About

Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Venice, Italy, and specializes in Japanese religions and cultural history, with a particular focus on the Esoteric Buddhist tradition (mikkyō) and the history of Shinto. His research explores the interactions between Buddhism and local cults across Asian traditions, as well as the development of Shinto discourse in Japan. Rambelli envisions Shinto as a product of complex processes involving the localization of Buddhism in Japan and the influence of various Asian and Western intellectual trends, including Neo-Confucianism, Daoism, Neo-Brahmanism, and Christianity, alongside a growing awareness of cultural identity and specificity. His current work investigates the religious and cultural history of gagaku and bugaku, traditional Japanese imperial court music and dance, with a specific focus on the shō, a bamboo mouth organ. Rambelli is also interested in the impact of Indian cultural elements on pre-modern Japan, issues of cultural identity in Japan and Italy, and broader themes in the history of religions such as materiality, semiotics, iconoclasm, and syncretism. Throughout his career, he has contributed to the understanding of Japanese religious practices, semiotics, and cultural identity, publishing extensively on these topics and editing several volumes related to Japanese religiosity and cultural history.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Ancient history
• Law
• Archaeology
• Art
• Philosophy
• Religious studies
• Geography
• Literature

Selected publications

• The World of Japanese Medieval Musicians: Gagaku Encyclopedias and the Cultural History of Japanese Religions

  Annuaire - Ecole pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences religieuses/Annuaire · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Review: <i>Esoteric Zen: Zen and the Tantric Teachings in Premodern Japan</i>, by Stephan Kigensan Licha

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Gagaku as World Music: Heritage, Identity, and Creativity

  2025-02-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Gagaku, the Ceremonial Music of Japan: Cultural Capital, Cultural Heritage, and Cultural Identity

  2025-02-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration , by Mark R. Mullins

  Journal of Religion in Japan · 2023-04-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama by Mariko Anno (review)

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama by Mariko Anno Fabio Rambelli (bio) Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama. By Mariko Anno. Cornell East Asia Series, Cornell University Press, 2020. xxii, 339 pages. $65.00, cloth; $42.99, E-book. Typically, nō theater is studied in North American and European universities as part of their premodern Japanese literature curricula. The most obvious result of this disciplinary location—admittedly, quite odd and inadequate—is to reduce any nō play to a short libretto ("drama") that takes a few pages in English translation. No one would ever think of reducing the subtleties of an opera such as Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly or the intricacies of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser to aspects of Romantic literature in Italy or Germany, but this is, mutatis mutandis, the typical destiny of nō in Western academia. Indeed, there is no established academic discipline today that covers the range of intermedialities constituting nō: literary texts, acting, singing, music, costumes, stage art, visual arts, material culture, etc.—all interrelated in multiple layers of action and meaning and imbricated in social structures of education and transmission dating back to the middle ages. As a consequence, nō is mostly seen as a form of "drama"; and while this postcolonial classification may have been devised as a way to ennoble it (that is, nō is not just an Asian vernacular "performing art" but a veritable form of "drama" that aims at universality, in which Zeami functions as a Shakespeare of sorts), it also obscured the very intermedial stuff nō is made of. As a type of "total art," the expressive value of nō, far from being found in its texts alone, is produced in the interrelations between texts and all the other semiotic systems that constitute it (gestures, singing, music, dance, etc.); exclusive focus on one semiotic system irreparably reduces the effect (and the value) of any nō play. And yet, we are not at the point in which nō can be comfortably taught in the classroom by addressing in depth all its constitutive language and elements. Still, we have to start somewhere. Dance and singing are probably the most elusive and specialized aspects of nō, and very few people have an adequate competence in them; in terms of common knowledge about it, music lies somewhere in between literature and the performing arts. Very little exists in English on the music of nō; the most valuable book in any Western language on the subject may well still be Akira Tamba's La structure musicale du Nô: Théatre traditionnel japonais (Klincksieck, 1974), which presented nō music as a modular structure composed of cells and patterns, which interacted with other patterns in dance and singing. Tamba, himself [End Page 517] a composer, saw in nō some important affinities with contemporary avantgarde music. The book under review by Mariko Anno is a new contribution to our understanding of the music of nō. Its originality lies in its exclusive focus on the flute (nōkan, annoyingly spelled nohkan in the book) as the only "melodic" instrument of the nō music ensemble (which also includes three different percussion instruments). Anno sketches the history of the instrument (about which very little is known) and presents its peculiar organology, which produces scales with highly irregular intervals and no precise octaves (chapter 1). This is followed by a discussion, largely informed by the author's own fieldwork and experience as a musician, of traditional teaching and playing techniques, based on both representative books and oral instructions by important masters, especially Issō Yukihiro (of the Issō nōkan) and Richard Emmert; Anno also compares what she learns in person with recorded performances by masters belonging to different lineages (chapter 2). The central part of the book presents the role of the flute and its melodic patterns in a series of representative nō plays (Atsumori, Takasago, Izutsu, Kinuta, and Tō) (chapter 3). This is followed by a more detailed analysis of the flute parts in Atsumori, in which Anno shows how the flute intersects with singing parts and...

