and performance of ‘Schlesvig’ by Kate Ingeborg Hansen in Sendai in 1932. The performance exemplifies the role of music in linking the provincial town to the wider world.

Paper long abstract:

On 11 June 1932, at a concert at Miyagi College, the Suzuki String Quartet gave the first full performance of ‘Schlesvig’ (sic), a work composed by the head of the College’s music department, Kate Ingeborg Hansen. Hansen, a missionary from Kansas, who spent most of her working life in Sendai, had Danish roots. Her father had emigrated to the United States in 1864 after his homeland in Southern Jutland was annexed by Prussia. In 1893 he took his family to Denmark, and Kate Hansen spent several months with the family of his sister, who had married a German. She composed ‘Schlesvig’ in 1929, presumably as part of her studies for a doctorate in music at the Chicago Music College. The work represents both a tribute to her father, who died in 1926, a commemoration of her family’s time in her father’s homeland, and a celebration of the incorporation of Southern Jutland into the Danish nation as a result of the plebiscite in 1920, according to the Treaty of Versailles.

In my paper I will describe the circumstances of the composition and the performance and briefly characterize the work. Placing the performance in the context of concerts in early twentieth-century Sendai, I argue that the performance of ‘Schlesvig’ represents a prime example of the role of music in linking the northern provincial town to the wider world. Performing and listening to Western music enabled the people of Japan and Sendai to actively participate in modern civilization (bunmei) and to imagine themselves a part of a global community of nations through the music and the associations it evoked.