Japanese Musical Instruments 0195905008, 9780195905007

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Japanese Musical Instruments HUGH DE FERRANTI

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IMAGES

OF

ASTA

Japanese Musical Instruments

TITLES

IN THE

SERIES

At the Chinese Table

Indonesian Batik

Gaal

SYLVIA FRASER-LU

At the Japanese Table RICHARD

Japanese Cinema: An Introduction DONALD RICHIE

HOSKING

The Japanese Kimono

Arts of the Tang Court PATRICA EICHENBAUM

KARETZKY

The Birds of Java and Bali DEREK HOLMES

& STEPHEN

NASH

HUGO

MUNSTERBERG

Japanese Musical Instruments HUGH DE FERRANTI

The Cheongsam

Korean Musical Instruments

HAZEL CLARK

KEITH HOWARD

China’s Muslims

Korean Painting KEITH PRATT

MICHAEL

DILLON

China’s Walled Cities

Life in the Javanese Kraton

RONALD

AART VAN BEEK

G. KNAPP

Chinese Almanacs RICHARD

Macau , ' CESAR GUILLEN-NUNEZ

J. SMITH

Chinese Bridges

Mandarin Squares: Mandarins and their

RONALD

Chinese Classical Furniture

Insignia VALERY M. GARRETT

GRACE

The Ming Tombs

G. KNAPP WU BRUCE

The Chinese Garden

ANN

JOSEPH CHO

Modern Chinese Art

WANG

PALUDAN

The Chinese House

DAVID

RONALD

Musical Instruments of South-East Asia

G. KNAPP

CLARKE

Chinese Jade

ERIC TAYLOR

JOAN HARTMAN-GOLDSMITH

New Chinese Cinema

Chinese Maps

KWOK-KAN TAM & WIMAL DISSANAYAKE

RICHARD

J. SMITH

Old Bangkok

Chinese New Year PATRICIA BJAALAND

WELCH

JOHN LOWE

AT

Old Manila

Chinese Paper Offerings RODERICK

RAMON MA. ZARAGOZA

CAVE

Old Penang

Chinese Snuff Bottles ROBERT

SARNIA HAYES HOYT

KLEINER

Old Shanghai

Chinese Tomb Figurines ANN

SMITHIES

Old Kyoto

Chinese Painting CS

MICHAEL

BETTY PEH-T’I WEI

PALUDAN

Old Singapore

The Forbidden City

MAYA JAYAPAL

MAY HOLDSWORTH

Peking Opera

The House in South-East Asia

JACQUES DUMARCAY

COLIN MACKERRAS

Images of the Buddha in Thailand

Traditional Chinese Clothing

DOROTHY

H. FICKLE

VALERY M. GARRETT

Series Editors, China Titles: NIGEL CAMERON,

SYLVIA FRASER-LU

Japanese Musical Instruments

HUGH DE FERRANTI

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

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First published 2000 This impression (lowest digit)

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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data de Ferranti, Hugh.

Japanese musical instruments / Hugh de Ferranti. . cm. — (Images of Asia) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-18-590500-8 (alk. paper) 1. Musical instruments—Japan. I. Title. II. Series. ML535 .D4 2000 784.1952—dc21 00-021246

Printed in Hong Kong Published by Oxford University Press (China) Ltd 18th Floor, Warwick House East, Taikoo Place, 979 King’s Road, Quarry Bay

Hong Kong

Contents

Preface Music in Japanese History

vi ]

Instruments in Japanese Literature and Folklore

24

Drums, Bells, and Other Percussion Instruments

40

Flutes and Other Wind Instruments

55

String Instruments

76

Selected Bibliography

97

Index

101

Preface For Fumon Yoshinori,

who first placed a Japanese instrument in my hands.

Since the publication of William Malm’s pioneering text, Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, nearly forty years ago, there have been a small number of quality books written in English on the traditional music of Japan. Accurate, highly technical descriptions of certain instruments are available in a number of diverse sources, most of which deal with single genres of what is now considered to be the ‘classical’ historical music. The scattering of data in academic monographs has meant that those with a less formal interest in Japan’s instrumental, vocal, and theatrical ensemble traditions have found it difficult to obtain information about individual instruments, especially less commonly heard ones. Moreover, many other instruments have remained

almost untouched by English-language scholarship (with the exception of David Hughes’s legion entries in the 1984 New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments). It is my hope that this book will answer a need for a concise reference source in which Japanese instruments are presented in several contexts, including the historical circumstances and changing cultural significance of the principal genres in which they have been played, and the kinds of performative events in which they can be seen and heard. Given the scope and the intended general readership for the series of which this book is a part, it has been most practical to group Japanese instruments not according to their

genres of usage, period of origin, or materials of construction—to mention some of the criteria that have been applied to them at various times in history—but under the familiar rubrics of ‘percussion’, ‘wind’, and ‘string’ instruments, each vi

PREEACE

of which here comprises a chapter. Although several instruments do not fit neatly into these broad classes, they are categories now also well-known in Japan, and they accomodate almost all traditional instruments without undue distortion. I have also written a brief chapter on references to musical instruments in selected works from the Japanese literary canon, both because literature and music have been closely interrelated, complementary artistic spheres throughout most of Japan’s history, and because many general readers interested in Japanese music are likely to be familiar with some of the representative works of literature. I have used the Hepburn system for romanization of Japanese words, for it remains the most widely recognized among readers of European languages, despite its shortcomings. Long vowels in all but common place names are represented by an accent mark above the letter. Japanese names follow Japanese practice and give the family name first, followed by the given name. Please note that in words such as Toji, the final ‘-ji’ denotes the name of a Buddhist temple. For representation of musical pitches I use the following system: c is middle c on the piano, with higher octaves:marked:asse/ac” wandilowerones as: Cy C”,.-C!"4tin descending order. The photographic and other images have been secured in many places and at many times; all images shown without courtesy attributions were taken or made by me. Sources for translations from Japanese are included in the Selected Bibiliography. Wherever an English-language source is not cited, the translation is my own. Work towards this book began, in some senses, in late 1984 after J first arrived in Japan, and several of the photographic images date from not long after that time. The vill

PREEA@E

preparation of this particular manuscript has taken place in several phases, however, in Sydney, Tokyo, and Ann Arbor, as I moved between teaching jobs and research positions like a latter-day tabi geinin, an itinerant performer on the academic stage. I am grateful to far more people than can be named here for their assistance and support. I wish to mention in particular, however, the following individuals, listed in approximate chronological order of our encounters in this context: Mitchell Clarke; Professors Fukushima Kazuo and Steven Nelson of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno Gakuen University; Professors Iguchi (Musicology Division), Fujita, Howell, and Ohkaji (Museum of Musical Instruments) of the Osaka College of Music; Shibata Yosuke; Arai Masamitsu of Tokyo Shoseki Publishing Company; Kitamura Ken’ichi and colleagues at the Nara National Museum; the Shosoin Office, Department of the Imperial Household; Kimura Riro; Professor Terauchi Naoko; Professor Silvain Guignard; Professor William Malm; Kondo Yuen of the Engakuji in Kita Kamakura; Professor Robert J. Smith; Professor Komoda Haruko; Gabriel Gould; and Yamagishi Shizuko. The endpapers show young female dancers accompanied by male drummers and a flute player, as in the early history of kabuki. The image is from Kabuki Zoshi, courtesy of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno Gakuen University.

Vill

l Music in Japanese History

Japan has . . . given an example of a style of life subordinating everything to one value: duration. (Singer, 1973: 95)

This statement was written in the light of a European’s experience of Japanese culture during the 1920s and 1930s, but it retains a particular relevance for the nation’s traditional performing arts today. Music is of paramount importance in most of those arts, and at the end of the twentieth century musical traditions persist in Japan which have their origins in each of the periods of its documented history. Few traditions were allowed to disappear, to be revived later by historical enthusiasts, as was the case with much European music before Mozart. Rather, their ‘duration’ has been ensured through meticulous care exercised by both musicians and their patrons over long spans of Japanese history. None of those performance traditions has continued unchanged through the centuries, and in the modern era several have even inspired the creation of new musical repertories, so that one can often attend concerts in which there is a juxtaposition of historical repertory and modern musical styles. This approach is a vivid instance of the value that has been placed on the maintenance of the canonical core of music traditions, even as new styles are developed in response to contemporary taste. In any culture, past and present-day—new and old— cultural forms are constantly in states of coexistence and flux. The relative value afforded new and old, and the distinctness of the very division between the two, are subject to changing circumstance. In Japan, the most important

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terms of distinction between new and old music are the categories of ‘traditional music’ (dento ongaku, nihon ongaku, or hogaku) and music of Western origin (seiyo ongaku). These categories date back little more than a century and reflect the changes in musical life brought about by the most important events of the last two hundred years, the opening of Japan to foreign contact and the ‘restoration’ of Imperial power in 1868. The primary subject of this book is the array of musical instruments which have continued to be played or, in a few cases, have been reconstructed as ‘traditional music’ since that watershed period in recent Japanese history. The most practical means for dividing Japanese history are large-scale units marked by fundamental political changes of the order of the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The resulting units are termed the prehistoric, ancient or classical, medieval or feudal, early modern, and modern ages, and each contains a number of shorter ‘periods’. Historical periods prior to 1868 were defined by relocations of political power and were named after the places which served as the centres of such power. The four periods of the modern age have been defined by the reigns of emperors, to form the Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-26), Showa (1926-89), and the current Heisei (1989-) periods. Within historical periods prior to the Meiji reign were sub-periods, in English usually called eras, which were determined according to various criteria. We know that music-making was important for particular purposes in Japan in times before the early historical periods. Japan’s major neolithic culture, called Jomon (before c. 300 Bc), left a wealth of pottery artefacts, among which are clay whistles and rattles. Much more evidence of musicmaking exists for the subsequent Yayoi (c.300 Bc—c.ap 300). Yayoi culture was based on agriculture and the use of bronze

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HISTORY

and iron, and its relics suggest many forms of contact with contemporary Chinese and Korean peoples, including some

population movement from the continent into western Japan. Yayoi-period relics include fragments of early zithers, as well as hundreds of dotaku (ornamental and musical bells). Abundant relics and images of instruments have been found in and around mounds built over the tombs of various rulers who lived in north-west Kyushu and the Kinki region (around Osaka and Kyoto) during the third to early sixth centuries, a period named Kofun (tumulus), after this practice of elaborate tomb-building. Findings include the remains of wooden zithers of various sizes, flutes of clay, stone, and wood, and small clay bells and rattles. Another source for knowledge of Kofun instruments are the haniwa, thousands of small clay statues of vassals, many of whom play or bear musical instruments. Some of the haniwa suggest instruments for which relics have not been found, such as drums, small horns or flutes fashioned from cow horn, and clappers. Of the music played on these instruments we know almost nothing, but it is certain that many were used in rites of the indigenous faith later called Shinto. One of the very first references to peoples who inhabited what is now Japan is a Chinese record compiled late in the third century ap, which includes the following statement: ‘During mourning rites the members of the family fast and lament, while friends come to sing, dance, and play music.’ The fundamental practices of Shinto are purification rites for and invocations of kami, named deities viewed as the spirits of natural phenomena. Kami are invoked by the establishment of sacred spaces and forms, and by incantations, but they are also drawn out by the sound of certain actions. Percussive stamping and beating, and the plucking of strings, were probably of particular importance in early ritual, to judge

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from references in the first collection of Japanese mythology and oral history, the Kojiki. Two minority peoples in modern-day

Japan whose histories have been largely different from those of the dominant cultural group are the Ainu and the Okinawans. The Ainu inhabited much of eastern and northern Japan, as well as Sakhalin and parts of the Kurile Islands, until the early medieval age. From that time, their history has been one of ever-diminishing geographic and cultural dominion in the face of encroachment, conquest, and subsequent assimilation by the dominant Yamato Japanese. By the late nineteenth century the survival of their distinct language and religion, elaborate oral lore, and material and musical arts was greatly threatened. Efforts by both Japanese and Western scholars to document and help maintain some aspects of Ainu culture have had mixed success, and in the present age only a few Ainu instrumental and vocal performance traditions continue. By contrast, the Okinawans, whose autonomous court culture continued in the Ryukyt Islands until the nineteenth century (albeit under the sway of the lords of Satsuma, in southern Kyushu, from 1609), have been able to retain many of their distinct cultural forms. Probable reasons for this

success have been the application of Chinese script to their language for centuries prior to their assimilation into the Japanese state, and the fact that unlike the Ainu, they have for the most part been treated as a regional Japanese culture, rather than a racially distinct one requiring forceful integration. Many genres of Okinawan music and dance have been maintained, and since the 1980s there has been a strong increase of interest in folk and popular strains of these ‘southern’ music traditions among urban Japanese audiences.

