The accelerating rhythm of two hardwood clappers signals the opening of the curtain: an audience of several thousand watches as the immense stage is revealed. At its rear are eight singers, eight players of three-string, banjo-like instruments, five drummers and a flautist, all male and wearing matching kimono with broad-shouldered waistcoats and skirt-like trousers. A flute melody in free rhythm – a slow sliding stream of intervals, which may strike Western ears as otherworldly – accompanies the entrance of a samurai character, to enthusiastic yells from the audience. In stylised speech he introduces himself, and sets the scene. The lead singer launches into a slow chant-like song, accompanied by two hand-drums. Between drum-strokes, the drummers shout like martial arts competitors: yooo! ho! ya! ha!
Soon the banjos join in in unison, and the music becomes more rhythmic and melodic, the vocalists seeming to chase the string tune, a split-second behind the strongly-plucked beats. Actors enter along a runway passing through the audience, who shout further cries of encouragement. The flute re-enters, its melody seemingly unrelated to the voices and strings. At a dramatic climax the hero – a powerful warrior-priest – strikes an exaggerated pose, arms akimbo, eyes crossed. Accenting his pose, a deep-voiced stick-drum sounds from behind a screen offstage to the left, while – barely visible to the far right – a man in black pounds on a wooden board with two hardwood bars.
THIS is how a performance of a kabuki play might begin and develop. Sounds come at you from every direction: music from onstage and offstage musicians, heightened speech from the actors, shouts from the drummers and the audience, sound effects depicting insects or symbolising natural phenomena. Such a soundscape, however, would be unthinkable in the other genres of Japanese classical music covered in this chapter: each is specific to its social, physical and historical environment.
Ask a Japanese about classical music in Japan, and the names likely to pop up are those of Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Or maybe the pianist Uchida Mitsuko, who studied in Vienna from the age of twelve and is now a British citizen. Or two recent figures of worldwide fame: composer Takemitsu Tōru and conductor Ozawa Seiji.1 But that’s if you are conversing in English. In Japanese, you would have had to choose between two words for ‘classical’. One is the Japanese pronunciation of ‘classic’ kurashikku, which refers only to what is called ‘Western art/classical music’ by those who realise that there are also non-Western art/classical musics. The other is koten, a native word mostly referring to the world’s ‘other’ classical musics, especially those of Japan.2
Japan’s many classical genres are historically related but highly diverse. Each has its own moods, social contexts and musical forms. This chapter focuses on those koten genres which foreigners most often encounter: gagaku ‘court’ music, the theatre genres noh and kabuki, the solo shakuhachi flute tradition and non-court music for the koto zither.
Gagaku (literally ‘elegant music’) is generally perceived and translated as ‘court music’. But it is also performed in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and since the modernisation of the late nineteenth century numerous other professional, amateur and religious groups have been allowed to get in on the act. Many Japanese proudly proclaim gagaku to be the world’s oldest continuously transmitted orchestral tradition. Though this claim is fanciful – there have been several interruptions in transmission, and a myriad changes to the music and performance practice – gagaku’s existence is indeed well documented by the eighth century, with both instruments and examples of notation surviving from more than a millennium ago.
The term ‘gagaku’ embraces several sub-genres; space permits dealing only with the best-known, tōgaku, specifically its purely instrumental style known as kangen, ‘pipes and strings’ (when accompanying dance – bugaku – the same pieces are today performed without strings and with some alterations in percussion, rhythm and articulation). As its name suggests, togaku (‘Tang music’) reached Japan primarily from Tang-dynasty China (618–907) during the seventh to ninth centuries. Japan’s imperial court, based in Nara and then in Kyoto in west-central Japan, hoped to bolster its status by persuading the Chinese to allow it to adopt the ritual music of that great empire. Eighteen different types of instrument from the period, many imported from Tang, survive to this day in the Shōsōin treasure-house in Nara; some of these types, including the ancestor of the shakuhachi, were soon dropped from the togaku orchestra, yielding the present-day ensemble of eight instruments described below.3
The repertoire received was actually Chinese banquet music, and it became expanded and Japanised over the centuries, becoming the ritual music of the Japanese palace, and of nearby religious institutions. Court nobles, including the emperor, pursued togaku performance as an artistic accomplishment, in part reflecting Confucian beliefs in the importance of music for sustaining social order. Early examples of court notations were compiled by high-ranking nobles, and professional musicians (gakunin) supplemented their performances when necessary. Such employees have always been of high importance – being deemed essential to a good ritual or concert – though occupying less lofty status. As hereditary professional families were established, the art came to be passed from father to son, and to some degree this practice continues today.
The civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries disrupted the imperial court so badly that many gakunin fled the palace and the capital, Kyoto. Gagaku then continued mainly in temples and shrines in the region, which did allow the eventual revival of palace performance. Gagaku was also established in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) when the shogunate moved there at the start of the seventeenth century, thus launching the Edo Period (1603–1868).
Like other genres, gagaku was profoundly affected by the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when imperial rule replaced the military shogunate. After more than two hundred years of a closed-door policy, the Meiji Period (1868–1912) saw those doors flung wide open as Japan strove to catch up with the West in every way – militarily, economically, politically and culturally. Thus began a period of modernisation and westernisation affecting all aspects of Japanese culture. With the Restoration, the imperial capital relocated from Kyoto to Tokyo, and court gagaku was now handed over entirely to professionals selected from the Kyoto palace as well as from various temples and shrines. Significantly – due in part to an awareness of the importance of notation in Western classical music – the repertoire was captured in detailed part-scores published in 1876 and 1888: the Meiji sentei-fu is still the standard for virtually all togaku performances today. Moreover, as with other genres, the modernising government eliminated restrictions as to who could perform togaku, thus leading to the eventual establishment of skilled groups outside the court and religious institutions. With foreign dignitaries beginning to visit the palace, musicians were required to provide Western music as well: a ryūteki flute player had also to perform Bach (or some national anthem) on a Western flute to honour and entertain these visitors.
Notation collections from various eras help us detect changes to performance practice over time, alterations due only in part to the disruptions of war and relocation. Over the centuries the tempo of togaku was greatly slowed down, as befitting its increasingly dignified purposes. Originally the melody of a piece was played on ryūteki transverse flute (seven fingerholes), hichiriki double-reed pipe (seven fingerholes, two thumbholes), shō mouth organ (with seventeen bamboo pipes of which fifteen contain metal free reeds), biwa four-string fretted lute and koto thirteen-string zither, plus other instruments no longer used. But each instrument’s version of the melody would vary somewhat from the others in idiomatic ways, resulting in heterophony. As a result, perception and audibility of this core melody has over time become obscured by horizontal and vertical elaboration, yet those ancient tunes are still there, hidden away in today’s practice (there is a parallel here with the development of European motets from slowed-down Gregorian chants).4 A sparse but effective rhythmic structure is provided by the large taiko and smaller kakko stick-drums, and by the small shōko gong. Typically there are three performers of each wind instrument, two for koto and biwa and one for each percussion instrument.