  PublisherDOI

• Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of "Kōshiki" in Japanese Sōtō Zen by Michaela Mross (review)

  Monumenta Nipponica · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of "Kōshiki" in Japanese Sōtō Zen by Michaela Mross Fabio Rambelli Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of "Kōshiki" in Japanese Sōtō Zen. By Michaela Mross. University of Hawai'i Press, 2022. 392 pages. ISBN: 9780824892739 (hardcover; also available as softcover). The study of Japanese religions is traditionally a silent discipline. Scholars have long focused almost exclusively on texts: scriptures, commentaries, and ritual manuals. Two or three decades ago, images were added to the mix, and more recently attention has shifted to material objects and their role in rituals. Still, the sensory turn that is taking hold in other disciplines in the humanities has yet to make a dent in this field. Music in particular has been largely silenced by scholarship, for reasons that are impossible to address here. In Memory, Music, Manuscripts, Michaela Mross makes an important contribution toward rectifying this lack of attention to the musical dimension of Japanese religions. The most frequently studied premodern temples and shrines today were once small towns, with thousands of people going in and out every day, carrying foodstuffs and construction material, working on the premises, speaking, yelling, whispering, crying, singing, chanting … The animals who lived in these compounds were hardly silent, not to mention the natural elements and atmospheric phenomena (wind, rain, storms, and the muzzling effect of accumulated snow). Bells of different kinds marked the passing of time and the progression of rituals, together with drums and other percussion instruments. Some large temples and shrines (such as Kōfukuji, Kasuga Taisha, Shitennōji, Iwashimizu Hachimangū, and, at different historical periods, Tōdaiji and Tōshōgū) had a choir with dozens of monks and a full-scale gagaku orchestra to perform instrumental music (kangen) or dance (bugaku) at Buddhist ceremonies, a tradition that has continued for about one thousand years. Yet this thick and extensive soundscape of Japanese religions has never really been addressed seriously; musical aspects tend to be downplayed or ignored as an unnecessary superfluity, or the lavish ceremonies with music and dance are seen as a manifestation of inauthentic religiosity. At most, we find scholarly references to kagura (a type of ceremonial dance) and perhaps noh, but the former is relegated to folklore or "folk religion" and the latter tends to be dealt with in Japanese literature, not religious studies. Mross has chosen as her subject kōshiki, a ritual form that was created in Japan around the tenth century and involves elaborate chanting in various styles, accompanied by percussion instruments. Kōshiki literally means "ritualized lecture," but [End Page 246] Mross quotes Lori Meeks's "chanted lecture," a more apt translation of what is essentially a sung ritual (p. 21).1 A kōshiki typically consists of several segments, or "modules," including the purification of the ritual space, the summoning of the divinity to which the ritual is dedicated, a ceremony in four parts involving shōmyō chanting, the central ritual sequence (shikimon), and the transfer of merit (pp. 73–93). In actual rituals, some of these modules can be shortened or eliminated. Memory, Music, Manuscripts is an extended and in-depth study of two important kōshiki within the Sōtō Zen denomination: the Jūroku rakan kōshiki ("Kōshiki" on the Sixteen Arhats) and the Butsuji kōshiki for Zen Master Butsuji, the posthumous name for Keizan Jōkin (1264 or 1268–1325), who is credited with beginning the diffusion of Sōtō Zen in Japan.2 After a general introduction describing the goals of the book, her methods and sources, and the presence of music in Japanese Buddhist and Zen liturgy, Mross provides a useful outline of the history of the kōshiki form and its adoption by the Sōtō tradition, including its contemporary practice, in chapter 1. She explains that the genre was initially created for the praise of the buddha Amida and his Pure Land; subsequently, it expanded to address various Buddhist divinities, sacred objects such as relics, and even kami (as in jingi kōshiki). Kōshiki was one of the new ritual forms created in Japan, together with saimon (ceremonial declaration), hyōbyaku (declaration of...

  PublisherDOI

• The Economic Study of Buddhism

  2022-09-26

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Gagaku in Medieval Japanese Religion

  Religions · 2022-06-22 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Contrary to the widespread assumption in the study of Japanese religions that Kagura is historically the main genre of performing arts at Shintō festivals, something dating back to the beginning of Japanese history, in this article I focus instead on Gagaku (and its Bugaku dance repertory) as a central component of rituals, ceremonies, and festivals not only at the imperial court but also and especially at many temples and shrines across the country. While Gagaku and Bugaku were deeply rooted in the Kansai area, with guilds of hereditary professional musicians affiliated with, respectively, the imperial court in Kyoto, Kasuga-Kōfukuji in Nara, and Shitennōji in Osaka, and with the most lavish performances being held at temples and shrines in the region, those art forms had already spread to the provinces by the end of the Heian period. This article investigates some of the connections between religious ideas, rituals, and musical performances in relation to Kuroda Toshio’s concept of the exo-esoteric system (kenmitsu taisei) and the creative use of Buddhist canonical sources that such connections originated.

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• Chapter Nineteen Shō kanjō: Music Education, Secret Melodies, and Imperial Politics

  2022-01-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Mark Teeuwen

  University of Oslo

  4 shared

• John M. Breen

  1 shared

• 倫英 和気

  1 shared

• Yijiang Zhong

  University of Macau

  1 shared

• Shoji Mitarai

  1 shared

• Aike P. Rots

  University of Oslo

  1 shared

• J E Breen

  1 shared

• Carina Roth

  University of Geneva

  1 shared