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IN JAPANESE

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The Music of Ancient Japan The earliest items of musical repertory still performed in Japan date from the seventh century ap, well after the consolidation of the Yamato court’s control over the western sections of the archipelago. The shomyo Buddhist chant tradition and the greater part of the gagaku court music tradition were introduced from China and Korea, but in time both inspired new indigenous music and were gradually transformed under the influence of extant Japanese practices and aesthetic preferences. Gagaku and shOmyo were transmitted through the mediation of musicians, priests, and scholars of Japan’s contemporary high-cultural milieu, a court society which during the seventh to ninth centuries imitated the Chinese model in many key respects. The writing system of the Japanese court was Chinese (first learned from Koreans, who had been engaged as scribes from the beginning of the fifth century), and patterns of Chinese government and Chinese court culture were introduced through the experiences of successive emissaries to the Chinese capital, as well as by visitors from China and Korea. Travellers from Japan had reached the Chinese court as early as the third century AD, but official envoys were sent frequently from the early seventh through the mid-ninth centuries, during the height of China’s Tang dynasty (Ap 618-907). The first recorded visit to Japan by continental musicians was that of eighty performers from the Korean kingdom of Silla in ap 453. Thereafter, diverse repertories of music, dance, and popular performance traditions practised at the Tang court—music from East, South-East and even Central Asian cultures—were gradually transmitted by visiting foreigners and Japanese musicians who had been taught by Tang and Korean masters. In 701 a government

oO

division

JAPANESE

known

MUSICAL

as the gagakuryo

INSTRUMENTS

or utamai-no-tsukasa

was

established to oversee the teaching and practice of music and dance under court sponsorship. By the mid-eighth century the repertory called togaku (Tang music) was clearly prevalent among gagaku styles. A wealth of literary references and surviving instrumental scores from the earlyto-mid Heian period (ap 794-1185) have enabled research on the nature of early togaku. Buddhism was a major vehicle for the introduction of performing arts, figurative arts, and architecture from the Asian continent. Elements of Buddhism were introduced gradually during the later Kofun period, but it was not until the late sixth century that the foreign religion gained the support of powerful court factions and, in turn, the Imperial house. Buddhism supplemented rather than displaced indigenous rites and beliefs, and by the early eighth century it began to function as a state cult centred on the powerful temples of Heijo-kyo (Nara), the first Japanese capital to endure until the present day. The musical consequences of this acceptance of Buddhism were far-reaching: the early forms embraced by Japanese court society required the observance of ho-e, large-scale ceremonies within major temples. The most elaborate Buddhist rituals involved not only multiple styles of sutra recitation, for which performance on temple percussion and sometimes wind instruments was required, but also set pieces of gagaku and bugaku court dance in synchronization with other ceremonial events. The liturgy of both esoteric Buddhism and the Pure Land faith, which rapidly gained popularity after its introduction in the ninth century, provided models for these performances in the raigo, the descent to earth of

Amida, Buddha of the Western Paradise, and a troupe of angelic musicians (Plate 1).

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The most common context for the music and dance of the gagaku repertory was not Buddhist ceremony, however, but the daily round of social observances, celebrations, and rites of Heian court society. The instrumental repertory of gagaku, although originally continental, had come to be learned by courtiers as if it were their own, and it was played in both solo and small ensemble formations. Both men and women of the court especially favoured the string instruments, the gakuso (koto) and gakubiwa, but performance on transverse flutes was also a common accomplishment. The performance skills of the courtiers, and the fundamental role that music, song, and dance played in their lives, are apparent in every chapter of Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), the novel of Heian court society written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu at the start of the eleventh century. The nobles performed for personal pleasure and for celebrations among members of their own society. For more formal occasions, however, professional guild musicians were employed. As the Yamato rulers were considered sacred beings, a body of music and dance for Imperial rituals had been developed by at least the sixth century ap and was maintained by certain troupes of guild musicians. Although this music has always been called indigenous, it is impossible to tell to what extent it was influenced by contemporary continental sources. It is likely to have been so affected during the early Heian period, however, because of subsequent efforts-to create a strict separation between indigenous and foreign musics. In the ninth century, for example, as contacts with Tang China waned, clear distinctions between native and continental music, and reductions and regroupings of the range of court-sponsored music were institutionalized.

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Togaku was redefined as Music of the Left, which included repertory of South-East Asian and Central Asian provenance as well as Chinese styles. Styles of Korean and Manchurian origin were grouped within komagaku, Music of the Right. Many continental instruments that had been played only in certain repertory were discontinued (the performance traditions of some had already been lost). These included the standing harp (kugo), stone and bamboo end-blown flutes (shakuhachi), pan-pipes (haisho), the large free-reed mouthorgan (u), and the five-stringed straight-necked lute (gogenbiwa). Well-preserved examples of these and other Tang instruments are contained in the ShOsoin, an Imperial storehouse attached to the Todaiji in Nara, in which are found many of the personal belongings of Emperor Shomu (r.724— 49) and ritual objects used for the largest public Buddhist festival of the Nara period (Ap 710-94), the ap 752 dedication ceremony of the bronze Great Buddha of Todaiji (Fig. 1.1 and Plate 2). Comparatively little is known of music in ancient Japan apart from the élite traditions. The names of many styles are recorded, most of them courtly stylizations of songs originally of the populace, such as the imayo, but few sources give detailed descriptions of music and entertainments outside court society. Exceptional in this regard are an account in the late eleventh century work Shin Sarugaku Ki of dances and mime sketches variously called sarugaku and sangaku, as well as puppetry and other performing arts, with drawings of some of the same arts on the surface of a bow in the Shosoin treasury (Fig. 1.2). In diaries, literature, and picture scrolls, there are frequent references to musicians and dancers of low social status; prominent among these were the shirabyoshi, solo dancers of great skill who were often prostitutes for the courtiers.

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Itinerant blind lute (biwa) reciters later called biwa hoshi are also recorded for the first time in the mid-Heian period.

Music in the Medieval Age The socio-historical distinction implied by the terms ‘ancient’ and ‘feudal’ is class-based; from the late twelfth century, most political power was wielded not by the Chinese-styled bureaucracy which court aristocrats had developed but by the provincial warrior (samurai) class, who were able to maintain their pre-eminence until the start of the modern age. The effective transferral of power to warrior retainers and provincial branches of aristocratic clans had taken place over the course of the tenth through early twelfth

JAPANESE

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MUSICAL

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INSTRUMENTS

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1.2 Drawings of sangaku performers on a bow held in the Shosoin. Courtesy of the Department of the Imperial Household.

centuries, as the income and political reach of the central government dwindled and provincial authorities formed warrior groups to protect property rights. By the mid-twelfth century the support of such groups was crucial to the position of leading figures within the court, and warrior leaders were rewarded with court ranks. By 1156 two warrior clans descended from nobility, the Taira (Heike) and the Minamoto (Genji), had become so 10

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IN JAPANESE

HISTORY

powerful as to vie for military control of Kyoto in a court dispute. Initially, the Taira were victorious, and until 1181 their leader, Kiyomori (1118-81), dominated court political life. Just four years after his death, however, Minamoto warriors drove Kiyomori’s clansmen out of the capital and down the eastern coast of the island of Honshu to their destruction at the battle of Dan no Ura. The Minamoto leader Yoritomo (1147-99) was soon in command of the entire country, and to him the reigning emperor, Gotoba, granted the title of shogun (great general). Yoritomo established Kamakura, a settlement for his own military administration, the Minamoto Shogunate, in eastern Japan. Thus was established a dual system of government which continued in various manifestations for seven centuries until the Meiji period. Kamakura itself was overthrown as the seat of the Shogunate in 1333, but the system was perpetuated by shogun of the Ashikaga family, who had their headquarters in Kyoto and based themselves in the Muromachi district from the late fourteenth century onwards. While the ritual and ceremonial functions of gagaku were maintained to a limited extent in Kamakura, the music most often patronized by men and women of the warrior class had other origins. Firstly, there were accounts of the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto, called the Gempei Wars, which helped to give the new military rulers legitimacy. In terms of music history, the most important of the variety of performance media in which the war narratives were presented was the recitation by blind biwa players of a set of stories that came to be called Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike). The performance tradition was called heike katari (literally, Heike narrative), heikebiwa, or simply heike. From its beginnings at the end of the twelfth century, soon after the events recounted in its narrative, heike katari grew vl

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steadily in popularity until its heyday in the mid-to-late fourteenth century, when a national guild of blind heike reciters, the Todoza, was established with Shogunal sponsorship. The guild controlled the activities of blind musicians, and eventually all of Japan’s blind professionals, during most of the ensuing centuries until its dissolution in the early Meiji period. Another important form of music-making favoured in warrior society was no drama. No first emerged in the early fifteenth century as the highly developed art called sarugaku, whose origins were archaic and multiple, including adaptations of both continental and indigenous theatrical and dance traditions, such as sangaku, gigaku, dengaku, and kusemai. No plays are highly poetic narratives presented through chanting and dance to the accompaniment of an instrumental ensemble called the hayashi. The hayashi flute and drums comprise the oldest of Japan’s ensembles for dramatic accompaniment, and their repertory of set ‘interlude’ pieces includes some of the most complex and sometimes spectacular music of all Japanese instrumental traditions. At the same time, the sound of the hayashi has a severity and dispassionate forcefulness that reflects the aesthetic preferences of the early feudal age’s warrior rulers (Plate.3)s Both the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the lives of members of the military class were deeply influenced by Zen, a form of Buddhism that had become dominant in China in the twelfth century and was introduced to Japan by returning monks around the year 1200. Zen places great emphasis on rigorous training of the mind through meditation and austerities, and its core values of simplicity and disciplined economy of means were embodied in several new styles of architecture, visual, and plastic arts developed under the 1)

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Shogunate’s patronage. No drama and the ritual of the tea ceremony likewise embody aspects of the Zen ethos, and some of the most prominent shogun of the Kamakura (11981333) and Muromachi (1338-1573) periods were patrons or participants in both. The greatest of no actors and playwrights, Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), was patronized for more than thirty years by the most illustrious of the Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu.

Music in the Edo Period The late sixteenth century saw the downfall of the Ashikaga family in 1573, and a subsequent thirty-year period of military struggle during which two successive warlords, Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), attempted to impose political unity on a country that had experienced virtually continuous regional warfare for two centuries. Only a third warrior leader, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), succeeded in subduing and retaining power over all of Japan’s regional overlords. Ieyasu had the court name him shogun in 1603, and in so doing initiated the 250 years’ peace of the Tokugawa period. Like Yoritomo long before him, Ieyasu established his administration in the east of Honshu, in Edo (called Tokyo since 1868). The culture of the Edo period (1603-1867) was the product of a juxtaposition of samurai values and an ever-more vigorous urban popular culture that emerged with the prosperity of the merchant classes. The merchants held the lowest status within the four official classes of the social order instituted by the Tokugawa Shogunate, which in descending order were the samurai bureaucrats, peasants, artisans, and merchants. The distinction between samurai

13

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and all others was strict, although lines between the other three classes were less rigid. The merchants, therefore, had to create a culture of their own in isolation from that of both the court in Kyoto and the warrior class. What resulted was the bourgeois culture of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. These cities were each home to several hundreds of thousands of inhabitants by the eighteenth century (so they were much the same size as Paris and London) and contained large ‘pleasure quarters’, districts for theatres, ‘tea houses’, and associated licensed brothels of many kinds, wherein the laws of the Shogunate were relaxed and the merchants could celebrate their economic power and capacity for pleasure. It was chiefly in these quarters that the musical arts of the ukiyo (‘floating world’) were developed, including the styles of narrative music (katarimono) of the puppet drama and kabuki theatre, diverse song forms accompanied by a three-stringed lute, the shamisen, and instrumental and song forms for the koto. Although most theatres were part of the pleasure quarters, the texts of music drama presented therein were subject to the strict censorship of the Shogunate, so the themes of many plays were ‘offically’ sanctioned ones, stressing the values of absolute loyalty and civic virtue over individual desires, and cloaking references to contemporary issues behind remote historical settings. The diverse styles of narrative recitation named after individual chanters, which comprise the core of Edo period theatre music, are collectively called j6ruri. Jorurihime Monogatari (Tales of Princess Joruri, a legendary lover of the Minamoto hero, Yoshitsune) were first performed by blind beggar musicians in the late fifteenth century, using biwa or percussive accompaniment. Other joruri tales followed, and the tradition spread rapidly from the end of the sixteenth 14

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HISTORY

century, after performances began to be made in conjunction with groups of puppeteers, and with the adoption of the shamisen, a new kind of plucked lute introduced from China (probably via the Ryukyu Islands) by late in the sixteenth century. From as early as the 1610s, printed texts for ningyo joruri (puppet joruri, later also called bunraku) plays began to appear, and they were soon circulated widely among audiences. The heyday of this narrative music began in the late 1680s, when plays by ‘the Shakespeare of Japan’, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), were being written for the great Takemoto Gidayu (1651-1714), founder of the gidayu style of joruri chanting (Fig. 1.3). Kabuki, the other representative musical theatre of the

Tokugawa period, was also developing from the early seventeenth century onwards. Until about 1650, the dramatic dance style called kabuki was inseparable from the sphere

1.3. A gidayt chanter and shamisen player in an illustration from Seikyoku Ruisan, an 1847 almanac of Edo music and dance. Courtesy of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno Gakuen.

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of young female and male courtesans; both of these institutions were eventually banned from performance because of their corrupting influence on public morals (Fig. 1.4). Later texts for what came to be called men’s kabuki (varo kabuki) were often adapted from no and ningyo joruri sources. From the mid-seventeenth century, the shamisen was added to a basic flute and drum hayashi accompaniment ensemble, and a style called nagauta soon emerged as the most common on-stage music in kabuki plays. Unlike gidayu, nagauta is a narrative song style, in which there are many sections of lyric poetry sung as dance accompaniment. Outside the theatres, numerous shamisen song styles were nurtured within the world of the distinguished tea houses, whose geisha were highly skilled in music and dance. The texts of such songs were disseminated through literature and

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nc ape

Leg. Leone:

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1.4 Young female dancers accompanied by male drummers and a flute player, as in the early history of kabuki. From Kabuki Zoshi. Courtesy of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno Gakuen.