Japan’s three most prominent music-theatre genres – noh (nō), kabuki and bunraku – have all been designated by UNESCO as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Historically the three are closely linked, with kabuki drawing on both noh and bunraku.
Gagaku in the Imperial Palace, Tokyo, where it is performed at state events and occasional public recitals. Derived from Tang-dynasty China, and documented as far back as the eighth century, this art-form’s instruments have stayed substantially the same.
Front row: shoko, taiko (gakudaiko), kakko; middle: koto, biwa; back: ryuteki, hichiriki, sho; far back, at each side: two very large taiko (dadaiko) which replace the gakudaiko for dance pieces
Noh is a Gesamtkunstwerk, or all-embracing art work – a music-dance-drama which is also valued as literature and for the beauty of its costumes and masks; the word itself means ‘accomplishment’ or ‘ability’. Today it is so dignified and austere that one can hardly believe its roots lay in some vigorous folk performances seven centuries ago. The popularity of these performances led to troupes being invited to perform in aristocratic mansions, and even in the shogunal headquarters in Kyoto. The modern form of noh had its roots in the late fourteenth century, and is principally credited to Zeami (c. 1363–1444), the son of a respected actor, who was adopted into the shogun’s court in 1374. From that time until the liberalisations of the 1870s, noh flourished under the patronage of the military aristocracy, while still being performed for the masses as well; many amateurs from the military and merchant classes took lessons in it.
Zeami entered the military court at a time when Zen Buddhism was influential within samurai culture; thus did the influence of Buddhist chant on noh vocal style grow even stronger. Zeami strove to raise the status and dignity of noh: a serious intellectual, he produced several treatises on aesthetics and performance which are still frequently quoted (and are mostly available in English translation). He adopted terms and concepts from gagaku, though not always in ways easily understood: passages specifically relating to musical elements are often vague, and hard to relate to current practice, given the thorough-going changes to performance over the centuries. Yet Zeami’s words are often evocative: ‘Forget the voice, and understand the shading of the melody. Forget the melody, and understand the pitch. Forget the pitch, and understand the rhythm.’5
Like gagaku, noh has slowed considerably since its founding, reaching its current tempo and style by the mid-nineteenth century. Bodily and vocal expression are today remarkably austere and restrained: this suits the nature of many noh plays, whose action often takes place in dreams and/or involves spirits from the afterlife. The plays are traditionally assigned to one of five types, often translated as god, warrior, woman, miscellaneous and ‘concluding noh’. A full day’s performance may include one of each.
Another major change since Zeami’s day is the tuning of the noh flute (nōkan), the only melodic instrument employed. An inserted bamboo tube, lacquered over, constricts the flute’s bore between mouth-hole and nearest finger-hole, creating an irregular scale whose intervals shrink as the pitch rises. This insertion may originally have been an attempted repair of a cracked instrument, but the result evokes an otherworldly mood. The melodic elements of noh consist of the vocals of the main actors and a chorus usually of eight unison voices, plus the flute. One curiosity is that the flute’s intervals are today intentionally quite unlike those of the vocals, so that when flute and voice overlap there is no musical connection between the two.
Three drums provide a rhythmic underpinning: the kotsuzumi and ōtsuzumi hand-drums, which work together, and the taiko laced stick-drum. The most notable feature of their use is less the drum sounds themselves than the drummers’ dynamic cries (kakegoe), which often seem to overpower the vocalists. These swooping, powerful yo’s and ho’s, not unlike the cries of martial artists, add a layer of musical texture crucial in establishing both mood and timing, and further support the dreamlike atmosphere. A professional drummer once told me that seventy per cent of noh drumming is in the voice.
One thing has not changed: all roles in professional noh are played by men (with the exception of one or two women’s troupes whose status is still under debate). Even the voice of a young female character would be intentionally in a deep register. Moreover, the masks worn by the lead actors (shite, pronounced sh’tay) further muffle the wavering voice. The resultant vocal colours enhance the eerie mood.
Eventually five different schools of noh emerged, and continue today, with the Kanze school, descended from Zeami, being the largest. These share most of the repertoire of more than two hundred plays, and their musical style and dance movements are very similar, though the differences are enough to prevent, say, singers from the Kanze and Kita schools from performing together.
Kabuki emerged in the early seventeenth century in the burgeoning urban areas of the Edo Period, as audiences gradually lost interest in the restrained expressiveness of post-Zeami noh. Kabuki drew on noh but aimed successfully to cater for the growing merchant and middle classes: it reversed the inwardness of noh and went for flashy large-scale productions. Though it was created by female performers kabuki soon became an all-male preserve too, after the government banned women from the stage in 1629 for excessive eroticism. Huge noisy audiences gathered, their fanatical interest spawning endless fan magazines and woodblock prints of famous actors. The samurai class were attracted too – it was still erotic – despite being officially forbidden to attend performances.
Noh’s austerity was reflected in its small stage without curtain or scenery, and with very limited props. Kabuki came to be performed on a huge stage, with complex scenery which might appear suddenly from behind a curtain at the rear of the stage, or be wheeled into position on a rotating central platform, or emerge (with actors aboard) via trap doors from beneath the floor. Noh generally featured only two or three main characters, with the facial expressions of the lead actor usually hidden behind a mask, while even the naked faces of the other actors showed no emotion. Kabuki eschewed masks in favour of painted faces and over-the-top facial expressions, and many more actors appeared. Whereas the young women of noh may be played by deep-voiced double-chinned men, kabuki developed the celebrated onnagata acting style in which male actors strove to be the epitome of femininity, and indeed were worshipped as such.
Like gagaku, noh enjoys UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage status, and over the seven centuries of its existence it has become progressively more inward and austere. An integration of music, dance and drama, it is also valued as literature and for the beauty of its costumes and masks. In this picture, the play Okina – A Venerable Old Man receives its formal dedication; kotsuzumi drums and noh flute are seen.
Kabuki theatre was always a convivial social event, as seen in this woodblock print by Utagawa Toyokuni III. It depicts the 1858 production of Shibaraku at the Ichimura-za theatre in Edo with, to the left, the hanamichi walkway via which actors may enter and exit, and from which they may make key speeches.
