Matthew Gilbert is a fourth-year transfer student from San Diego, California majoring in Musicology. His research aspires to build meaningful ways of connecting with people through musical experiences and rectify the inherent gaps in musical canons, which are designed to exclude, by creating space for musicians who have traditionally been undervalued. For his senior capstone project, he is excavating the life of Sachiko Kanenobu, a Japanese musician whose pioneering work as the first woman in Japan to write and release her own songs has been overlooked in the academic narrative of Japanese music. He explores alternatives to traditional models of musical biography and canonicity by incorporating oral history into an ethnographic biography. He is interested in applied methodologies whose impact is felt outside of the university, where his work is directly beneficial to those persons with whom he engages in his research. Part of his project will include archiving Kanenobu’s work and bringing her to UCLA for a performance. He hopes this project will bring awareness to musicians outside of the traditional narrative and create a compelling framework for other scholars to use. He is grateful to be the 2019-2020 recipient of the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Scholarship for his research.