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woodblock prints that circulated largely free of the Shogunate’s control. (In Plate 4, a woman is shown practising a famous song of the kato-bushi style from a printed collection.) In the naming and practice of all of these styles— as in many other aspects of the culture of the Tokugawa period—there was clear distinction between the manners of Edo and those of the kamigata or Kansai region cities, Osaka and Kyoto. Apart from the demi-monde of the pleasure quarters, both the well-to-do urban merchants and some members of the warrior class fostered domestic music forms. Chief among these were a new repertory of solo pieces for koto and music for various early forms of the shakuhachi flute. The koto had been used by courtiers during the Heian and Kamakura periods to play versions of gagaku melodies solo and in small ensemble groups. By the late Muromachi period, however, a solo tradition was maintained in reduced form among priests, most notably in the Tsukushi (Chikuzen) region of Kyushu. A blind shamisen player became a student of a tsukushigoto musician living in Edo in the mid-seventeenth century, then began to compose new songs and independent instrumental pieces (danmono) which subsequently became the fundamental works of the new solo koto repertory. This musician took the name Yatsuhashi Kengyo (1614-85). Founding his own school, he inspired younger players to further explore the potential of the instrument through new compositional forms and the medium of jiuta sokyoku, involving ensemble combinations with shamisen and kokyt, a bowed form of shamisen. During the eighteenth century, new koto compositional approaches also drew upon materials of the popular shamisen styles. Several kinds of end-blown flutes had been played in the forms of court music prevalent during the Nara period, but WA

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their traditions had been lost by the mid-Heian, and subsequent accounts of the instrument are from the early thirteenth century. In the early Edo period, forms of the shakuhachi became associated on the one hand with beggar— monks of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism, and on the other with men of the samurai class who developed the playing of it as a pastime. The instrument used by the latter, the hitoyogiri, died out entirely by the late nineteenth century, but the shakuhachi played by Fuke sect members was gradually modified and refined to become the instrument used today. By the mid-eighteenth century, laymen were playing shakuhachi as a common substitute for the bowed lute, kokyu, in ensemble with the koto and shamisen. This format for ensemble music was known as sankyoku (three parts). The representative traditions of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras continued to exist, but with significant changes in context and reception in the case of no, as well as in heike recitation, (or heikyoku, as it was known from early in the Edo period). Both were practised by professional guild performers under the patronage of powerful warrior clans and institutions, but they were generally perceived as antiquated, refined arts by comparison with the contemporary music of the urban demi-monde. Hence, they were favoured as amateur pastimes by many of the samurai in the idleness forced upon them by peace. No chant and heikyoku were also learned by priests and scholars who looked back to the ‘classical’ values of earlier times, and by some merchants who aspired to an old-style sophistication. During the Edo period there were four major gagaku troupes, three in Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka, all of which had existed throughout the medieval age, and one group of Edo gakunin in the service of the Shogunate. A transformation

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of the melodic nature of togaku, involving the obscuring of the original Tang melodies, as well as a substantial loss of repertory and deterioration of complex performance techniques for the string instruments, had probably taken place by the fifteenth century. The dispersal of court musicians during the chaos of the Onin civil war that began in 1467 then sharply disrupted transmission for several decades. While these conditions had inspired individuals to compile compendia of extant knowledge of the tradition, such as the Taigensho (written 1510-12), by the start of the early modern age the various gakunin groups maintained repertories that were greatly reduced by comparison with those of the late Heian and Kamakura periods.

Music in the Modern Age By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate was facing internal pressures and contradictions between new socio-economic conditions and an antiquated

theory of government and society. In 1854 the Shogunate’s demise was hastened by the arrival of the so-called Black Ships of an American naval expedition under Admiral Perry. After the Shogunate signed treaties to open Japan to trade with foreigners, an internal power struggle ensued which led to the defeat of the last shogun and an ‘Imperial restoration’ in 1868. The man whose effective political power had been ‘restored’ was only fourteen years old at the time and had become emperor one year before, so from the first years of the new Meiji period, government was largely in the hands of samurai who had led the revolt against the Shogunate. It was these men who decided to move the Imperial capital from Kyoto to Edo and to rename it Tokyo

Lo

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(Eastern capital). From that time until 1945, the emperors continued to lend Imperial legitimacy to the policies of men who ruled in their name. From around 1930, in response to economic duress and other factors, those policies became increasingly militaristic, with aggression against China and in turn a disastrous war against the United States and its allies as the eventual outcome. Western music had first been introduced to Japan by the Jesuits, whose mission work in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had won tens of thousands of conversions, but together with almost all traces of Christianity the music was wholly suppressed by 1640. More than two centuries later the foreign music again appeared, at first in the utilitarian forms of military bands and school songs. In the 1870s, Meiji-government bureaucrats first considered the matter of music in primary education. No traditional musical forms were deemed worthy of inclusion in an educational scheme devised with the assistance of European and American advisers. Thus, the 1880s saw the implementation of what became a long-standing curriculum through which no Japanese schoolchild Heer about Japanese music.

The effect on Japanese musical tastes of the introduction of European melodies and simple harmonies, and the neglect of Japanese music in the school music curriculum, was at first slight. Until the 1940s hogaku instruments and singing styles continued to be learned by many Japanese, and experienced by most, outside of school. Gradually, however, with the end of the Second World War and the American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951, young Japanese came

to have less and less exposure to traditional music, and today most find it remote and inaccessible. In the late 1980s, the Ministry of Education reviewed guidelines to allow for 20

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increased exposure to hogaku, but since that time the problem has arisen that schoolteachers are themselves not trained to listen to or to teach appreciation of the music. Contact with European music had relatively little impact upon the world of traditional musicians for two generations, but beginning around 1920 some leading young performers of hogaku began to experiment compositionally with Westerninfluenced formal and tonal materials. The most renowned and influential among these performers were the koto player Miyagi Michio (1894-1956) and the shakuhachi player Yoshida Seifti (1890-1950). Other hogaku musicians responded to the times by founding new styles and schools whose characteristics reflected the exigencies of the new society. One of these was the Fukuoka biwa player Tachibana Chijo (1848— 1919), who during the 1890s devised and popularized a new genre of narrative performance called chikuzenbiwa. He remodelled a form of biwa previously played only by blind priests of the Chikuzen region of northern Kyushu, and used the new instrument as an accompaniment for recitations

fashioned from elements of older biwa styles and the melodic mellifluousness of geisha songs. With the Meiji Restoration and the Emperor’s removal to Tokyo, a new Imperial Household gagaku ensemble was formed from selected members of the major Edo-period troupes. Under bureaucratic supervision, new partbooks were written in which the discrepancies among the performance practices of the old troupes were ‘reconciled’. A new official ideology was also promulgated: that gagaku was music exclusively for the rites and leisure of the Imperial Household, free of association with the ‘foreign’ practices of Buddhism, yet somehow unchanged since the glory of the Heian period. This ideology prevailed until 1945, and it was not until the 1960s that significant numbers of ‘plebeian’ PAI

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people began to participate in gagaku as amateurs. After a period of alarming decline, a gagaku revival has taken place since the so-called Silk Road Boom of the 1980s, when many young Japanese sought aspects of their cultural identity in ancient Asian arts and their residual forms in Japan. During the early post-war period, many traditional performing arts were threatened by not only the country’s destitution but also by Occupation policies that discouraged expression of ideas associated with pre-war nationalist and ‘undemocratic’ values. By the late 1950s, however, smallscale performance activity had begun again in most genres of traditional music. The numbers of people involved in such music were far smaller than they had been in the 1920s and 1930s: the experience of war and defeat had certainly meant a sea change for many in their attitudes to old cultural forms. This was especially true of people educated since 1945, who on the whole have avoided involvement in traditional arts during their youth. The condition of traditional music was greatly helped by governmental ordination in 1955 of a system of awards that recognize Living National Treasures and Intangible Cultural Assets. Particular music and theatre genres were given government subsidy. In the case of the bunraku puppet theatre, this has made possible a training programme whereby the transmission of the artform’s multiple skills is assured. It is often observed that traditional music in post-war Japan is preserved primarily as an unchanging, completely codified set of practices for élite and diminishing audiences. This may be so, with qualification, in the case of some genres, for which responsive, informed, and relatively young audiences no longer exist. There are several genres, however, for which that certainly is not the case. Audiences for both kabuki yp)

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and no have been growing since the 1970s, and for performances of well-loved repertory by the most renowned actors, ‘standing-room only’ is the norm. Minyo, traditional folk-song, in some regions is moribund, known only to a handful of members of a local preservation society, but elsewhere it is still sung widely among older generations. It may also be able to appeal to younger audiences in various renovated forms, such as the arrangements sung by professional minyo artists on national television, in which traditional instruments and references to melodic and rhythmic aspects of local style are intermixed with harmonic structures derived from Euro-American precursors and played on electric guitars and keyboards. At the other end of the spectrum, innovative masters of traditional music, such as the late Sawai Tadao (1937-97), have inspired and produced contemporary compositions for their instruments and drawn the attention of modern ‘concert music’ audiences. In the ever-changing context of contemporary Japanese society, traditional music occupies a small sector of the

nation’s musical culture as a whole. That musical culture is itself dominated in both popular and élite musical genres by styles either of Western origin or based on Euro-American models. Sustained during recent decades mostly by welleducated and financially secure people, traditional music in Japan may now be threatened to some degree by a decrease in the private funds available for amateur pastimes and in the public funds allocated for assistance to traditional arts. It seems probable, however, that, as in the past, means will be found to ensure the ‘duration’ of the great majority of these music genres.

23

2, Instruments in Japanese Literature

and Folklore

In all known societies, music is one of the primary forms of expressive culture. In the songs, myths, and tales of oral folklore, as well as written poetry, plays, and prose, music and musical instruments are common not only because they are a part of daily life, but also because they are an important part of what is considered spiritual and sacred experience. Spiritual experience includes not only events of a strictly religious nature, such as performance of rituals, but also the conditions of heightened emotional and physiological experience that can be induced by the sounds of musical instruments or the singing voice, and by participation in dance. The portrayal of instruments in literature tells us about the sorts and qualities of human experience with which they have been associated in given historical periods, and among different groups within society. Certain continuities in the treatment of musical sounds can be identified throughout Japanese literature. The first of these is the power of sound itself. Kami, the fundamental Shinto concept of divinity, is a sacred power that resides not only in most aspects of the natural environment but also in natural phenomena, including sound and the human ability to shape sounds with the voice and material objects. For this reason, the sounds of words or certain verbal formulas uttered in appropriate circumstances have been thought capable of invoking the power of the things or beings named. This belief in kotodama (word spirit) was basic to ancient ritual texts, as well as to much other poetry of Japanese antiquity. Kotodama was in part dependent upon musical qualities, as

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it was harnessed through chant or song and not plain speech. Similarly, the sounds of instruments appropriately played could harness and deliver kami. These sounds were especially important for inducing possession in the context of the shamanic rites that were central to early indigenous religion in most parts of what is now Japan. In literature of or based on oral tradition, this power is ascribed to percussive sounds made by striking objects or plucking strings. This is so for the literature of Ainu, Okinawan, and Yamato Japanese cultures alike. The reciter of an Ainu long heroic epic (yukar) would tap out a pulse against the hearth with a wooden beater called a repni throughout a performance of many hours’ duration, and for certain genres the listeners would do likewise, so that the entire group was united in trance and narrative. In the Omorososhi, an anthology of twelfth- to seventeenth-century poems and songs from the Okinawan and Amami islands, there are many references to ceremonial drumming, often performed by the female shamanic figures who have been the principal celebrants of indigenous religion. For example, a song from Volume 15, Song 1104 (Sakihara, 1987: 81), about the renowned Kimitoyomi and her attendant priestesses, has been translated as follows: Renowned Kimitoyomi, Kikoe, Kimitoyomi Noble-spirited Kimitoyomi. Setaka, Kimitoyomi What majestic drumming famed Kimitoyomi! Uchiche, mimon, Kimi In the garden of Kitatan, Kitatan no, myani In the garden of our lord, Aganasa no, myani Where the spirit abounds,

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Tamayoseé ga, maeni

Where the granaries stand together, Yoritachi ga, maeni, Hundred drums, Momokuchi no, tsuzumi Eighty drums thundering the air. Yasokuchi no, nariyobu.