Kabuki adopted the flute and three drums of noh, but soon added many more instruments. The most striking is the ‘banjo’ of our introductory vignette: the shamisen, a three-stringed long-necked lute whose four-sided resonating chamber was faced and backed with catskin, and whose silk strings were plucked with a large heavy plectrum to produce a wide range of timbres and volumes. The shamisen developed in the late 1500s from the snakeskin-covered Okinawan sanshin, which in turn had reached those southern islands from China (as the sanxian) in the fourteenth century. Like the modern guitar, the shamisen developed different forms to suit new genres; it would vary in absolute and relative thickness of strings, height and weight of bridge, size and sharpness of plectrum, thickness of neck and membrane, and in playing technique. Such fairly subtle differences match the distinct vocal timbres of each shamisen-accompanied genre; one of these, the lyrical nagauta (‘long song’), considered the heart of kabuki music, is discussed in detail later in the chapter.6 In kabuki the nokan (noh flute) alternates with a second transverse flute, the lyrical bamboo shinobue, which, unlike the nokan, plays heterophonically in tune with shamisen and vocalists.
Offstage to the kabuki audience’s left is a room (kuromisu, geza) with musicians playing some of the above instruments plus other forms of percussion and countless devices to evoke birds, waves, temple bells, and so forth. In noh, much is left to the imagination; in kabuki, far less so. Yet it still takes an aficionado to recognise the offstage drum pattern symbolising snow – a regular but slow-pulsed sequence of gentle muffled beats on a large taiko drum: this language of symbolism must be learnt. In most kabuki plays, there are no on-stage musicians: all sounds and music apart from the voices of the actors (who speak but do not sing) come from offstage.
Kabuki absorbed and interacted with many other art forms. Some plays derived from noh; these would often begin with a close imitation of noh style (as in this chapter’s introductory vignette), then yield quickly to kabuki flashiness, suddenly bringing in perhaps eight shamisen and changing to a higher-pitched and sharper vocal style. Others were based on bunraku plays; these would invariably include bunraku’s gidayū music, with its rough-voiced chanter (and matching shamisen) supplementing the actors’ voices. Actors might even imitate the movement style of puppets from the original play. Kabuki hand-drummers, while still using the patterns and vocal yells of noh, also developed a distinctive style known as chirikara (from the oral mnemonics used to transmit the often breathtakingly rapid interlocking parts). In the passage of lexically meaningless mnemonic syllables chirikara chiripopo tsu pon tsutatsuta tsu pon, the syllables with vowels i and u represent a loud sharp stroke on the otsuzumi, while the vowels a and o represent two contrasting sounds from the deeper-voiced kotsuzumi.
Some kabuki ‘plays’ are in fact dance pieces lasting between fifteen and forty minutes accompanied onstage by up to three types of shamisen music, with nagauta being the most common. Many of these dance plays are performed outside a formal kabuki context, as ‘Japanese [classical] dance’ (nihon buyō). In this latter context, most teachers and dancers are women.
Times change. During his US tour in 1973, the renowned shakuhachi master Aoki Reibo II (b. 1935) was adamant that I should tell the audience that he was not a Buddhist priest but a musician, and that he was playing a musical instrument (gakki), not a religious tool (hōki). He had found that shakuhachi aficionados in the West tended to have a romantic view of the instrument, as a tool for Zen spiritual experiences. This was hardly surprising: many Japanese themselves saw it that way until the late nineteenth century, and indeed many still do.
The shakuhachi is an end-blown bamboo notch-flute. Its ancestor came from China with the togaku ensemble by the eighth century, but had virtually disappeared from that ensemble by the twelfth century. The Tang dynasty examples in the Shōsōin storehouse had five fingerholes plus one thumbhole, yielding a diatonic scale suitable for togaku. All subsequent Japanese descendants, however, have only four fingerholes plus a thumbhole, most naturally yielding an anhemitonic (‘no semitones’) pentatonic scale (i.e. five intervals approximating to major seconds and minor thirds).7 A treatise from 1233 links the shakuhachi to blind itinerant monk-priests, and thus to Buddhism. Blind men often became monks, at least informally, and made a living as musicians and/or masseurs. Such men would have played what was later called the hitoyogiri, a short, narrow shakuhachi incapable of producing the volume of the modern instrument; this is well documented from the seventeenth century as accompanying popular songs, or playing in a trio with koto and shamisen.
The shakuhachi (left) was associated with Buddhism and blind itinerant monks from the thirteenth century onwards, and still has religious connotations. Right: Komuso ‘priests of nothingness’ with straw baskets over their heads to obscure the face and erase the self, photographed in the 1950s.
The form of the instrument that we know today seems to have arisen in the early seventeenth century. It takes its generic name from its current standard length: one shaku (about one foot) plus eight (hachi) tenths of another – about 55 cm, though soloists today may play shakuhachi ranging from about 1.4 to more than 3 feet. The modern shakuhachi is much heavier and thicker than its predecessors, occasionally appearing as a weapon of self-defence in kabuki plays. The bore is lacquered inside, though the earlier non-lacquered (jinashi) type, with its less powerful tone, is increasingly being revived among those who see it as ancient, and thus linked more closely to Zen.
To distinguish it from predecessors, the modern form is now called the Fuke shakuhachi – reminding us of the instrument’s historical links with Zen. By the late fifteenth century the itinerant priest-monks mentioned above were often called komusō, ‘straw-mat monks’, after the sleeping mats they carried. By the mid seventeenth century this term had evolved to mean ‘priests of nothingness’, to stress links with Zen philosophy. Around that time the Fuke sect of Zen was established and spread rapidly throughout the land, its members being masterless samurai seeking an alternative living in times of peace. They did indeed use the shakuhachi as a ‘religious tool’, in services or while playing on the street to receive alms. These komuso wore baskets of woven straw or bamboo over their heads, obscuring the face and thus the ‘self’ – another Zen concept. In the later seventeenth century the Tokugawa shogunate granted the Fuke sect a monopoly on playing shakuhachi for profit (though others, including some geisha, managed to subvert that). Such priests were guaranteed the freedom to travel round the country, apparently in exchange for serving as the government’s eyes and ears in the regions.
Many pieces generated by Fuke practitioners form the core repertoire of what is now called the Kinko school, which arose from the activities of Kurosawa Kinko (1710–71), a priest who visited Fuke temples to collect local tunes. Today’s Kinko school (a loose agglomeration of sub-schools) generally recognises thirty-six tunes, all solos except for the duet ‘Shika no tōne’ (‘Distant calling of deer’), in their honkyoku (‘main/true/original melodies’) repertoire. The titles of these tunes are often redolent of spirituality and nature: ‘Kokū’ (‘Emptiness’); ‘Tsuru no sugomori’ (‘Cranes tending their nestlings’). Almost all are in free rhythm, with long drawn-out and highly (but generally slowly) ornamented notes suitable for a meditative mood. Players used to speak of ‘attaining Buddha-hood [achieving enlightenment] with a single sound’ (ichion-jōbutsu). Hence we should not evaluate this music solely on the interest of its melodies, but rather on shifting timbres, subtle pitch inflections and dynamic changes on the level of the single tone or short phrase.
