Yayoi Uno Everett

Yayoi Uno Everett is a native of Yokohama, Japan, and joins CUNY Hunter College and the Graduate Center from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has previously taught at Emory University (2000-14), University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1999-2000), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (1994-98). Her research focuses on the analysis of postwar art music, film, and opera from the perspectives of semiotics, narratology, multimedia theories, cultural studies, and East Asian aesthetics. Her publications include monographs entitled Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Operas (Indiana University Press, 2015) and The Music of Louis Andriessen (Cambridge University Press, 2006), a co-edited volume Locating East Asia in Western Music, and various peer-reviewed articles on music by Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Thomas Adeès, Charles Wuorinen, Louis Andriessen, György Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Chou-Wen Chung, Lei Liang, Kyong Mee Choi, and Unsuk Chin. Since 2016, she has given invited lectures at Northwestern University, UW Madison, University of South Carolina, University of Miami, UNC Greensboro, McGill University, and University of Michigan, and delivered plenary and keynote addresses at regional and national conferences of Society for Music Theory. She has served on Ph.D. dissertation committees at University of Helsinki, Northwestern University, McGill University, University of Illinois, and Temple University, and guest taught a graduate seminar on Topic Theory and Intertextuality at University of Chicago (2016).

She is currently co-editing a collection of essays entitled Opera in Flux: Posthumanism, Dramaturgy, Subjectivity under contract with University of Michigan Press.

Everett served as the associate editor of Music Theory Spectrum (2015-18). She served as president for Music Theory Southeast (2010-12) and as member/chair for Society of Music Theory’s Executive Board, Publication Subvention, and Diversity committees (1998-2009). She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from UIC’s Creativity Activity Award, Dean’s Research Award, NEAC Research Fellowship from the Association of Asian Studies, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, the Japan Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Asian Council, and the National Endowment
for Humanities.

Publications

Monographs

• Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative: Contemporary Operas by Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
• The Music of Louis Andriessen.  In Music in the Twentieth Century series, edited by Arnold Whittall.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Edited Volumes

• Yayoi Uno and Nicholas Stevens, eds. Opera in Flux: Staging, Identity, Narrative Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (under contract).
• Yayoi Uno Everett and Fred Lau, eds.  Locating East Asia in Western Art Music. Middlebury, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Volumes

• “Ritual and Variation in Unsuk Chin’s Šu: Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra (2009).” In Michael Puri, Jason Geary, and Seth Monahan, eds., Critical Approaches to Musical Meaning: New Essays in Musical Hermeneutics. New York: Oxford University Press (under contract).
• “Sonic Allegory in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel.” In The Cambridge Handbook on Thomas Adès, eds. Edward Venn and Philip Stoecker, pp. 258-82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• “Transcending Ethnicity: Post-spectral Music by Xu Yi, Anthony Cheung, and Yoshiaki Onishi.” In the Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music, eds. Brian Christian and Amy Bauer. New York: Oxford University Press (in press).
• “Pianto as a Topical Signifier of Grief in Contemporary Operas by John Adams, Thomas Adès, and Kaija Saariaho.” In Routledge Handbook of Music Signification, eds. Esti Sheinberg. New York: Routledge Publication, 2020.
• “John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer: Straddling the Fence Between Myth and Realism.” Singing in Signs, eds. Gregory Decker and Matthew Shaftel., pp. 339-66. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• “Opera as Film: Multimodal Narrative and Embodiment.” In the Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body, eds. Youn Kim and Sander Gilman, pp. 399-417. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• “Counting Down time: Musical Topics in Dr. Atomic (2005) by John Adams.” Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations: In Honour and Memory of Raymond Monelle, ed. Esti Sheinberg, pp. 263-74. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2012.
• “Trope of Desire and Jouissance in Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin.” Music and Narrative in Music Since 1900, eds., Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland, pp. 329-45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
• “Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima di Toshio Hosokawa” La musica di Toshio Hosokawa, edited by Luciana Galliano. Roma: Aracne editrice. 2009.
• “Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Avant-garde Music in the Sixties.”  In Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and The Sixties, edited by Robert Adlington, pp. 187-208. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• “Mirrors of West and Mirrors of East: Elements of Gagaku in Postwar Art Music.”  In Translating Asia’s Traditions: Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts, ed. Hae-kyung Um, pp. 176-203.  New York: Routledge, 2004.
• “Reflecting on Two Cultural ‘Mirrors’: Mode and Signification of Musical Synthesis in Tōru Takemitsu’s November Steps and Autumn.”  In A Way Alone: On the Music of Takemitsu, eds. Hugh De Ferranti and Yoko Narazaki, pp. 125-153. Tokyo: Academia Musica, 2002.

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

• “From Exoticism to Interculturalism: Counterframing the East-West Binary.” Music Theory Spectrum 43/2 (2021). (in press)  http://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtab001.
• “Infusing Modern Subjectivity into a Premodern Narrative Form: Tōru Takemitsu’s Soundtrack for Double Suicide (1968).” Journal of Film Music 3/1 (2010): 37-49.
• “Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre.” Music Theory Spectrum, 31/1 (2009): 26-56.
• “Gesture and Calligraphy in the Music of Chou Wen-chung.” Contemporary Music Review 26/5-6 (2007): 569-84. Special edition, eds. Edward Green and Lei Liang.
• “Modeling Parody and Irony in Music by Weill, Maxwell Davies, and Andriessen.” Music Theory Online, vol. 10/4, 2004.
• “Musical Design and Signification in ‘Writing to Vermeer’ by Louis Andriessen.” Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie 7/2 (2002): 67-79.
• Uno, Yayoi.  “Reflecting on Two Cultural ‘Mirrors’: The Roles of Biwa and Shakuhachi in Two Orchestral Works by Toru Takemitsu.” Journal of the Asian Music Research Institute, vol.20 (1998): 213-251.  Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, 1998.
• “Aleatoric Processes in Twentieth Century Music and Arts.”  Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly.  Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1998. Vol. 1, pp. 46-49.