The first references to sound-making in the myths of the eighth-century Kojiki are the shaking of jewels to produce a jingling sound’ that brings forth latent life forces (Book 1, Chapter 15), and the goddess Uzume’s rhythmic stamping or dancing on an overturned tub so as to induce a trance (a state of reception to kami) and an erotic display, which causes the assembled deities to laugh. As a result, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu is lured out of hiding and light is restored to the world (Book 1, Chapter 17). This ecstatic dance myth has often been seen as a prototype for the role of dance and music in Shinto ritual. In an account presented later in the Kojiki, it is the sound of a plucked zither that induces possession and the delivery of divine instructions concerning the supposed invasion of Korea by the Empress Jingu (Book 2, Chapter 92). This example suggests the frequency of the zither’s use in early shamanic rituals. Both string instruments and drums continued to be accorded numinous power in poems, prose, and drama. In the Nara-period anthology of poetry, the Manyoshu, the following poem (Book 7, Poem 1129) may reflect the belief that the koto is able to act as a medium for the dead: As I take up the koto koto toreba I first hear a cry escape it. nageki sakidatsu Can it be that

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kedashiku mo within this koto koto no shitahi ni my wife’s spirit has hidden? tsuma ya komoreru

Like forms of the koto, the biwa was played as a favoured instrument of the Heian courtiers, but it has long been venerated as an instrument of ritual power. In Kyushu and south-western Honshu, exorcism rites for some of the most important deities of local belief, such as the earth spirit Jijin, have called for a celebrant who plays biwa since perhaps as early as the Nara period. Another powerful deity, Sanbo Kojin, god of the kitchen fire, has also been exorcised by blind biwa players (Plate 5). Given the status of the biwa in historical Buddhist cosmology (see Chapter 5), it is possible that the instrument’s use for such important rites was once common in East Asia. From its earliest appearance in Japan,

where there was already indigenous belief in the sacred efficacy of plucked strings, the continental lute was accepted as a ritual tool. One of the most important of the indigenous practices historically associated with the biwa is that of chinkonsai, a ritual action for releasing spirits of the dead from the realm of the living. Such rites have involved repetitive sounding of a bowstring or stringed instrument during incantations that induce spirits to appear, so that they can in turn be freed. In the early medieval age, such rites were thought to be especially important for pacifying the ghosts of those who had died in battle or while still bearing grievances. It has been suggested that the important medieval narrative, The Tale of the Heike, had as its origin stories told by blind biwa players in the context of chinkonsai for those killed in the Gempei Wars.

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The structure of many no plays—especially among the shuramono, plays focused on warriors—is that of an outline chinkonsai, wherein an attempt is made, often by means of the performance of certain songs and dances, to free a spirit that has remained among the living. In the case of Tsunemasa, the main character’s spirit is placated for a time by the power of the famous gakubiwa called Green Mountain, one of two lutes originally brought from Tang China as gifts to the Imperial house. The instrument had been presented to the Ninnaji after a ghost had appeared and played secret pieces on it. This biwa was in turn entrusted to Taira no Tsunemasa, a great performer who eventually returned it to the temple when his clan fled the capital. Similarly, an entire episodetof lhe Tale of Heike: ‘Chikubushima’, tells of the pleasure of the god of the Chikubushima Shrine, Benzaiten or Myoon Bosatsu, who appears in the form of a white dragon when Tsunemasa plays secret Tang compositions before the shrine. Another well-known instance of the chinkonsai rite is the folk-tale now known to Japanese (in the written version by Lafcadio Hearn) as ‘Miminashi Hoichi’ (literally, ‘Earless Hoichi’), in which a young blind biwa player unwittingly initiates a chinkonsai for souls of the Taira clan when practising heike recitation outside a temple near the site of the final battle of the Gempei conflict. He is bewitched by the Taira clan ghosts, who seek to take him into the netherworld, but is saved when sutras painted over his entire body (with the unfortunate exception of two places) make him invisible to ghosts. Drums have been central to ceremonial music in Japan since earliest times. The power associated with drumming is evident in the sole form of traditional music still heard

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‘live’ by most Japanese: the sounds of Shinto ritual and the festival ensembles of large and small shrines. Shrine drums are struck by Shinto priests and priestesses for most important ceremonies, and the music and dancing intended to please kami during a festival are almost always centred around a form of hayashi, that is, a drum and flute group. The significance of the drum’s sound as a link to the realm of spirits is implicit in inverse form in the nod play Aya no Tsuzumi (The Damask drum), in which a man is possessed by a drum’s silence. Told by the woman with whom he is in love that she will come to him when she hears the sound of a drum she has hung from a tree, the man starts to beat the instrument. The drumhead is made not of skin but of figured cloth, however, and will not sound. The woman’s falseness drives the man insane, so that he strikes the drum obsessively until he weakens, then drowns himself in a pond. He returns to torment the woman as a demon filled with hatred. A second element of continuity in literary references to musical instruments is the power of certain ones—especially in the hands of master performers—to move listeners, either reinforcing a particular emotion or affecting the hearers so that they commit extraordinary acts. One late Heian period tale tells of Mochimitsu, a renowned player of the hichiriki double-reed pipe; when attacked by pirates while on a sea journey, he saves himself by playing a single piece he has worked upon for years: [T]he weeping Mochimitsu began to play. This was the last time he would ever make music, and he poured his whole soul into the piece. ... When the music was over, [the pirates’] leader loudly declared, ‘I came because I wanted your ship, but your playing has brought tears to my eyes. I couldn't possibly harm you now’ (Tyler,

1987: 93).

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The koto, in its various Japanese and Chinese forms, was one of the instruments that both men and women of the Heian court would choose to play alone. Other instruments, such as flutes, were on occasion played solo, but it is the koto that is often associated with solitude and withdrawal from the world. The Kokinshi, an Imperial anthology completed in aD 905, contains the following poem by Yoshimune no Munesada (Rodd and Henkenius, 1984: 332-3): to my eyes it seemed wabibito no the secret refuge of a sumubeki yado to world-weary soul and the mirunabe no plaintive notes of the koto nageki kuwawaru deepened my heartfelt sorrow koto no oto zo suru

In The Tale of the Heike there is the story of Kogo, a superbly skilled koto player who, although loved by an emperor, is forced by the Taira leader Kiyomori into exile from the capital. The Emperor’s messenger, Nakakuni, comes to look for Kogo and hears her playing at a secluded temple: Someone was indeed playing the [koto] with Beyond a doubt, it was Kogo’s style. She was My Husband’ [Sofuren], a song in which nostalgia for her spouse (McCullough, 1988:

a brilliant touch. . . playing ‘Yearning for a woman expresses 203).

The koto could also invoke sadness of another kind, as a symbol of all the glories of the capital and court life that a listener may have left behind. In the ‘Akashi’ chapter of Genji Monogatari, an old man who, like Prince Genji himself for a

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time, lives in seclusion on the Akashi coast, hears Genji’s

zither-playing and becomes nostalgic for the world of miyako (the capital), feeling again the intensity of his isolation. He is inspired to play the koto again himself, and in turn the gakubiwa, on both of which he is accomplished. Of his performance on biwa, the author writes: He did, indeed, play beautifully, adding decorations that had gone out of fashion. There was a Chinese elegance in his touch, and he was able to induce a particularly solemn tremolo from the instrument (Murasaki Shikibu, trans. Seidensticker, 1976: 256).

This passage is typical of many in the novel, in its concern both with personalized playing styles and with the importance of performance traditions that were either secret or had become little known. Another remarkable instance of this is a banquet concert in the first of the ‘New Herbs’ chapters of Genji Monogatari, wherein the author comments on the relative merits of the Chinese gin and Japanese wagon zither repertories: There is perhaps nothing so mysterious about the secret Chinese repertory, for all its variety. The scores may be secret but they are fixed and not hard to read. It is rather the Japanese wagon, the improvising after the dictates of one’s fancy, all the while deferring to the requirements of other instruments, that fills the listener with wonder (Murasaki Shikibu, trans. Seidensticker, 1976: 553).

The time depicted in this passage was more than 150 years after the cessation of official relations with China. Knowledge of ‘purely’ Chinese literature and music was still important for the courtiers, but it had become an antiquated area of expertise, one which carried prestige and status but was less important (and apparently less aesthetically stimulating)

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than was specialist expertise in Japanese poetry and music. With respect to the courtly string instruments, such specialist skills and knowledge continued among courtiers until perhaps the early fifteenth century, after which they rapidly declined. In the case of biwa performance, a common mode of response evident in literature from the Heian to the Edo periods is one that expresses a sense of desolation induced by a projection of loneliness onto the performer. In a poem from the late tenth century Kanemorishu, the courtier Taira no Kanemori hears a wandering biwa hoshi and responds not so much to the individual as to an idea—apparently already well-established—of the potential of the instrument for exploration of emotion in the depths of solitude: On four strings yotsu no oO nl

his heart omou kokoro o he wanders through shirabetsutsu playing and playing hikiarikedomo yet no one knows it. shiru hito mo nashi

This image of the biwa as an instrument played by solitary wanderers and exiles became predominant in literature from the Kamakura period on, when the courtly tradition of biwaplaying was in gradual decline and the oral narratives of the biwa hoshi acquired tremendous popularity. It is from this time that the story of Semimaru became important for representations of biwa in many contexts. Semimaru is a quasi-historical figure said to have been the son of an

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emperor, expelled from the capital because his blindness had been interpreted as a defilement of the court (Fig. 2.1). Three poems attributed to Semimaru appear in the first imperially commissioned anthology, Kokinshi, in 905, and four others appear in later anthologies. The earliest telling of his story is that in Konjaku Monogatari-shu, a collection of tales compiled in the early twelfth century. The tenth-century courtier-musician Hakuga no Sammi goes to listen in secret

outside Semimaru’s hut by the Ausaka Barrier every evening for three years. Finally he meets the blind man and is taught an archaic secret repertory for biwa, of which he becomes the last knowledgeable player. The story ends with the claim that Semimaru was ‘the first of the blind biwa players’. In a later source, a fifteenth-century no play about Semimaru

PAS SAS oe leoS

2.1 A portrayal of Hakuga no Sammi visiting Semimaru, from Hyakunin Issha Issekiwa (1833). Courtesy of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music Library.

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(Zeami, trans. Tyler, 1992: 249), the sounds of the biwa he plays in solitude enable his sister to find him in the forest: No one comes calling. I only hear monkeys crying from trees on the mountain as my tears fall; and the pattering showers I tune my lute to, their sound my own on through the hours, the long, long hours: a music of weeping, a rain of tears in the hut’s deep silence.

The significance of a given musical instrument or phenomenon in literary sources is conditioned by both the individual writer and the concerns of the age or period in which the source was written. In the mid-Edo period, for example, another reference to a solitary blind biwa player, by the poet Matsuo Basho (1644-94) in his poetic diary Oku no Hosomichi (‘Narrow road to the interior’), emphasizes not the strangeness of the Heian or Kamakura biwa hoshi but contemporary interest in heikyoku and other musical forms as an archaic yet refined pursuit among Edo literati: In the evening I heard a blind hoshi reciting something called ‘okujoruri’ with his biwa. Heard from so close by, his songs were boisterous, unlike either the Heike narratives or the chants for mai dancing.

Edo-period writings offer a great deal of information about contemporary attitudes toward music, for much of the canonical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries comprises ukiyo-zoshi, writing that often takes as its subject the world of the licensed pleasure quarters and theatres, in which music was central to daily experience. Not only most of the professional entertainers of the licensed quarters, but also many of the partons of the theatres and

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teahouses, were skilled in music. The people and pursuits of the pleasure quarters are superbly captured in the woodblock prints that came to be called ukiyo-e, ‘pictures of the floating world’ (see Plate 4). As it is presented in the literary and iconographic representations that remain, trade in sex was embellished by the enjoyment of music and poetry, as well as the pleasures of fashion and connoisseurship of all kinds. Apart from its use on the theatre stages, the shamisen was first and foremost the instrument of the courtesans. This association was so fundamental that a 1701 guidebook and compendium of stories about the pleasure quarters of the three major cities, Keisei iro-jamisen (The Courtesan’s Amorous Shamisen}, initiated a series of publications called shamisen books, which were not music collections but fictitious stories of the scandalous lives of courtesans and their patrons. Although there was an elaborate heirarchy of brothels, courtesans, and prostitutes, from the tayu, the highest-ranked geisha who would choose her patrons, to the streetwalkers unaffiliated with any teahouse, a man-abouttown who frequented any but the least of the facilities ought to have been able to sing some of the most popular shamisen songs to a geisha’s accompaniment. In Saikaku’s ukiyo novel

Koshoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man), there is an episode about an old hand of the Kyoto Shimabara district. He visits the teahouses accompanied by a servant who sings well and carries a superb ebony-necked shamisen with gauge-six strings, ready to be proffered to courtesans. It is unclear whether the man himself can sing and play, but the novelty and quality of the instrument he brings wins him the women’s favours. Courtesans above a certain rank danced, sang, and played shamisen almost without exception, but instruments

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associated with other spheres of Edo-period society were rarely heard in the pleasure quarters. The strangeness of hearing a gagaku instrument, the sho mouth organ, at a party in the Gion district of Kyoto, for example, is emphasized in a story by Ejima Kiseki (1667-1736) about the restless wife of a rich man: The husband began to boast of his wife’s accomplishments. ‘You girls should hear her play the [sho]’, he said. ‘I suppose you’re on good terms with men of discrimination, and you’ve heard all kinds of music, but it may be that a really expert artist on this instrument has not yet performed in Gion’ (Hibbett, 1959: 107).

The strange but beautiful music she proceeds to play has the effect of inducing melancholy throughout the entire

2.2 Blind female shamisen players in rural Kumamoto prefecture, Kyushu (mid-1930s). Courtesy of Professor Robert J. Smith.

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teahouse, whose guests begin to reflect on the folly of their ways! This episode suggests that for people of the eighteenthcentury metropolis, the sounds of gagaku were associated with the neo-Confucianist ideology and moral code espoused by the governing powers. Outside the cities, the association of the shamisen with women of pleasure was well-known, but another common connection was with blind itinerant singers called goze. Unmarried blind women in Edo Japan had few options for survival, but one was to join a goze troupe, to train as a shamisen player and singer of ballads (Fig. 2.2). There are many folk-tales about both goze and their male counterparts, zato (who played either biwa or shamisen). In one story from the Shimabara peninsula of western Kyushu, a badger disguises himself as a goze, contriving a shamisen and a child guide from weeds and logs floating in a river, then sets off to entertain people at a party: After the badger finished disguising himself, the blind woman walked on with the shamisen in her arms, led by the girl. They looked like a true party of travelling shamisen players (Dorson,

1962: 135).