The government’s dissolution of the Fuke sect and its quasi-monopoly in 1871 led to two major developments. First, the shakuhachi now found a role in a secular ensemble with shamisen and one or two koto – a genre called sankyoku, described further below. There it plays a subsidiary role, heterophonically supporting the original melodies created for those string instruments. Then, at the start of the twentieth century, a new school of shakuhachi emerged to rival Kinko: the Tozan school, named after its founder Nakao Tozan (1876–1956). A former komuso, Tozan began to compose his own honkyoku. Produced in an era of Western musical influence, Tozan’s twenty-eight tunes differ strikingly from Kinko/Fuke honkyoku. Only three are entirely solos; free rhythm plays less of a role, yielding to a metric ensemble style; microtonal pitches are far less common; and some pieces have sections in an organum-like parallel homophony, though maintaining traditional Japanese modal style to avoid mere imitation of Western harmonies. Though several other schools exist today, Kinko and Tozan have by far the most members.
Western influence in the early twentieth century saw the creation of seven- and nine-hole instruments as well, facilitating the playing of Western-style chromatic pieces. But using these instruments for traditional pieces would potentially ruin what is possibly the most distinctive feature of honkyoku style, a technique known as meri: dropping the chin to change the blowing angle, resulting in a lower, often non-chromatic pitch from the same fingering. (Part-holing may also be employed.) That lowered pitch will have a somewhat different timbre, usually breathier and quieter – a crucial part of shakuhachi aesthetics. The twentieth-century instruments, which could execute those lowered pitches through simple fingering with no change in timbre, are thus avoided for honkyoku.
The koto is a thirteen-string zither, around six feet long, with a moveable tuning bridge under each string. Picks of ivory or plastic are worn on the thumb, index and middle finger of the right hand. While the koto remains a mainstay of togaku, most people know it as a non-court instrument. Arriving from Tang China, it was originally called by its Chinese name. In modern standard Chinese, this name (written 箏) is pronounced zheng; in Japan, the word lost its final nasal and became sō, as in the words gakusō (‘gagaku koto’), zokusō (‘popular koto’) and sōkyoku (‘koto music/melodies’). But koto is a Japanese word which previously designated a six-string zither known since the second century BCE; now called wagon (‘Japanese zither’), it still features in pre-Chinese court genres.
Even a millennium ago, the koto was enjoyed as a solo instrument, often for private pleasure. In The Tale of Genji, a novel from around the year 1000, the hero Prince Genji urges one girlfriend after another to take up the instrument, judging their attractiveness in part by their musical skill, and by their grace in performance: ‘[Genji] thought her delightful as she leaned forward to press a string with her left hand.’8
The koto spread to various parts of Japan in the hands of nobles and warriors, sometimes as they fled the capital after finding themselves on the losing side in a war. By the late sixteenth century, a non-togaku koto tradition had developed in the Tsukushi region of Kyushu, southern Japan. Its repertoire included instrumental solos and accompanied songs, some deriving their melody from the best-known togaku piece, ‘Etenraku’. The elitist Tsukushi school specifically instructed adherents not to pass its teachings to blind musicians, who at this time were most prominently performing ancient battle stories or Buddhist chants, accompanied by the four-string biwa lute (descendant of the Chinese pipa), and gradually also adopting the shamisen which had only recently arrived in Japan. They were considered little more than beggars, though since the 1340s many blind musicians belonged to a government-supported organisation called the Tōdō-za, a welfare system with its own ranks and emoluments.
Ironically, then, this elitist koto tradition was transmitted by a Tsukushi performer visiting Edo in the 1630s to a blind shamisen master now generally seen as the founder of ‘popular koto’ (zokusō). This was the man later known as Yatsuhashi Kengyō (1614–85). Kengyō was the highest rank in the guild of the blind, and subsequently ‘popular koto’ became the official prerogative of members of this guild until 1871 and the Meiji modernisation. Zoku, ‘popular’, can also be translated as ‘vulgar’ and ‘inelegant’ – doubtless what the sophisticates back in Tsukushi would have been thinking. But there was nothing inelegant about Yatsuhashi’s music. He adapted some of the koto-accompanied songs from Tsukushi while adding new compositions, and is also thought to have introduced to koto music the in mode, with its evocative semitones (see ‘Scale and mode’ below). The koto’s moveable tuning bridges made it easy to change some of the intervals of court-derived tunings to introduce these semitones while maintaining a pentatonic scale. Pitches between the basic five are obtained – for melodic or ornamental purposes – by pressing a string to the left of the tuning bridge with fingers of the left hand.
In Yatsuhashi’s day, aside from various short song-centred pieces, there was a small repertoire of instrumental tunes known as danmono, each consisting of several sections (dan) of equal length, 52 bars of simple duple metre. One of these, ‘Rokudan’ (‘Six sections’), is the best-known koto piece today. But the vast majority of compositions from the late seventeenth century until Meiji include vocals. There are two main ‘schools’ (ryū) of zokusō, both named after their founders, who like Yatsuhashi were kengyō: the Ikuta school was formed in the late seventeenth century, and the Yamada school at the end of the eighteenth. Both encouraged the combining of koto and shamisen; the Yamada school drew influence not only from shamisen narrative genres but even from noh, giving Yamada vocal stylings a different flavour from Ikuta. While continuing to flourish as a solo instrument, the koto is often heard in the sankyoku (‘three melodies’) format: one or two koto, one shamisen and one shakuhachi. Vocals are provided by one of the string players.
In the Edo Period, many sighted people studied with blind koto masters. The Meiji Period saw the koto being made available to all, and now blind teachers are rare. Playing koto soon became a badge of culture and grace for marriageable upper- and middle-class women; today the piano has largely replaced the koto in this respect.
In musical terms, the first significant effects of Western influence surfaced with the launching of the New Japanese Music (shin nihon ongaku) movement in 1920. A central figure was Miyagi Michio of the Ikuta school (1894–1956), a blind koto and shamisen master. His compositions for koto, shamisen and/or shakuhachi, while generally avoiding Western harmonic language, nonetheless departed from tradition in some respects. His most famous piece, ‘Haru no umi’ (‘Spring sea’, 1929), gives the melody to the shakuhachi, with the koto providing the accompaniment almost as if on a piano, with no Western triads but arpeggios and chordal accompaniment nonetheless (though his chords drew on pitches from traditional modes). Miyagi’s solo koto composition ‘Eihei no kōtai’ (‘Changing of the guards’, 1954), by contrast, does use Western triads, because he was imitating the sound of the brass instruments at Buckingham Palace he heard on his sole visit to England; it also features slapping the strings to evoke the drums. Miyagi’s compositions are hugely popular today in the koto world. More recent contemporary and avant-garde koto pieces by Western-style composers are less commonly performed.
