Dr Naomi Matsumoto is a musicologist working particularly in the field of opera studies. Before launching her musicological career, she worked as professional singer, having trained at Aichi Prefectural University of Arts (Japan), Liceo Musicale di G.B. Viotti (Italy) and Trinity College of Music. Her vocal teachers were Rita Orlandi, the late Robert Spencer, Ian Partridge and Teresa Cahill.
Her doctoral thesis (2005) investigates the origins and early development (up to c. 1700) of the operatic mad scene. For this work, she was awarded The Overseas Research Scholarship and the British Federation of Women Graduates National Award. After the degree, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation British and Commonwealth Award enabled her to pursue further archival research in Venice, Padua, Verona and Genoa.
While Monteverdi, Purcell and their contemporaries constitute her main scholarly interests, she has also extended her researches into 19 th -century opera and produced several articles on Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor . Recently, she has started working on the reception of Western opera in the Far East and contributed a chapter on Bizet’s Carmen in Japan in Carmen Abroad: Bizet’s Opera on Global Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which won the Royal Musical Association Outstanding Edited Collection Prize (2021).
Naomi is keen on interdisciplinary work, collaborating with scholars in diverse fields such as medical history, literature, translation studies and cultural studies. She instigated several international and interdisciplinary research projects and as the research lead, won the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Award (2011) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Symposium Award (2013).
She is a member of the Royal Musical Association, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (USA), and the Japan Musicological Society. She also holds fellowships of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Historical Society. She was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Swiss Journal of Musicology .
Academic qualifications BA, LTCL (vocal performance), Perfezionamento Diploma di Canto Lirico ( Liceo Musicale di Viotti ), Postgraduate Diploma (Trinity College of Music), MMus (London), PhD (London), Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy.
Publications and research outputs
Book Canova-Green, Marie-Claude and Matsumoto, Naomi . 2023. Christophe Ballard/Michel Richard de Lalande Ballet de La Jeunesse
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2023. Music Historiography: How and why music history has been written
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2022. Critical Edition of Anonymous, Lo Spedale
Edited Book Norton, Barley and Matsumoto, Naomi , eds. 2019. Music as Heritage: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives
Matsumoto, Naomi , ed. 2015. Staging Verdi and Wagner
Matsumoto, Naomi and Yamamoto, Kazuto, eds. 2014. SHIZENGAKU: the Search for a Coming Aesthetic
Book Section Canova-Green, Marie-Claude and Matsumoto, Naomi . 2023. Exoticism or Eclecticism? Carnival at Court and the Mascarade du Roy de la Chine
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2023. Realising Arianna: the Problematic Accompaniments of Claudio Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2023. Representational Conventions and Varieties of Operatic Madness: The Gap between Dramaturgy and Diagnosis
Show more information
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2022. Notice sur l'établissement de la musique
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2020. The Other Reversed? Japan’s Assimilation of Carmen, 1885 to 1945
Norton, Barley . 2019. Filming Music as Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Audiovisual Representation
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2018. Pio Enea Obizzi: Power and Authorship
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2018. L'opera dei pupi, Torneo, and Early Opera: Shared Traditions and Intangible Experiences
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2017. Giovanni Vittorio Rosi's Musical Theatre: Opera, Operetta and the Westernisation of Modern Japan
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2015. Charles Marshall’s “Dioramic” Scenery: Staging Verdi in Victorian London
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2014. Michael Costa at the Haymarket: the Establishment of the Modern Role of 'The Director of Music'
Pryer, Anthony J. . 2014. ‘Real’ Nature, ‘Aesthetic’ Nature and the Making of Artworks: Some Challenges of Cross-Cultural Collaboration (in Japanese Translation)
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2014. Nature in Music, Music in Nature: Imitation, Quotation and Representation
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2011. Manacled Freedom: 19th-Century Vocal Improvisation and the Flute-Accompanied Cadenza in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2007. 1001 Classical Recordings 1001 Classical Recordings
Article Matsumoto, Naomi . 2024. Representing Insanity and the Crisis of Identity through Henry Purcell's 'Bess of Bedlam'
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2023. "Madama Butterfly": Prospettive occidentali e giapponesi a confronto
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2021. Madam Butterfly and the Forging of Japanese Identity
Show more information
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2019. The Mad Scene: Portrayals of Insanity in Opera
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2016. "Ghost Writing”: an Exploration of Presence and Absence in Lucia di Lammermoor (1835)’
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2015. Book Review: James Kennaway (ed.), Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014),
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2014. Il plagio vs "una piacevole reminiscenza al nostro orecchio". The Siege of Rochelle (1835) di Michael Balfe e il "lavoro culturale" della critica estetica.
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2012. Instrumental Music and the Industrial Revolution
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2012. Liner notes to Quintetto Vocale Italiano, Gesualdo
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2012. Liner notes to Paolo Cammozzo (dir.), Laudate Dominum: Masters of the Chapel of St Mark’s
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2012. Liner notes to Cappella Marciana, Voce Mea ad Dominum: Celebrations of the 400th Anniversary of the death of G. Croce da Chioggia
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2012. Liner notes to Angelo Ephrikian (dir.), Jacopo Peri: L’Euridice
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2011. Pio Enea degli Obizzi and the Opera Torneo Genre – Towards an Understanding of the Commercialisation of Early Italian Opera’
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2010. Englishness and Burlesque on the London Stage: the Case of The Dragon of Wantley
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2009. The dating of MS, GB-Lcm: n. 927, The Dragon of Wantley
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2008. The Identity of the librettist of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2008. Motoo Ohtaguro interviews Prokofiev
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2006. An anonymous setting of L’Ospedale and the question of an “asylum opera” genre
Conference or Workshop Item Matsumoto, Naomi . 2002. 'Global Presentations of Madness in Musical Theatres: a Comparative Study of Britten’s Curlew River and Juro Motomasa’s Sumidagawa
Film/Video Matsumoto, Naomi . 2017. Goldsmiths Research Questions: How does opera represent madness?
Project Matsumoto, Naomi . 2012. Anonymous: Lo Spedale
Matsumoto, Naomi . 2011. Pierto A. Ziani: Le fortune di Damira e Rodope
Areas of supervision
Music and medicine
17 th century and 19 th century Italian opera
The inter-cultural reception of Western musical theatre
Baroque performance practice