In literature of the Meiji period and later, references to traditional instruments were frequent until the 1940s but have become few and far between in post-war writing. Direct experience and knowledge of Japanese music, dance, and theatre were still common among pre-war writers. In a majority of cases, the music concerned was the same as that which Edo-period literati had favoured: the songs of the geisha and the kabuki theatre. Almost without exception, in these sources such music is symbolic of a culture that the writer perceives as rapidly disappearing, whether the lifestyle of the urban pleasure quarters and the sensibilities which 37

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had continued to typify the world of letters until the end of the Meiji period, or the equally unmodernized lifeways of rural Japan. There is a common thread of nostalgia in the pre-war works of Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1971) and Nagai Kafu (1879-1959), which becomes one of lamentation in some of each man’s later writings. The occasion for its

expression is often the music of geisha or other professional entertainers. In Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer (1925), a student becomes

infatuated with the apparent freshness and unsullied charm of a girl who dances and drums with an itinerant troupe: At each drum-beat I felt a surge of relief. ‘Ah, she’s still there. Still there and playing the drum.’ And each time the beating stopped, the silence seemed intolerable. It was as though I were being borne under by the driving rain (Kawabata, trans. Seidensticker, 1974:

14-15).

Many of Nagai’s stories and novels take as their subject the lives of people of ‘the Quarter’. In Quiet Rain (1918), Nagai exercises a knowledge of the fine points of distinction between older and newer styles of Edo shamisen music, as part of a documentation of what is being lost: Iam told that among the geisha he had been in the habit of calling, there had been adepts of nagauta and kiyomoto and the like, but now he turned rather to kato and ittchu and sonohachi, and the very youngest geisha in these schools were in their mid-twenties (Nagai, trans. Seidensticker, 1965: 262).

In post-war literature, references to traditional music are mostly found in works by writers who were educated before or during the Second World War. Japanese music becomes part of the writers’ portrayals of cultural values and lifeways abandoned by Japanese society or ones that seem doomed in 38

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the face of modern society’s wilful aversion to ideas and practices associated with the militarism of the 1930s. The geisha who appear in many of Kawabata’s post-war novels play and sing relatively little. They lack vitality, as if in acknowledgement of Kawabata’s claim that after the defeat and occupation of Japan, he could write ‘nothing but elegies’ for the remainder of his life. In the works of Mishima Yukio (1925-70) there are several graphic accounts of the sounds of traditional music, but it is in his final novel, The Decay of the Angel, that the aesthetic power of a canonical instrumental genre is turned on its head. The novel takes the death of an angel as described in the no play Hagoromo as a metaphor for the loss of beauty and strength from Japanese culture. At one point Mishima travesties the gagaku played by Buddhist angels during Amida’s descent from the Western Paradise: In a garden blocked off by the beautiful foundations of a Chinese pavilion, crowds of angels are plucking on zithers, beating on drums. But there is no suggestion of vitality, the music has fallen to the dull buzz of a fly on a summer afternoon. Pluck though they may, beat though they may, the strings and skins are slack and tired and decayed (Mishima, trans. Seidensticker, 1974: 53).

If Murakami Haruki, Banana Yoshimoto, Shimada Masahiko, and other leading writers born after the end of the Second World War refer to traditional instruments in their works, they do so in the spirit of their times, wherein traditional performing arts—like many other aspects of historical culture—are experienced by most Japanese as remnants of a past that is their own, yet somehow not their own. At the close of the twentieth century, the sounds of koto, shakuhachi, and shamisen have become markers of the exotic both inside and outside Japan.

39

3 Drums, Bells, and Other Percussion Instruments

Many people have experienced the tremendously dynamic and energetic music of taiko groups, mixed percussion ensembles made up mostly of various types and sizes of drums (taiko). The music and ‘traditional’ ethos of some of these groups have tended to be exoticized—the early 1990s film of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, for example, introduced this music in the context of a portrayal of Japan as something implacably other and implicitly threatening— but since the 1970s concerts and recordings of groups such as Kodo have given the term ‘Japanese drumming’ a vivid meaning for people in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Percussion is integral to ritual life in Japan. Ainu ritual is best known for its singing and onomatopoeic vocal sounds, but in certain shamanic rites a single-headed drum called a kaco is struck by the female shaman or a male assistant, while the importance of the wooden repni beater to performances of epic has already been noted. Within the Shinto shrines of the Yamato Japanese, drums are among the only large objects present apart from the altar. The capacity of rhythmic sound for both pleasing the deities and inducing a state of receptivity to kami in the ritual celebrant is suggested by the legend (see Chapter 2), of Uzume'’s erotic dance.

Drums

The Sino-Japanese compound taiko has long been in use as a generic term for drums; the indigenous word tsuzumi

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probably fulfilled the same function prior to the Nara period. No identifiable remains of drums from before the eighth century have survived, but haniwa figures show that barreldrums worn suspended from the hip and struck with beaters were common during the Kofun period. The presence of continental Asian music and dance in Japan from as early as the sixth century ap renders futile attempts at distinction between indigenous drums and ones developed from foreign models. While it is clear that certain drums, such as the various tsuzumi of early gagaku, were of Korean or Chinese origin, it is not known whether similar drums were already played in Japan before the continental instruments’ introduction. The popular sangaku acrobatics, mime, and dances graphically portrayed in drawings on an eighthcentury bow held in the Shosoin (see Fig. 1.3) provide evidence that the hourglass-shaped drums were also played long ago in non-élite genres. Many kinds of drums were used in the various continental repertories practised during the eighth century under the auspices of the gagakuryo. Fragmentary examples of only a few have survived in the Shosoin. All are slender-waisted, ‘hourglass’ drums, played with either the hands or beaters, of a kind thought to have been commonly used in musics from northern India, central Asia, and the western reaches of China. Of the ancient types of drum, four continue to be used commonly in modern-day gagaku: the kakko, dadaiko, gakudaiko, and san-no-tsuzumi, while three others are played only for special occasions or in certain pieces. The kakko is a small barrel-drum suspended in a wooden stand. It has two heads of deerskin and diagonal tuning cords whose tension is adjusted by lace fittings. The kakko is played by the leader of the ensemble in all music of the togaku

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repertory. The san-no-tsuzumi is a larger hourglass-shaped drum which replaces the kakko for komagaku. While the kakko is struck with two slender hardwood sticks (bachi) using a variety of techniques, the san-no-tsuzumi in modern performance practice requires only single strokes with a stick held in the right hand (Plate 6). A drum used only rarely in modern gagaku performance practice, usually in the context of processional music, the ikko was once the ‘first’ of four tsuzumi-type drums named numerically: ikko, ni-no-tsuzumi, san-no-tsuzumi and yon-

no-tsuzumi. Even rarer are the keiroko, a small barrel-drum worn suspended from the neck and beaten with a stick held in the right hand, and the furitsuzumi, a set of two tiny barreldrums attached to a short pole at right angles to one another,

with two tassles that strike the drum heads in turns when the pole is shaken. Both are played by a Dancer of the Left in the bugaku dance ‘Ikkyoku’, while a Dancer of the Right plays the ikko (Plate 7). Because of their size and spectacular appearance, the enormous dadaiko drums are for many people among the most memorable images retained from gagaku performances. Dadaiko were in use for accompaniment of dance at least by the eighth century, as a pair of dadaiko were played in the festive performances for the ‘eye-opening’ ceremony of the Great Buddha at Nara. Although instruments of such antiquity have not survived, to judge from dadaiko of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, such as those presented to the Kasuga Shrine in Nara by the Minamoto leader Yoritomo in the thirteenth century, the size of such drums was not standardized (Plate 8). The structure of dadaiko is typical of a type found in many Japanese performing arts, albeit on a huge scale: the drumheads are not attached to the wooden body but are 42

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wrapped onto a circular metal frame whose circumference is larger than that of an hourglass- or barrel-type body. Ropes are then threaded in a criss-cross pattern from one ring-frame to the other, as a means to further tighten the heads (see the taiko in Plate 11). The large, leather-covered beaters with which dadaiko are sounded are unlike the wooden beaters used for many Japanese drums, but they are similar to those used for the suspended gakudaiko drum. In both cases, while lacking in sharpness the resulting sound is loud enough to be heard distinctly through the dense web of the gagaku ensemble’s melodic wind instruments. As dadaiko have been used only for bugaku dance performances, held mostly on outdoor stages until the twentieth century, their large, elaborately carved and painted wooden frames are easily dismantled. Decoration of both the frame and the drumheads reflects the principles of yinyang cosmology, whereby such drums were made in pairs, one each for Right and Left dance. While the two directional categories applied to the entire Heian court bureaucracy, in bugaku performance they retain the practical designation of the side from which the dancers enter and on which the relevant drum is positioned atop a raised platform. The colouring and symbolism of these correspondences is distinctive: the left is predominantly presented in shades of red and orange, colours worn by court officials of the fifth rank. A sun is displayed atop the left-hand drum, as a symbol of the male principle (yang in Chinese, yo in Japanese). A dragon decorates the frame, and a triple-tomoe motif (three elongated commas in a circular formation) is painted on the drumhead. The drum on the right side is predominantly in shades of blue and green, colours worn by officials of the sixth rank. A full moon atop the drum serves as a symbol of the female principle (yin in Chinese, in in Japanese).

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A phoenix decorates the frame, and a double-tomoe motif appears on the drumhead. The gakudaiko (literally, ‘the taiko of gagaku’) is a smaller and structurally distinct drum primarily used for performances of kangen, the instrumental repertory. It is a shallow barrel-drum suspended from a circular wooden frame with a flame-shaped crowning ornament of beaten metal. The skins are attached to the rim of the frame with metal studs and are decorated with ornate designs or paintings. Plate 9, for example, shows a splendid phoenix painted on a gakudaiko at the Zen temple, Engakuji, in Kita Kamakura. The soft beaters have distinct functions, as the lighter left-hand ‘female’ stroke (mebachi) is made to the left of the drumhead centre, and the heavier righthand ‘male’ stroke (Obachi) is made directly in the centre of the drumhead. The hayashi ensemble of no, and its counterpart in many kabuki plays derived from no, includes three kinds of drums: the small and large tsuzumi (kotsuzumi and Otsuzumi, also called okawa, respectively), which are struck with the hands, and the taiko, struck with thick wooden sticks. The kotsuzumi (Plate 10) is a ring-frame hourglass-drum whose performance techniques include alteration of the drumheads’ tension by application and release of pressure via the tuning ropes, called shirabe. The drum is supported on the right shoulder by the left hand, which squeezes the shirabe to increase tension on the lacquered horsehide drumheads, so that the drum’s pitch is raised. Releasing the shirabe allows the pitch to fall. Through the coordination of such shirabe changes and the use of different fingers and parts of the right hand, five standard sounds are produced; their onomatopoeic syllables are pon, pu, ta, chi, and tsu.

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In comparison with the kotsuzumi, the 6tsuzumi has larger, thicker skins of cowhide, which remain unlacquered. They are pulled so tightly over the two ring-frames that no further pressure can be applied by the player. The drum is held on the left hip and struck with the fingers of the right hand, on which the player usually wears thimbles made from washi (Japanese paper) or deerskin. The resulting tone is very sharp, and so dry that one might imagine it is produced by an earthenware pot rather than a drum skin. There are three basic types of strokes used to produce the sounds, which are called chon, tsu, and don. Both the kotsuzumi and Otsuzumi require special preparations before each performance. The kotsuzumi has a small patch of deerskin attached at the centre of the inside surface of the rear dr'umhead. The drumhead’s vibration is finely regulated both by breathing onto the outside surface opposite the deerskin patch (often done both before and during performance), and by placing against it pieces of washi which have been slightly moistened with spittle. The Otsuzumi's two drumheads must be placed before a dry heat source for more than an hour before performance if the ideal dry ‘cracking’ tone is to be achieved. The third no drum, called simply taiko, is a ring-frame barrel-drum placed on a wooden stand at a slight angle to the floor. It has skins of either horsehide or cowhide, tied tightly by means of a system of ropes. Two small circles of deerskin are attached at the centre of the upper drumhead. The thick wooden beaters are gripped loosely in the hands, with the arms held slightly out from the chest and the forearms rigid in a flat plane. All strokes are aimed at the central deerskin patch. The taiko and two tsuzumi of no are also played in the on-stage ensemble of kabuki plays that are adaptations from no texts, and the taiko is played in many 45

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kinds of festival music ensembles. The bachi used for playing the taiko in these contexts are thinner than those used for no performances. Outside the traditional theatre, hayashi ensembles of drums, flute, and gongs are most often heard in the context of festival (matsuri) music and dance, so that they are usually called matsuri-bayashi. They will be seen either on the back of a float that travels close by the mikoshi, the portable shrine in which the kami is transported through a community, or on a wooden stage within the shrine grounds, where dances may be offered to the kami (Plate 11). The drums of matsuribayashi are various in kind, but they almost always include one or more taiko similar to, although heavier in construction than, those used in no. If there are two taiko, they usually play a single part in unison, as a frame of reference against which the players of the ddaiko (another, deeper-pitched drum), kane (a small hand-held gong), and shinobue (a transverse flute) perform in a highly regulated but improvisational manner.