Miyagi also created the seventeen-string bass koto to supply a somewhat Western bass part, and commissioned a single eighty-string koto; the latter languishes unplayed in the Miyagi Michio Museum in Tokyo, as he and others quickly recognised its irrelevance. As in twentieth-century China and Korea, some Japanese have also expanded the number of strings: koto with twenty-one to thirty strings are often exploited for contemporary composition.
Notation for the instruments of togaku survives from as early as the eighth century, with abundant examples by the late twelfth century; today’s notation looks remarkably similar, though it is interpreted very differently (see illustration overleaf). Buddhist chant was also being notated a thousand years ago.
However, there is no unified notation system equivalent to Western staff notation, as each instrument and vocal genre has its own system: there is, for example, no ‘full score’ for togaku. Moreover, each instrumental school tends to use notation incompatible with others. Written notation was rarely used at all until Meiji, for a variety of reasons. First, professional performance and teaching of some genres were restricted by law to the blind. Second, genres such as gagaku and noh were transmitted, often from father to son, through immersion from early childhood. Third, the availability of detailed notation could have threatened the professionals’ monopoly on musical knowledge and thus reduced their income. Since the Edo Period the guild-like, quasi-familial iemoto (‘househead’) teaching system has allowed the autocratic head of each school to keep firm control of the musical product.
Since the Meiji loosening of restrictions on transmission and the encouragement of Western influence, ever more detailed notations have appeared. For example, a century ago a tablature notation called bunka-fu, ‘culture notation’, was devised, and can theoretically be used for any shamisen. (‘Tablature’ here means a notation that shows where to place one’s fingers, rather than what pitch to play. Most notations currently in use for Japanese melodic instruments are tablature in that sense.) But many types of notation are in use for nagauta shamisen, and yet others for jiuta shamisen, which is the style generally heard in sankyoku.
Until the twentieth century, such notation as existed was generally for reference – to help recall what had already been learned aurally – rather than for use in instruction or performance. Teaching has usually involved one-to-one rote imitation: many instruments were and are taught with the aid of sophisticated systems of oral mnemonics.9 Thus a beginning noh flute student might first – before being allowed to touch the flute – learn to sing a melody using mnemonics such as ohyarai houhouhi…; or, as noted above, a student of the hand-drums of kabuki dance music will learn the interlocking patterns for these two drums orally: tsu ta pon tsutatsu popopon… Many written notations include these mnemonics, and indeed may consist of little else. The fact that much Japanese music is constructed from recurring rhythmic or melodic units (often named) facilitates memorisation.
Two examples of shō notation, seven centuries apart, together with a shō (right). The three-line example dates from 1303, the two-line one from the present. They read from top to bottom and from right to left. Black dots represent beats and small circles bar lines; the main symbols indicate specific pipes, but today also demand the playing of standard chords based on the pitch of each pipe. The most significant difference is that the 1303 notation has a symbol 由 representing a melodic ornament, supporting Laurence Picken’s claim that no chords were played then, but rather a brisk single line.
Ryuteki flute master Shiba Sukeyasu (b. 1935) is the son of a hereditary palace performer and later taught gagaku at Tokyo University of the Arts. He told me that his experiences were similar to other sons of court musicians: from around the age of five he began learning the repertoire by singing the mnemonics, but was not allowed to try playing the flute for several years. Court musician Ohno Tadaaki (b. 1959) confirmed that he learned the sho only via mnemonics for eight years. One wonders whether he and Shiba had tried out their instruments in secret at some point – but I never asked that potentially embarrassing question. With a smallish repertoire of a couple of hundred short pieces, and with many standardised phrases and techniques, any court instrumentalist should be able to memorise down to the smallest ornament.
It is still uncommon for professional players in traditional genres to use notation in performance – and unthinkable in the palace, or for noh. Singers in shamisen or koto genres are more likely to have notation, though primarily in order to remember the lyrics. For contemporary compositions, notation is more commonly used. Intentional alteration or variation of what one has learned is rare in the classical genres. Although only the head of a school is thought to have the right to make changes, an advanced student may be able to set up his or her own school, and pass on variant versions of traditional pieces.
Japanese music is primarily pentatonic, using five different principal pitches per octave. However, the scale systems are different for gagaku, Buddhist chant, noh, folk song and the various Edo-period urban musics. Moreover, one or two notes often differ in ascending and descending passages, as with the European melodic minor, effectively creating heptatonic (seven-tone) scales. For this reason, I encourage the replacement of ‘pentatonic’ with the invented term ‘pentacentric’: centred on five tones, but with other notes substituted at times. Modulations within a piece do not affect modal theory per se.
It is important to keep in mind the distinction between scale (the collection of pitches used in a particular genre or composition) and mode (the way that these pitches function). Koizumi Fumio showed how most Japanese scales can be analysed as built from one or more of four types of tetrachord (see ‘Koizumi’s modal types’ overleaf).10 In ancient Greek theory, this term indicated two notes a fourth apart with two other notes in between. Applied to Japan, the term designates a framework of two ‘nuclear tones’ a perfect fourth apart, with a single note – an ‘infix’ – positioned between them. The nuclear tones serve as competing centres and goals of tonal movement (hence we cannot speak of a single ‘tonic’ as in Western music). Combining two identical tetrachords to make an octave yields four pentatonic modes. The names of these are used by scholars, but rarely – except in gagaku – by musicians, although Koizumi’s system is now familiar to many performers.
To revisit the analogy with the melodic minor: in miyako-bushi, one might encounter a rising and then falling passage like g–bb–c'–ab–g–f–db–c. Though ab is the default infix for this mode, in rising passages the gravitational pull of the high nuclear tone c' can encourage substituting bb for ab.
But the pitches shown above are only relative. Song-centred genres dominate Japanese music, and instrumentalists need to accommodate the singer’s range, so compositions are not written in a specific key (except in gagaku). In noh, the chorus takes its pitch from its leader, who may choose a pitch totally unrelated to that of the main actor’s most recent song. String instruments are easily retuned; shinobue flutes, as used in kabuki nagauta and to accompany folk songs, are made in multiple keys to suit the singer. Unlike the Western orchestral flute, it is very rare to play in multiple keys on one shinobue, except for temporary mid-tune modulations of a fourth or fifth.
In terms of precision of pitch, while the fourths and fifths separating nuclear tones hold firm, the infixed, non-nuclear pitches may be flexible, yielding non-Western intervals; this is most noticeable in folk music, noh, gagaku, bunraku and shakuhachi. In Western music, the upward-leading seventh degree may be raised slightly by singers or violinists, producing an interval less than a semitone; the same occurs in reverse with the downward-leading semitones of miyako-bushi. Once such flexibility of intonation is acknowledged, Koizumi’s model works well enough, but it cannot quite accommodate the ryo modes of togaku or the tsuyogin vocal style of noh (explained below).
