Dr Maiko Kawabata

Professional biography

Dr. Maiko Kawabata is an award-winning musicologist and violinist educated at Cambridge University (B.A.) and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D.). She joined the Open University in 2021 having previously held positions on the faculties of the University of Edinburgh, University of East Anglia, and the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She also teaches at the Royal College of Music where she is Lecturer in Music.

Mai’s main research interest is in the history of musical performance, with a focus on extremes of solo violin playing – convention-breaking styles and ideas such as virtuosity and unplayability. She is the author of Paganini, the 'Demonic' Virtuoso and a co-editor of Exploring Virtuosities: Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, Nineteenth-Century Musical Practices and Beyond. She has also published articles on Stradivari, Paganini, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Heifetz, Gilles Apap and Patricia Kopatchinskaja. She has presented her research at the American Musicological Society, the Institute of Musical Research, and numerous international conferences.   

Mai studied violin with John Crawford and the late Nona Liddell and has wide experience playing professionally in orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the UK, USA, and Germany. 

Mai is the co-organiser (with Dr. Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway) of the 2019 Study Day: Cultural Imperialism and the New ‘Yellow Peril’ in Western Classical Music and 2020 IMR/RCM Conference Racialised Performance in Western Classical Music in Europe and the UK (postponed due to Covid). She received a BBC Radio 3/AHRC grant to further her research into Japanese composer Kikuko Kanai (1906 - 1986). Her ethnographic study of racialised identity among professional East Asian musicians in European and British orchestras is forthcoming. 

Impact and engagement