Many of the numerous drums played in the folk performing arts (minzoku geino) are structurally identical to those used in élite performance genres, but. they have names accorded by their particular usage in the regions where they are constructed and played. Often the drums are played in ensemble with one or more flutes and singers, but dance and ritual traditions in which drums alone are heard are not uncommon. These traditions are associated with a particular community, and most are performed as forms of kagura (entertainment for kami) in shrine ritual and public celebratory performances, as well as in concert displays for tourists and schoolchildren. Two types of drums in popular tradition which are structurally unique are the uchiwadaiko and the 46

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dendendaiko. The uchiwadaiko is made up of a single drumhead within a circular frame. As it lacks a resonator, it is light enough to be carried and struck when walking or running. One of its uses is as a powerful rhythmic accompaniment to the sutras that are chanted on winter nights by groups of Nichiren sect priests when they are performing austerities that involve running through a community in line formation. The dendendaiko is today used only as a toy ‘shaken drum’. A miniature two-headed shallow drum with a string and pellet attached on each side so that each head is struck in succession when the instrument is twisted rapidly back and forth, it probably derived from larger pellet drums of Korea and China, such as the furitsuzumi of processional gagaku and some bugaku dances.

Gongs and Bells Metal instruments have been produced in Japan since the Yayoi period, but prior to that era, terracotta bells and rattles were used. In common usage, a generic distinction is made

between kane, struck with a hand-held stick or mallet, and suzu, globular forms with an incised slit, which are sounded by an internal object or by being struck one against another. Following this categorization, Buddhist temple bells are considered the largest form of kane. Within these two broad categories are instruments of diverse kinds, shapes, and uses. Kane can be supported, handheld, or suspended. Their tonal quality is determined by the materials from which the body and beater are made, as well as by their shape and depth. Supported gongs called kin are used in the ceremonies of most Buddhist sects and for 47

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domestic devotional practice. The surigane (also known by onomatopoeic names such as chanchiki) of matsuri-bayashi ensembles, held in the palm of the left hand and struck with a deer-horn tipped stick, is the most commonly played handheld gong. Among suspended kane, two forms heard (and usually also sounded) by almost every visitor to Japan are the most common kinds of bronze temple bell, the tsurigane (‘hanging bell’) and waniguchi (‘crocodile mouth’). Both are struck not only to mark sunrise and sunset (and through New Year’s Eve, in the case of the tsurigane) but also as integral parts of some ritual musics, in accordance with the temple sect’s practice. Most tsurigane are suspended from a roof beam in a wooden belfry located toward the front of the temple compound, or on a hill within it. Except in the case of small temple bells sounded with a mallet, a large wooden beam hangs horizontally beside the bell to serve as a beater. Large tsurigane may have names, and they are almost always ornamented with inscribed drawings, sutras, and other texts. Plate 12 shows the early fourteenth century bell at Engakuji, one of a small number of tsurigane which have been registered as National Treasures. Waniguchi are circular slit gongs (hence their name) suspended vertically above the main beam of the entrance to a temple’s central hall and struck with a thick knotted rope or wooden beater (Fig. 3.1). Both the dadaiko and gakudaiko of gagaku are played in conjunction with suspended gongs that are struck with rounded, hardwood beaters. Both gongs are called shoko, with the prefixes ‘0-’ and ‘tsuri-’ being added to distinguish the larger gong used for bugaku and the smaller one used for kangen performances. The frames in which the gongs are suspended are ornamented in a similar manner to the drum with which they are functionally paired. 48

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3.1 Waniguchi at the main hall of the Komyoji, Kamakura.

Apart from temple bells and waniguchi, an array of metal instruments are played in Buddhist ritual. Most are identical to or modelled on continental forms, and the set of instruments used varies between sects. For example, in the Obaku branch of Zen, introduced from China in 1654, several unique Chinese percussion instruments are played. Among kane-type instruments played in Buddhist rites are a variety of bowl-shaped supported gongs (grouped under the term kin), which can be so small as to fit in the palm or too large for one man to carry. They are generally struck with padded beaters (Fig. 3.2). Also common is a portable version of the kin, the inkin, which is attached to a stick and struck during meditation (Figs. 3.3 and 3.5), as well as 49

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A large kin of the Engakuji, Kita Kamakura. In the Rinzai Zen

tradition of the temple, the instrument is called daikeisu.

‘cloud-shaped’ suspended gongs called unpan, gong slabs called kei, and single gongs called dora, which are suspended from the left hand by means of a cord. Among suzu-type Buddhist instruments are small hand-held bells with a single clapper (called rei), as well as hachi cymbals (Fig. 3.4), and the shakujo, a metal instrument that is neither a gong nor a bell but a kind of rattle consisting of a staff with metal rings attached. Two metal instruments are used in Shinto ritual, both considered suzu rather than kane. Large spherical bells (commonly called suzu) with a stone or metal pellet inside are hung at the entrance to most shrines. Cloth or a rope is attached so that the bell may be rung to alert the shrine kami to a prayer or petition. Smaller suzu are used to make bell-trees: the suzu are hung in a pyramid formation on handheld rods which are shaken by female shrine attendants (miko-rei) during performances of kagura dances (Plate 13).

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3.3 A priest of the Mt. Koya 3.4 Hachi played by Kondo Yuen, a Shingon temple complex playing __ priest of the Engakuji, Kita an inkin in the streets of Osaka. Kamakura. In the Rinzai Zen tradition of the temple, the instrument is called myohachi.

Percussion Instruments of Wood and Bamboo Wooden and bamboo percussion instruments of many varieties have long been played in Japan. The long wooden clapsticks called shakubyoshi, now used in the Imperial shrine rites mikagura, as well as in saibara, yamatouta songs, and some folk performing arts, are likely to have been an indigenous addition to gagaku practice. Clapsticks made from shorter, stouter wood played in Buddhist ritual are called taku. In kabuki they are called hydshigi or tsuke and are used both in the off-stage geza ensemble and in clear ep

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view at one corner of the stage, where they are slammed down in alternation against a wooden board to mark spectacular moments in the play. A clapper used in remnant forms of dengaku and some folk dance traditions, the binzasara, is constructed from multiple pieces of wood threaded onto a cord, with handles at either end. When the handles are shaken, all the clapper pieces sound (Plate 14). Although not a clapper in organological terms, an instrument related in name and sound quality to the binzasara is the surizasara scraper. It comprises two sticks, one of wood or bamboo with incised notches and the other of bamboo, with one end split into multiple bands so that a complex scraping is produced when it is rubbed against the notched surface. Hand-held clappers of wood or bamboo are used in Okinawan regional folk dance. They are called sanba

3.5

Taku and inkin of the Engakuji, Kita Kamakura.

on,

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when made up of a set of three wooden or bamboo plates threaded together with a cord, and yotsudake (pronounced yuchidaki in Okinawan) when there are two pairs of two bamboo plates, one of which is held in each hand. Buddhist ritual wooden instruments of continental origin include the mokugyo, a wooden temple block which, like the kin, can be either tiny or immense and is struck with a padded beater (Fig. 3.6); the gyvoban, an enormous wooden board usually in the likeness of a fish, which is struck with a mallet or rod; the moppan, a smaller board hung on a temple wall; and the mokusho, a short cylindrical wooden gong. Another wooden instrument of continental origin is the mokkin, a Chinese xylophone introduced during the Edo period as part of the ensemble for what became known as minshingaku (‘Ming and Qing dynasty music’). The mokkin

3.6 Mokugyo played by Kondo Yuen, a priest of the Engakuji, Kita Kamakura.

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was subsequently deployed in the kabuki geza, the off-stage ensemble. The Ainu mukkuri is an indigenous jaw harp made of bamboo, played by rapidly pulling then releasing a thin strip or lamella while the instrument is held against the open mouth. A melodic repertory exists for the mukkuri, so that Yamato Japanese who have heard the instrument have at times called it the kuchibiwa (‘mouth biwa’). Finally, a unique form of ‘environmental instrument’ is the suikinkutsu, literally a ‘water zither cavern’. The suikinkutsu is a resonant pot buried upside down underneath a bed of stones, so that the sound of water both trickling through the stones and dripping onto the pot can be heard as something akin to a soft set of chimes.

54

A Flutes and Other Wind Instruments

Flutes are the principal melodic instruments known to have been played in prehistoric Japan. Fue, the generic term for flutes, is an indigenous word, like tsuzumi and koto. Small whistles, ocarinas, and flutes of stone and terracotta are among the relics that have been found at Jomon and Yayoi habitation sites. Instruments of these kinds, referred to generally as iwabue and tsuchibue, have continued to be made as folk instruments and toys in some regions. Wooden, bamboo, or reed flutes may also have been played prior to the fifth century AD, but examples of such instruments have not survived. Two kinds of wind instruments played in Yayoiperiod Japan are suggested by a small number of partial figures and one more fully preserved figure among the haniwa. One figure portrays an end-blown flute, probably made of animal bone or horn rather than bamboo, which survives with two fragments of hands holding it, in positions similar to those used for the shakuhachi. Another figure shows a man wearing what appears to be a horn made from animal material on his back. Although some small stone flutes among the Jomon and Yayoi relics were side-blown (transverse) instruments, no transverse flutes are depicted in surviving haniwa. Several Ainu wind instruments have been identified only from historical writings, rather than from any playing tradition or surviving examples. Among them is what Japanese scholars call the kosabue, an end-blown flute made from tree-bark rolled into a cylinder. Other Ainu wind instruments are a kind of trumpet made from strong grass wrapped to form a cylinder, which is sounded by either blowing or eye)

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inhaling strongly, and the hunting horn called shikabue in Japanese, used to imitate the autumn mating call of female deer. The shikabue is made by wrapping shark, doe, or in rare cases frog skin tightly over a shallow bowl, so that it will vibrate when sharp breaths are directed onto it through a narrow mouthpiece. A similar hunting horn has been used in northern Honshu, where it may originally have been introduced by Ainu of the region.

Flutes Used in Festival Music, Kagura, and Gagaku Flutes are an important element in the music played during matsuri, the public shrine-based festivals that occur on a periodic basis in communities throughout Japan. From picture scrolls and other evidence, flutes seem to have played this role since at least the late Heian period. The type of side-blown flute played in most matsuribayashi ensembles is the shinobue, named for the shinodake variety of narrow bamboo from which it is made. Narrow-bore pieces of bamboo are selected, then cut to lengths of between 30 and 60 centimetres. The longer flutes include a node at the lower end which is concealed by twine wrapping. Both six- and seven-hole shinobue exist, although the latter are more common, and all can produce a range of nearly three octaves, when overblown pitches are included. The fifth hole is cut larger and the seventh hole slightly smaller than the others, so that certain pitches can be produced precisely and consistently. Like all Japanese sideblown flutes, the holes are closed with the fleshy undersurface of the fingers, not the fingertips, so that gradated

56

1. Amida raigo, from Amida nijugo bosatsu (a National Treasure), in the Chionin, Kyoto.

3. Lateral view of the hayashi ensemble in an outdoor no performance during the On Matsuri festival at the Kasuga Shrine, Nara. In the background a shite actor moves along the hashigakari, a bridge to the stage.

2. Painting on the pick-guard of a four-string Tang lute, gakubiwa, held in the Shosoin. Courtesy of the Department of the Imperial Household.

ices ue \ AN Bt Teh SVRTC TERS Bea! 8

4. A young woman practising ‘Matsu no Uchi’, a famous kato-bushi song, from a printed collection of texts. The artist of the print is unclear, but is in all likelihood the mid-eighteenth century ukiyoe artist Okumura Toshinobu.

em

5. An April 1989 performance of a rite for Sanbo Kojin by Yamashika Yoshiyuki, a blind biwa player of Kumamoto prefecture. This view shows some of the unique structural aspects of biwa formerly played in the Higo region: the neko-ashi, tsunbari, and itodome.

6. An instrumental ensemble for Imperial Household gagaku performances of bugaku dances in front of the Meiji Shrine, Tokyo. Clearly visible are, from left, the hichiriki, sho, kakko, and san-notsuzumi.

7. A processional performance of bugaku by the Nanto Gakuso ensemble of the Kasuga Shrine, Nara, at the Horyuji. The keiroko and the furitsuzumi are held by the dancer of the Left, wearing a costume of orange and red shades, while the ikKo is played by the dancer of the Right.

8.

A pair of dadaiko presented to the Kasuga Shrine by Minamoto no

Yoritomo.

9. A gakudaiko of the Zen temple, Engakuji, in Kita Kamakura.

10.

Kotsuzumi.

Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

% wid

Pa

11. A matsuri-bayashi ensemble and dancer performing in a neighbourhood festival in the Yoyogi Uehara district of Tokyo (1955). Courtesy of Professor William Malm.

12. A temple bell cast in 1301, designated as a National Treasure. Engakuji, Kita Kamakura.

13. Miko-rei. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

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14. Binzasara. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

15. A shinobue. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

16. Ryuteki with lacquered case. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

17. An Edo-period set of tuning pipes for the sho. Courtesy of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno

Gakuen.