An eighteenth-century woodblock print by Ishikawa Toyonobu (1711–85) showing two kabuki actors in the role of street musicians playing for donations on a shamisen and kokyu fiddle
A colour postcard from the early twentieth century showing two young women playing the koto and shamisen
Togaku uses six basic modes (chōshi). Each is pentatonic, with two exchange tones (hennon) replacing the infixes in certain melodic contexts (see the note to the list of Koizumi’s modal types above). These six are divided into two groups of three called ritsu and ryo which feature different intervallic structures. The three modes within each group differ in pitch level; thus the three ritsu modes have their fundamental pitch (kyū) – the closest to the concept of a tonic – at different levels: E for hyōjō, A for ōshikichō, B for banshikichō. A given composition may often be played in all three modes from the same group, but this is not a matter of simple modulation: each instrument’s part will change somewhat due to limitations in the range of the instrument, and to different tunings for different modes. Ryo modes differ from ritsu in that the basic five pitches are do re mi sol la rather than do re fa sol la.
Today, the main melody of togaku is felt to be shared between ryuteki flute and hichiriki double-reed pipe, which have greatly elaborated their melodies of a millennium ago; the sho usually provides ethereal chords (selected from a small fixed corpus), while the koto and biwa supply standardised arpeggios. The lowest pitch of the sho chord and the highest pitch of the koto and biwa arpeggios generally correspond to the now almost indiscernible ancient melody. There are some divergences, however, due to historical disruptions in transmission, as well as for other reasons. For example, the hichiriki, with its narrow range (g'–a"), cannot preserve the melodic contour as well as the ryuteki with its two-octave range (e"–d'''' ); it has idiomatic ways of solving this problem. The koto, meanwhile, is always tuned pentatonically: its open strings can only play five of the seven main pitches of each mode. As our quotation above from The Tale of Genji confirms, historically the player could press a string to the left of the tuning bridge to play the missing pitches, as in today’s popular koto music. But as this technique was lost in transmission in togaku, the koto is often a semitone or so away from the winds.11
Togaku also features a set of short modal preludes (netori), one for each of the six modes. These are standardised free-rhythm pieces in which one player of each instrument enters successively, with overlap. Like the pathetan of central Javanese gamelan, these allow the musicians and audience to prepare their ears for what follows. Theoretically these netori allow for checking the tuning, but I have never seen a performance where any retuning occurred – that would be an unthinkable embarrassment for the musician. Pieces also end with a brief modal coda.
Noh vocals (collectively called utai, ‘singing’) include kotoba, a non-metric heightened speech style used for most dialogue sections, and fushi, ‘melody’. Melodic singing centres around three nuclear pitches called jō (upper), chū (middle) and ge (lower). How these are realised, however, depends on which of two singing styles is used. In ‘soft singing’ (yowagin), these three pitches are separated by fourths, and other pitches gravitate around them; vocal range may just exceed an octave. In ‘strong singing’ (tsuyogin), these pitches are collapsed into the total range of about a major third; a strong vibrato obscures precise pitches, and the pitch level often slides up perceptibly during a passage. These two styles suit different plot situations: yowagin for a young maiden, tsuyogin for a battle with a vengeful warrior’s spirit, and so forth.
All of these are dominated by the miyako-bushi mode with its downward-resolving semitones, and it is quite common to modulate in mid-flow to another ‘key’ a fourth or fifth away. In nagauta, some other shamisen genres, and the koto repertoire where a piece may run for twenty minutes or more, interest may be added by retuning in mid-piece, effectively shifting the preferred tonal centre though usually retaining the basic mode. For shamisen, the three standard tunings are a fifth over a fourth, a fourth over a fifth, or two fourths. On the koto, tuning bridges will need to be moved under several strings.
Japanese melody lines are generally highly ornamented, and appreciation centres on this horizontal dimension of musical complexity. The vertical combination of tones – polyphony – is less exploited, and there is no system of functional, chordal harmony. But several types of polyphony do exist. Most common, as throughout Asia, is heterophony, in which each instrument, including the vocal part, performs its own idiomatic variant of a single melody. This is perhaps clearest in sankyoku and least obvious, though still true, in togaku. Example 3.1 shows a passage of a jiuta piece, featuring voice, koto, shamisen and shakuhachi in heterophonic variation. The koto and shamisen, with their sharp plucked attacks, keep the pulse; voice and shakuhachi often lag just behind. This is common to many genres: plucked instruments keep a beat while voices and flutes play around the plucked melody. Japan’s only bowed instrument, the upright three-string fiddle kokyū, rarely heard now, would also be able to elaborate the plucked melodic lines.
Koto and shamisen genres occasionally feature a highly independent second melodic line (kaede), in the same metre and key but otherwise vertically unrelated; two such parts converge in unison at cadential points. (See above for the unique interaction of flute and vocals in noh.)
Many traditional pieces have no beat or pulse, and thus no metre. Such ‘free metre/rhythm’ is most common in shakuhachi solos and folk song, where durations are at the performer’s discretion, within reason. Scholars and performers take great pride in a concept they consider uniquely Japanese: that of ma, the ‘space’ between sounds. This often refers to a correct execution of difficult free rhythms, but it can also refer to the (impossible to quantify) perfect amount of silence inserted in a metric passage, and also in general to a good sense of rhythm. The native view is that only Japan has ma, though the Western term rubato covers many similar phenomena. Japanese jazz musicians, seeking credence in the West as more than mere imitators, have sometimes cited ma as a unique feature of their performances.12
EX. 3.1 An excerpt from the sankyoku piece Hagi no Tsuyu, composed by Ikuyama Kengyo in the 1870s, and transcribed from the CD Abe Keiko no shigei 3 (Victor VZCG-128, 1997). A diagonal line between two tied notes indicates portamento; the note-head x denotes non-fixed pitch.
Metrical music is overwhelmingly in duple metres corresponding to Western 2/4 or 6/8, the latter being common only in folk songs and dances. (Triple metre, dominant in nearby Korea, is largely absent from Japan.) The beat, however, can be elastic. In many shamisen pieces the first of a pair of eighth-notes may give a small but noticeable portion of its length to the second; in nagauta this may be called tsume-ma, ‘compressed duration’ – that magic word ma again. Scholarly staff notations of togaku pieces can capture the pitches and inter-part relations fairly well, but they cannot show the gradual extending of durational values near the end of each four-bar phrase. There is no conductor in togaku (nor in any Japanese genre): performers ‘feel’ the beat – a challenge, given the extremely slow tempo. Different instruments help convey the beat at different points: for example, the sho player, whose instrument sounds continuously as he inhales and exhales, begins to move his fingers individually to play the chord for the next bar. Perhaps one to three pitches out of the six or so in the chord will thus be shifted just before the next strong beat.