18. The most commonly played lengths of shakuhachi. Courtesy of Mr Arai Masamitsu, Tokyo Shoseki Publishing Company.

19. Horagai. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

20. Tonkori. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

21. Wagon. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

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The komabue (Fig. 4.2) is played in pieces of Korean and Manchurian origin classified as komagaku, as well as in the azuma asobi dances of indigenous origin. (Another flute, the azuma asobi no fue, was once used exclusively for these dances.) The komabue is the shortest (about 36 centimetres) and thinnest of the gagaku flutes, so that its tone is also the shrillest. Tuned a whole tone higher than the ryuteki, it plays melodic phrases in heterophony with the hichiriki, exploiting a two-and-a-half octave range in three modes. The komagaku modes share the names of togaku modes but have different internal structures and base pitches a whole tone higher than their counterparts. 61

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4.2. Komabue. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

Other Wind Instruments Played in Gagaku The instrument whose strident, nasal sound most characterizes gagaku is the cylindrical double-reed pipe, hichiriki (Fig. 4.3). Three hichiriki are played in each of the togaku and komagaku repertory pieces, and in modern practice the instrument also figures in all principal forms of indigenous song and dance in the gagaku repertory except ruika (songs in praise of the deceased sung at Imperial funerals). The hichiriki is structurally similar to the Korean p’iri, and its early forms may have been identical to it, although the modern hichiriki is only about 18 centimetres long, distinctly shorter than the Korean instrument. These and other forms

4.3 Hichiriki. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

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of cylindrical double-reed instruments exist throughout East and South-East Asia and, as illustrated by the story of Mochimitsu recounted in Chapter 2, there is abundant oral folklore about the power of such instruments’ startling sounds when in the hands of fine players. As with the gagaku flutes, traditional accounts of hichiriki construction claim the bamboo was split and turned inside out. The bore tapers downwards, as a wide reed is inserted into a holder that extends well into the top of the instrument. The inner surface is lacquered red or black. There are seven finger-holes at the front, and two thumb-holes at the back. The lower of the two thumb-holes has no function in modern performance practice other than to aid in balancing the instrument. Particular hichiriki fingerings are used as much for the sake of timbral variety and exactitude as for pitch, for the reason that pitch can be altered by as much as a fourth by means of changes in air pressure on the reed alone. The sound produced through variant fingerings is also distinguished by the fact that they are played at a slightly lower volume. The large reed is usually 6 centimetres long and is cut from ashi (natural reed), slightly flattened out and dried, then shaved and cut to size. The two sides of the reed are held closed together with a small wooden clip, and the lowest portion of the reed is bound around with washi. Before playing, and during long rests between playing, performers immerse the entire reed in warm green tea, so that it stays supple and its upper, blowing edge remains open. In performance, the relation between the reed and the shape of the performer’s mouth and lips is fundamental. For this reason many players cut and prepare their own reeds. Direct wind pressure on the reed is slight, but it must be maintained by a nearly constant supply of air held in the player’s puffed 63

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cheeks. Volume can then be modulated by extra pressure exerted with the diaphragm. With the flutes and hichiriki, the third wind instrument of the modern gagaku ensemble is a free-reed mouth-organ, the sho. The formal name for this instrument is hosho (‘Phoenix sho’), in that its pipes are said to resemble the wings of a phoenix at rest. The thick ‘cluster-chords’ of the sho form a supporting texture for the melodic wind parts in togaku, while in saibara the sho’s single and octave-doubled tones trace a fragmentary heterophony with the vocal melody. The Sino-Japanese character for sho is the same as that for the Chinese sheng, the Tang-period form of which was brought to Japan. (The modern-day sheng, however, is structurally different from the sho and its music is unrelated.) Examples of early Tang sheng are among the instruments in the Shosoin. The modern sho differs relatively little from the ancient one, except in the length of the mouthpiece and the absence of reeds from two of its seventeen pipes (Fig. 4.4 and Plate 6). The sho consists of a wooden wind chest with bamboo pipes set in a circular configuration into holes in its top surface. Each pipe is fitted with a metal reed mounted in wax on a wooden base. A finger-hole is incised from the pipe’s inner or outer surface just above the reed mounting, so that the player’s fingertips can stop the hole to sound a fixed pitch when air passes through the wind chest and causes the reed to vibrate. Sound can be achieved both by inhalation and exhalation through the mouthpiece. The modern instrument produces fifteen fixed pitches, and as such it is used as a point of reference for singers, at times by the flute and hichiriki players, and also for tuning the string instruments. The pitches produced by the sho are referred to by the Japanese renderings of the Tang Chinese pitch names, but each pipe itself has a name which is used in the shd’s 64

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4.4 Heian- (right) and Muromachi-period (left) forms of sho. The larger u is shown in the middle. Courtesy of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno Gakuen, and the Department of the Imperial Household.

mnemonic vocable system, as well as in the names of the eleven prescribed pitch clusters (aitake): kotsu, ichi, ku, bo, otsu, ju (two forms), ge, gyo, hi, and bi. Many of the aitake at first sound remarkably similar to one another, because all include a diad of approximately a’-b’ in their middle, but closer listening allows their individual characteristics to be appreciated. They are named in all but two cases for their lowest-pitched pipe. The physical properties that have bearing on the pitch of a reed are the length and thickness of the reed itself and the sounding length of the pipe into which it is set. The latter is not the full length of the pipe, however, which is determined

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for aesthetic reasons, to give the instrument its phoenixlike form. Rather, each pipe has a rectangular sound-hole (byojo) cut into its inside surface at a point appropriate for production of its assigned pitch. As it is the gagaku ensemble’s only instrument on which pitches are fixed and unalterable, accurate tuning of the sho itself is clearly of great consequence. Although there has been some historical variation in pitch standards (as in European music}, sets of tuning pipes were produced to aid in tuning the reeds (Plate 17). Electronic tuners made especially for gagaku are now commonly used. The reeds themselves are made of a compound of several metals, primarily bronze, with smaller quantities of copper and tin. Each reed is a small metal rectangle with a tongue-piece incised in its centre; it is only

this ‘tongue’ that vibrates as a free reed. Fine tuning is dependent upon the application to the reedtongue of an extra weight (omori) of wax mixed with tin filings. The pitches are those of a twelve-tone series adapted with slight modifications from ancient Chinese theory, in which ichikotsu (measured as 292.7Hz in 1875, but slightly variable even at that time) is used as a reference tone. Only nine of the twelve pitches are present on the modern sho, but it has been argued that two of the missing pitches, approximately f’ and d-sharp’, were sounded by reeds inserted in the two pipes that are now empty. These pitches are obsolete in the modal systems of modern gagaku but were important in some modes played in former times. The timbre of a well-tuned, good-quality instrument is extraordinary—like shimmering glass, yet with an organic warmth that comes from the bamboo bore. This quality results from the type of bamboo (old smoked susudake of a kind now rare is best), the fine compound of the reed materials, the manner in which reeds have been coated with a

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mixture of ground malachite and water, and the precision of the tuning itself, which causes both complex interference and reinforcement in the upper partials of tones sounded together in aitake clusters. The sho is held by supporting the wind chest with the palms of both hands. In traditional repertory performance, the finger-holes are stopped with the first four digits of the left hand and the thumb and index finger of the right hand. Finger-holes on the pipes called otsu, ge, and hi are cut facing the interior of the instrument, and are stopped only with the front or back (in the case of hi) of the right index finger, which is always placed inside the ring of pipes so as to secure the instrument’s stability. Few of the aitake are difficult to finger, but there is a complex set of finger sequences (teutsuri) for movement between aitake combinations. Breath control is especially important, as the notes of an aitake swell from a soft attack. A dynamic envelope is articulated, moreover, during a prescribed metric unit (the proportions of which depend upon the metric scheme of the piece being performed) prior to every change of aitake. The timing of the last part of the dynamic swell, immediately before the fingering change, is important as a rhythmic cue for other instruments in the ensemble. A larger form of sho, the u, was pitched an octave lower than the present-day sho and was played until the early Heian period. Reconstructions of the u have been produced from study of remaining instruments in the ShOsoin (Fig. 4.4). Another ancient instrument called sho, or more formally haisho (the sho element is written with a different character), was the Tang pan flute. Like the u, the haisho has been recently remade for performance in musical reconstructions of Heian-period performance practice.

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Nokan: The Flute of No Drama The on-stage hayashi ensemble in no drama and in those kabuki plays derived from no includes a special form of transverse flute, the nokan. Due to structural contrivances, its sound is unmistakable: in its upper and highest register it has a piercing quality which, when combined with the volume at which its highest pitch (hishigi) is sounded in conventional patterns for the opening of a play, can be astonishing—even alarming—for first-time listeners. This response, however, ought to be tempered by the knowledge that no drama historically has been performed outdoors. The nokan is generally thought to have been developed from the ryuteki, although this has yet to be convincingly demonstrated. The instrument’s 40-centimetre main tube is constructed from three to six shorter lengths of bamboo joined end-on-end, the bore slightly narrower at its two ends. The outer surface is bound with bark, usually of cherry, as in the case of the ryuteki. Also like the ryuteki, the inner bore is lacquered red (although on the nokan, thin bands of red lacquer can be seen at the edges of each fingerhole), and a metal weight is placed in the solid section between the mouth-hole and the top end. Unique to the nokan is the nodo, a structural intervention to the natural acoustic mechanism of the instrument in the form of a short tube placed between the mouth-hole and first finger-hole. As a result, the overblown octave is distorted so that its lower notes are slightly sharp while higher notes are flat. The nokan’s pitch is not standardized, as it need not precisely accord with the pitches of singing in no performance. In sections of a play when the chorus (jiutai) must take starting pitches from the flute, it matters little whether they are slightly higher or lower than those given

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by another instrument. The nokan has a range of two-and-ahalf octaves, typically from around b to f-sharp’”. The sound produced juxtaposes considerable quantities of breathiness against the tone of the instrument in all registers above the lowest, and attention is given to timbral contrast achieved by means of cross-fingerings. Pitch is rarely stable, and gradated fluctuations of pitch are treated as ornamental features that can mark both a player’s lineage and individuality as a performer. In no performance the flute has several roles. The most conspicuous is that of playing preludes and interludes between distinct chant, song, and dance segments. The play as a whole begins with the flute’s piercing hishigi tone, and the audience is notified that certain dramatic segments will take place through the combination of identifiable flute phrases with drum patterns and rhythm styles. The nokan melody seems to have little relation to vocal melody when played concurrently. Except in principal dance segments of the kind that usually occur toward the end of a play, in which the drums, dance movements, flute, and voice (if used) are in metric concordance with one another, the rhythm of the flute part

also appears to be ‘free’. While the flute phrases are not coordinated with discernable beat schemes of either the drums or the vocal part for much of a play, this ‘freedom’ is relative and refers only to close detail of rhythm and metre; the phrases and larger patterns of the melody should correspond in length with phrases and sections of the vocal line.

The Shakuhachi With the koto, the shakuhachi is one of the two traditional Japanese instruments best-known outside Japan, as it has

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been mastered by non-Japanese players and is performe¢ and taught, moreover, in Australia, the United States, and severai European countries. The modern instrument is, however, only one of several end-blown flutes that have been played in Japan since the Nara period, and although the word shakuhachi denotes a physical measurement (one shaku and hachi—eight—sun; that is, ‘isshaku hassun’, or 54.5 centimetres), it is both the name of the most common form of the modern instrument, which is 54.5 centimetres long, and a generic term for end-blown flutes. There are ten lengths of instrument commonly available, ranging in length from about 33 to 84 centimetres (Plate 18). In modern-day Japan shakuhachi are played not only in their traditional settings as solo instruments and in the sankyoku ensemble, with koto and shamisen, but also in contemporary concert music and in other genres of non-élite traditional and popular music, including folksongs and some enka on rural themes. (Enka is a genre term used for popular songs that preserve the typical musical styles of the 1930s to early 1950s.) The earliest shakuhachi were those played in certain ensemble formations of Nara-period gagaku, and eight such instruments survive in the Shosoin treasury. All of these are shorter and narrower than the standard modern instrument

and have six holes—five at the front and one at the back— rather than the five found on most later instruments. They are made of various materials, including stone, jade, ivory, and various kinds of bamboo. Images of these early instruments being performed can be seen in paintings and drawings in the same collection (see Fig. 1.2). The shakuhachi appears again in Japanese iconography from the fourteenth century onwards, probably after centuries of being played in minor musical traditions or folk music unrecorded in historical documents. Some slightly earlier 70

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instrument in his way, ee he refers to it ineae of his poems. The instrument played by these monks was probably what later came to be called the hitoyogiri, literally, the ‘onenode’ instrument (as distinct from the three-node shakuhachi). By the seventeenth century, the Fuke sect of Zen had institutionalized the practice of suizen, and throughout the Edo period the figure of the komuso (‘monk of emptiness and nothingness’), an itinerant beggar-monk who played shakuhachi as an instrument of the Buddhist Law (hoki), was familiar throughout Japan. Having received from the Shogunate the right to travel freely between provinces, the Fuke sect komuso wore huge basket hats (tengai) that wholly covered their faces. While the majority of such priests were devout in their pursuit of Zen practice through begging and playing the instrument, a certain number were men whose motives were entirely secular and self-serving. As a result, the komuso were feared as criminals and spies by some, and the shakuhachi's hard, heavy root end was thought of as a weapon. The Fuke sect was dissolved by the Meiji government in 1871, but shakuhachi performance continued in secular contexts. During the Edo period, the instrument’s repertory had changed and developed, so that the meditational solo pieces called honkyoku (the ‘inner works’ of the repertory) were supplemented by gaikyoku (the ‘outer works’), versions of koto and shamisen melodies for the shakuhachi. The gaikyoku, in particular, were enjoyed as a pastime by men