Concepts of metre and rhythm differ among genres. Let us consider – greatly simplified – the most complex example, noh. Though most metrical passages are in eight-beat units called kusari, their execution is less simply described. First, sometimes the drums keep a beat but the vocal is in free rhythm. Second, there are several different ways to set texts: twelve syllables per kusari in slower passages (with perhaps four kusari per minute), up to sixteen in more urgent sections, and eight syllables in the rapid final section (often fifteen or sixteen kusari per minute). Third, in those twelve-syllable kusari the drums sometimes keep a steady (though often rubato) metre; at other times the vocal part dominates and the drums must omit some half-beats. Each of these features relates to specific places and moods in a play; even a first-time listener will feel some of the effects.
Contrasting with Western classical music’s traditional emphasis on relatively ‘pure’ sounds, the Japanese musical aesthetic – as in much of the world, and in contemporary Western music – embraces various types of pitchless sounds. Some listeners might consider these mere ‘noise’, but they result from conscious musical choice.
The shamisen and biwa lute feature a buzzing sound called sawari, whose quality and amount is crucial in evaluating a given instrument. A distant historical relation is hypothesised with India, where a similar effect is called jawari or jiwari. The percussive striking of the large plectrum against the instrument’s face is another such feature of Japanese lute genres. Koto and shamisen players often scrape a string lengthwise to create a swishing sound. Solo shakuhachi pieces may employ muraiki, a dramatic pitchless blast of air. Sometimes such effects imitate the sounds of insects, wind or an arrow striking its target. At other times the symbolism is abstract: conventionalised drum patterns of off-stage kabuki musicians can represent a river, the seashore, rain, snow or even a thief, though only an aficionado will recognise the connection.13 Japanese vocal tone is also generally less ‘pure’ (though no more artificial) than Western bel canto. Preference varies by genre, and both loudness and clarity must be matched to the venue and audience. Puppet-theatre chanters, for example, once strove to develop powerful yet raspy voices by trying to ‘out-sing’ waterfalls.
Do Japanese classical genres have structural forms on a par with sonata allegro, symphonic form and the like? To some degree yes, though such formal tendencies are less clearly named or theorised than in the West, as we will see with some significant forms.
We can look at togaku pieces at two structural levels. First, a typical piece will have a structure similar to an Irish reel or jig – though the moods and tempi could not be farther apart. The best-known piece, ‘Etenraku’, consists of three sections, each of which is repeated before moving to the next (AA BB CC); the entire structure is then repeated, though generally ending after the repeated B section. In togaku the first phrase is performed by a solo flute, with the other instruments gradually joining in.
‘Etenraku’ is a complete piece on its own (though preceded by an appropriate modal prelude). But some pieces are in effect one movement of a tripartite structure called jo-ha-kyū, a concept imported from Tang China, whose court-music connections caused Zeami to seek relevance for it in noh as well. Such prestigious ancestry has encouraged its attempted application by theorists and performers in many genres ever since, even when of doubtful relevance. In general, it implies a slow beginning (jo), followed by a more forceful and rapid middle section (ha) and finally a rush to the end (kyu). The typical progress of a noh play is seen in this way. More surprising for me, yet useful, was being told by kabuki hand-drummer Mochizuki Tasaku III that hitting the drum was a matter of jo-ha-kyu: slowly move the arm back in preparation; begin a steady movement towards the drumskin; finish with an accelerating flick of the wrist.
There is no overall standard structure of a noh play, but the jo-ha-kyu concept works well: things move more slowly at the beginning and eventually rush to a vibrant climax. Plays last from sixty to eighty minutes; most are in two acts, with no interval but instead a transitional scene preparing the way for the second act. During this transition, the main actor (shite) leaves the stage to change costume and identity: the local peasant of the first half may be revealed as the ghost of someone renowned who died there in tragic circumstances long ago. These changes can have musical implications, as in the play Funa-Benkei: in the first act, the shite is the beautiful young woman Shizuka, parting tearfully from her lover, the warrior hero Yoshitsune; all the songs in Act I are in the soft, melodic yowagin style suited to such sadness. In Act II, the shite returns as the ghost of the slain warrior Tomomori, seeking revenge on Yoshitsune; now the singing is in the powerful tsuyogin style.
Noh employs hundreds of named, stereotyped elements, ranging from roughly two hundred brief recurring patterns of each drum part, to long dance sections, to standard opening pieces suitable for different characters (priest, courtier and so on). A single dance and its music, for example ‘Chū no mai’, can recur in several plays with minor differences.
Detailed analyses of nagauta structure are available, but the most common outline is a six-part form whose application varies (as does symphonic form).14 Nagauta is through-composed. The introduction (oki), generally in free rhythm, has one singer and one shamisen setting the scene, and draws on a large number of standard named patterns. The vocal may be partly in heightened speech. The rhythmic michiyuki then accompanies the entrance of the dancer(s); though varying with the nature of the plot and characters, it generally begins with the full instrumental ensemble. Next comes the kudoki, a softer, lyrical vocal passage usually without drums. A lively dance section (odoriji) then brings the taiko stick-drum to vigorous prominence. The final two sections are shorter and generally accelerating: chirashi and dangire. In the chirashi, the taiko and noh flute often play as a unit, but out of phase with the other instruments, thus providing a fascinating tension. Listening to such a piece, you will be able to follow these changes of mood, and perhaps imagine the dance style that might match each of them.
In Kinko and other pre-Meiji pieces, the basic formal unit is the single breath-phrase, lasting eight to twelve seconds; many of these phrases recur as melodic units in different pieces, with a few being named ornaments (similar to Western terms such as mordent). Thus a nayashi is a phrase beginning as a meri (lowered pitch, discussed above) of the preceding pitch, then slowly resolving up to that preceding pitch, and perhaps ending with an almost inaudible wispy return to the meri. Nayashi occur in most tunes.
As for the overall form of a piece, many patterns exist, none standard: these include arch form, A–B–C–B', and others eluding simple description.
All of these genres underwent important changes from the 1870s onward, due both to Meiji modernisation and the impact of the introduction of Western music. The single most crucial step, still affecting musical tastes today, was the decision in the 1870s to prioritise Western style in school music education. Sadly, for well over a century afterwards, no schoolchild in Japan was ever required by the national music curriculum to perform on a traditional instrument: the musical language, and the instruments they encountered, were Western, with the new songs written for school use being heavily influenced by Western scales and harmonies. In recent decades, Japanese traditional musics have been introduced, but only via recordings and brief written descriptions. Music teachers were not required to learn anything about traditional music, nor were they generally interested or competent enough to excite the interest of their pupils. Not surprising, then, that students of piano or violin far outstrip those of koto or shamisen; the sho is left in the dust by its descendant, the accordion.
A glimmer of change occurred in the 1960s. Japan had recovered from the damage to its national pride and its economy by the Second World War, and was becoming an economic superpower. Western-style ‘classical’ composers such as Takemitsu and Miki Minoru began producing pieces for Japanese instruments, often combined with Western ones. Performers have continued to produce new works for Japanese instruments alone, some neo-traditional, some strikingly modern; among the more renowned are koto master Sawai Tadao (1938–97) and shakuhachi master Yamamoto Hōzan (1937–2014). Then there is Tōgi Hideki (b. 1959), descendant of a togaku lineage, who has taken his decade of hichiriki playing in the imperial ensemble in the direction of New Age compositions. The young listeners he attracts have a very different perception from that of court lady Sei Shōnagon (c. 966–1017) who, a thousand years ago, found this instrument ‘very hard on the ear’.15
Since 2003, efforts have been made to include traditional music teaching in the national curriculum: first, middle school students were required to experience hands-on a traditional instrument of some kind; and today students at all levels are to learn to sing local folk songs (considered more accessible than, say, noh). Moreover, all music teachers must now have studied a traditional instrument during their training. Alas, class time devoted to traditional genres is still only a desultory few hours per year in some schools, as teachers focus on preparing their students for the national choral competition and other Western-inclined events.
Meanwhile the training of future professionals still depends largely on the traditional artistic schools (ryū(ha)). To succeed in noh, you need to study with a (male) master from one of the five schools. But desperation for successors in kabuki led to the creation in 1972 of a training school for actors at Tokyo’s National Theatre; from there, graduates still need to apprentice themselves to a successful professional. Tokyo University of the Arts and NHK (the national broadcasting company) have for decades trained and examined performers in many genres. The high importance but low status often accorded to traditional musicians in the past has, ironically, been somewhat reversed. Some musicians who in the past would have been excluded from – or relegated to the fringes of – polite society are now Living National Treasures (ningen kokuhō) under the government’s scheme that laid the foundations for Intangible Cultural Heritage policy worldwide, as enshrined in UNESCO’s scheme. But this lofty official status rarely translates into interest from the general public, and these initiatives surely come too late to have a major positive impact on the future of traditional music after a century of neglect. Yet there are still millions of committed adherents, which means that the major classical genres are indeed ‘living’ and can be enjoyed in today’s Japan – with a bit of searching.
A sankyoku trio with koto (Ginevra House), shamisen (Shino Arisawa) and shakuhachi (Matt Gillan) performing at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2003
Hope may also lie beyond the borders of Japan. Composers worldwide have been stimulated by Japanese music, and many have written for Japanese instruments: Stockhausen’s Jahreslauf was commissioned by the court togaku ensemble, and two years later (1979) was arranged for Western instruments as well; Henry Cowell’s 1940 composition for shakuhachi was endearingly titled The Universal Flute; and John Kaizan Neptune continues to produce an amazing diversity of shakuhachi solo and ensemble pieces, crossing cultural boundaries. Many others have written for Western instruments under influence from Japan: Benjamin Britten’s ‘church parable’ Curlew River (1964) was based on the noh play Sumidagawa, which he saw in Japan in 1956; he intentionally avoided seeing noh again until the work was completed, to prevent producing a mere imitation of its musical language (though in fact there is arguably as much influence in it from gagaku as from noh).
Moreover, all these genres are being performed abroad, and not just by Japanese expatriates. Skilled koto players abound; a gagaku group practices in Cologne under a Japanese teacher; there is a thriving European Shakuhachi Society, and a World Shakuhachi Festival has been held in Boulder, Colorado and in Sydney, Australia. A noh troupe merging Japanese and US performers presented a new play in English (to a libretto by a British-born Chinese) in London in 2009, then in Japan and China in 2011.
What does the future hold for the classical musics of Japan? Only time will tell if later generations will prefer the New Age musings of Togi Hideki to ‘real’ togaku, or J. S. Bach as played on a twenty-one-string koto in preference to Yatsuhashi Kengyo (d. 1685) played on thirteen strings.
Further reading
Five easily-found sources give valuable overviews of Japanese traditional music, including the genres above. Each has extensive transcriptions as well as a useful bibliography leading to numerous other sources. Malm’s Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (including a CD) is user-friendly and well-illustrated. Tokita and Hughes’s The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music (with CD) is much more detailed. Wade’s Music in Japan is shorter but accessible, though confusingly inconsistent in its romanisation (thus shakuhachi is given as syakuhati, using the Kunreishiki system, even though most other terms are in the more common Hepburn system). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is now also online via Grove Music Online. Finally, the East Asia volume of Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (vol. 7, with CD) has extensive coverage of Japan, though it too uses the less common Kunreishiki romanisation. See also Malm’s Six Hidden Views of Japanese Music for, among other things, a direct comparison of noh and kabuki music, and a comparison of Britten’s Curlew River with the noh play Sumidagawa on which it was based.
Recommended listening
These CDs were chosen for their musical quality, English-language liner-notes and relatively easy availability outside Japan. To order items from Japan when abroad, start with the website of Far Side Music (www.farsidemusic.com), which also handles DVDs of noh, kabuki and other genres. The CDs with books listed in the Bibliography have a range of excerpts. To find performances on YouTube, search by instrument name, genre, composition title or for contemporary pieces perhaps by composer’s name.
Tokyo Gakuso (Tadaaki Ohno): Gagaku and beyond, Celestial Harmonies 13179-2, 2000. A good cross-section of court music genres, with extensive English notes by Steven Nelson.
Musique du nô: Shakkyô, Ocora C 559005, 1987. The music of this noh play is analysed in Malm’s Hidden Views of Japanese Music.
Kineya Ensemble, Japan: Nagauta, Ocora C 560144, 2000. Four nagauta pieces, one in somewhat modern style from 1933. Offstage geza music is not recorded.
Katsuya Yokoyama, Zen: Katsuya Yokoyama Plays Classical Shakuhachi Masterworks (2 CDs), Wergo SM1033-34, 1988. A variety of Kinko-school pieces by a Living National Treasure performer.
Ensemble Yonin no Kai, Japon: Jiuta, Ocora C 580069, 1998. Koto, shamisen, shakuhachi, voice; includes a sankyoku piece, a Tozan-school shakuhachi piece and two others.
Japan: Koto Music, Nonesuch 451836-2, 2008. Koto, shamisen, shakuhachi, voice, sankyoku.