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of the samurai and merchant class from the eighteenth century on, when a school of shakuhachi performance was founded in Edo by Kurosawa Kinko (1710-71). By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the shakuhachi had largely displaced the bowed lute, kokyu, in the context of ensemble performance of gaikyoku melodies with koto and shamisen, that is, the ensamble format known as sankyoku (meaning ‘three parts’). In this context the shakuhachi effectively displaced the bowed lute, kokyu. In the modern age a second major school of shakuhachi was founded by Nakao Tozan (1876-1956), who composed many pieces of the shinkyoku (new repertory) in the style of honkyoku. During the 1920s and 1930s, experiments with new forms of the instrument were prompted by interest on the part of other composers and players in producing music in Western modes. Such instruments have continued to be used by innovative performers in the latter half of the twentieth century. The bamboo used for making shakuhachi includes the root end, cut back but still slightly flared to form a ‘bell’ of gnarled appearance. The inner joints are gouged out, but nodes remain clearly visible along the length of the pipe. The entire instrument had in the past usually been fashioned from a single piece of bamboo; it is not clear when twosection instruments, able to be dismantled, began to be made, but they are now the norm. The break between upper and lower sections (nakatsugi) is joined by a tube inserted into the top of the lower piece. Several coats of black or red lacquer are applied to the surface of the bore, although the outer surface is often left in its natural condition. The construction of the blowing edge (utaguchi) is of fundamental importance for the shakuhachi’s sound quality and the player’s ability to manipulate pitch downward (meri) and upward (kari) by techniques of angling the chin

ies

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and lips. A diagonal edge is first created by sawing in toward the bore at an angle of about 30 degrees, then a small piece of buffalo horn or ivory is inserted. The shape of this inlay varies in the Kinko and Tozan schools of performance. When the instrument is held at approximately 45 degrees from the vertical and blown into, the air stream strikes the inlay and is directed down into the bore. Only a gentle stream of breath is needed to make the instrument sound, but some performance techniques, such as muraiki, often require very large quantities of breath to be used, so as to make an explosion of air audible as a component of the music. The five holes of the standard isshaku hassun instrument produce a pentatonic sequence of pitches, roughly d’-f’-g’a’-c”. Half-holings, special fingerings, and adjustments made with the spectrum functional The exact

head and lips, however, enable almost a full of pitch to be produced through the octave. The range is large: three octaves and a perfect fourth. placement and distance between finger-holes varies with the school of performance, but their size does not. The first and third fingers of each hand, and the thumb of the upper one (this can be either hand) are used in playing.

Other Wind Instruments Two other wind instruments unrelated to the groups described above were introduced from China. One is a form of natural trumpet, the horagai or conch shell (also called simply kai)(Plate 19). The horagai was probably introduced to the Nara capital with the rituals of certain esoteric Chinese sects of Buddhism, and it is one of the myriad objects depicted in the hands of Nara-period wooden sculptures of the bodhisattva known as the Thousand-Arm Kannon. It is 73

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played in most of the esoteric sects, including those of some Nara temples, the Tendai and Shingon sects, and the Shugendo or mountain priest (vamabushi) sects. Historically, it has also been used to signal the hour in temples during the Heian period, as a battle horn by warrior priests, and to warn off animals when yamabushi are walking alone through remote forests and mountains. Another, little-known use of the horagai is as an amplifier and modulator of vocal timbre— an instrument not blown but sung and declaimed through— in the oral narrative tradition called deroren saimon, now practised as a folk performing art in northern Honshu. Horagai are made from large shells, called shakogai, which are found in Okinawa. The shells are cleaned out, and they have a lacquered wooden mouthpiece attached to one end, so that the breath can more easily produce resonant vibration, but are otherwise untreated. In all traditions the instrument is played as a non-melodic sound source. An imported wind instrument which came to Japan far more recently than did the horagai is the double-reed pipe called charumera or, less commonly, tojinbue. The charumera is often thought to have been an Arab instrument introduced by the Portuguese, who entered southern Japan in the sixteenth century, because its name is.a Japanese transformation of a Portuguese word for a folk oboe or shawm: charamela. The word was indeed given by the Portuguese but to the Chinese suona, not to the Islamic instrument which is its ancestor. It is thought that the Chinese instrument started to be commonly played in Japan during the time of the Portuguese Jesuits’ early successes in converting Japanese in Kyushu.

The charumera has a single reed of straw stalk, flattened out so as to become in effect a double-reed. Its name, sound, and history, as well as the fact that it is often used in kabuki

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plays to create the atmosphere for scenes set in China, have given it somewhat exotic associations for many Japanese.

However, as it has long been played by night-time noodlevendors (noodles, of course, being originally a Chinese rather than Japanese food) in most parts of the country, it is also perceived as a wind instrument of ‘traditional’ Japan. A final group of wind instruments are the numerous small bamboo pipes, flutes, and whistles played during kabuki performances in the off-stage geza ensemble to imitate birdcalls, the sounds of insects, the crying of babies, and other phenomena called for by the narrative setting. Collectively called gion no fue (literally, ‘flutes for imitating sounds’; Fig. 4.5), some have the structure of flutes with a single fingerhole in each of up to three short pipes, while others are whistles. They come in many forms, some of which are immersed in water when played. Each bears the name of the animal or phenomenon it evokes.

4.5 Hototogisubue variety of gion no fue. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

gs)

5 String Instruments

No string instruments except the Ainu tonkori can unequivocally be said to be indigenous to the Japanese archipelago, but the importance ascribed to zithers in the mythology recorded in the eighth-century Kojiki and other chronicles (see Chapter 2) suggests the possibility that these instruments were played among Yamato Japanese from times before the earliest known interactions with continental musicians. In the early chronicles, plucked string instruments were associated with ritual power, and in particular exorcism, from at least the Kofun period. They may also have been common in forms of secular music at that time, but the earliest documentary evidence for the playing of string instruments as an élite pastime is from poetry and other writings in the eighth-century Manyoshu anthology.

String Instruments in Ritual The tonkori (Plate 20) is an instrument of great importance in Ainu culture. Played both in ceremonies for the supplication of gods and future prophecy, and for festival songs and dances, each tonkori is considered to be an individual with a soul able to act as a shaman, conveying the words of the gods as musical sound. The ‘face’ of the tonkori is a circular top-piece, and the soul of the instrument is often symbolized by one or two small stones placed in the interior of its soundbox. The tonkori is a zither, that is, an instrument on which parallel strings are stretched lengthways above a wooden

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resonator box. Unlike most zithers played in Japan, it has no movable bridges placed under its five or six strings, which are sounded only as open strings without pitch change. The instrument’s length is not fixed but is instead made to suit the dimensions of an intended performer's body. From a pegbox in the same plane as the body of the instrument, the strings pass over two fixed bridges and are secured to a piece of fish skin near the lower tip. A small sound-hole is opened about two-thirds of the way down the length of the front board. The player kneels, holding the tonkori at a diagonal against the left shoulder and plucking the open strings with the fingers of both hands. In Japanese indigenous religion, plucked zithers and bowstrings have sometimes been used to facilitate trance and the exorcism of potentially destructive kami. The kuchiyose rituals of itako, female mediums, are still conducted in central and northern Honshu using ‘musical bows’ as the central instrument of rites in which the itako plays a shamanistic role, entering a state of trance to become a vessel for communications from the dead. In light of the evidence for plucked strings as facilitators of numinous experience in early Yamato society, and in particular references to the azusayumi, a bow of catalpa wood, as a formulaic word (makura kotoba) associated with the verb ‘to possess’ in Heian-period poetry, it has been suggested that kuchiyose are a last vestige of shamanism as it was once practised throughout the domain of the Yamato. The large bow used by the itako, often called the yumidaiko, is placed on the ground or in a stand with the bowstring facing upwards, then struck with one or two sticks in a regular rhythm by the medium as she chants. Zithers referred to in the Kojiki and other early sources as bearing sacred power are instruments of the kind variously

is

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called yamatogoto, azuma no koto, or, most commonly,

wagon. Here yamato-, azuma-, and wa- are prefixes that emphasize distinction between this instrument type and others introduced from China and Korea. They also designate a specific kind of zither, for the word koto in ancient usage had the general meaning of ‘string instrument’. Hence, other kinds of koto were biwa no koto, kin no koto, and kudaragoto (or kugo, discussed below). Subsequently, the suffix ‘koto’ was dropped in most cases, so that plucked, pear-shaped lutes were called simply biwa, and the Chinese seven-string zither (qin) was called kin in Japanese. Wagon (Plate 21) have long been considered distinct from other zithers played in Japan, but they bear a fundamental structure in common. By the Heian period, the wagon had become standardized as six-stringed, but zithers with three, four, and five strings are among the instrument relics of the Kofun and Nara periods. Haniwa statues and fragments of the fifth and sixth centuries include thirty-four figures holding or playing zithers. The oldest wagon to have been

preserved intact are among the ShOsOin treasures and therefore date from no later than the eighth century. These wagon are not uniform in construction but are structurally distinct from most continental instruments: with the exception of the seven-string kin, a zither without movable bridges, the number of strings on Korean and Chinese zithers played in ancient Japan was twelve or more, whereas wagon had no more than six. There are wooden extrusions at the base of the wagon which serve as anchors onto which the strings are fastened by means of braided ropes called ashizu-o. The movable bridges, up to 6.7 centimetres high, are made from forked branches of the Japanese maple tree without the bark being removed. Only a single plectrum is

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used, wielded with the right hand while the fingers of the left hand pluck and damp the strings. Historically, the wagon has been used in several kinds of Imperial rites, some of which incorporate indigenous songs and dances within the court music repertory. Those rites still practised are mikagura, azuma asobi, duta, kumeuta, and ruika. Recent research suggests that the wagon was also sometimes played by courtiers in saibara and togaku performances in addition to the thirteen-stringed gakuso. The wagon typically plays series of stereotypic patterns in which the plectrum sweeps across all strings except the final one plucked, then the right hand damps the sound of all except the last. As the strings are not tuned in a unidirectional pitch order (for example, the tuning for playing kumeuta is d-A-D-B-G-E), the effect is of a succession of resonant pentatonic eruptions which quickly disperse to leave a single pitch, with occasional isolated melody pitches sounded softly with the flesh of the fingers of the left hand. The pear-shaped plucked lutes generically named biwa were probably played in ritual contexts from the time of their introduction to Japan. In the tenth century, when biwaplaying was enjoyed as a pastime by men and women alike among the courtly élite, a tradition of mos6, blind priests, playing biwa to accompany sutras had already existed in Kyushu for some centuries. It is not known whether the association between blindness and the biwa was itself transmitted from the Asian continent, but links between the instrument and certain Buddhist deities were wellestablished in China and Korea. When blind male ritualists in Kyushu adopted the biwa as an integral part of syncretic rites to exorcise the earth kami, Jijin, and the kitchen-fire kami, Sanbo K6jin, the instrument already bore an elaborate sacred mythology.

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It is possible that performance on the biwa in association with a cult of the bodhisattva called ‘Miraculous Sound’, Myoon Bosatsu, and the corresponding Japanese patron deity of music and the arts, Benzaiten (who holds a biwa in most depictions), was instituted by musicians of court society who had studied in Tang China. In early Chinese Buddhist iconography, the p’ip’a (biwa in Japanese) was one of several instruments played by some of the highest beings of the Mahayana pantheon. After the eleventh century, Korean and Chinese depictions of the four Heavenly Guardian Kings, commanders of the elements fire, air, water, and earth, commonly show four- and five-stringed p’ip’a held by one of the kings. The biwa is also shown being played in many images of Myoon Bosatsu herself, who is the subject of the twentyfourth chapter of the Lotus Sutra and is an East Asian avatar of Sarasvati, the vina-playing Hindu goddess of music, wisdom, and eloquence. Said to have been established in ap 808 on Mt. Ausaka near Kyoto, Myoonden was the name of the principal temple for the m0so, and some of the most renowned courtier biwa players of the Heian period used Buddhist names that included the characters for ‘miraculous sound’ (myoon). The most famous among these was Fujiwara no Moronaga (1137-92), the compiler of several important historical gagaku and shomyo scores, who took the name Myoonin. Semimaru, the quasi-historical blind poet and biwa player from Heian court circles, is claimed as an early head of the Kyoto moso. Clearly, the repertories and performance spheres of gagakubiwa players and m6s0 overlapped during the late Heian and Kamakura periods. High-ranking m0s0 of the time probably played small versions of the courtly instrument, that is, the four-string Tang biwa called gagakubiwa, or more commonly gakubiwa. 80

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Archaic Instruments: Kugo and Gogenbiwa Before other kinds of Japanese zithers and lutes are described, two archaic instruments of Asian origin should be mentioned: the standing harp, kugo (or kudaragoto), and the five-stringed lute, gogenbiwa. Notwithstanding their frequent depiction in Buddhist frescoes, these instruments were among the many introduced with the early gagaku repertories and are not primarily associated with ritual contexts. A superb gogenbiwa and pieces of a kugo have been preserved in the ShosOin treasury. The distinguishing characteristic of the gogenbiwa is that its five silk strings are wound onto tuning pegs in a peg-box not bent back at an angle but in a straight line with the neck. From Buddhist iconography and the remnants of the Shosoin kugo, it is known that the instrument’s standing strut was slightly curved at its tip, with more than twenty strings extending in fanned diagonals to the horizontal strut about 90 centimetres below. It is doubtful that performance traditions of either instrument continued after the ninth century.

Other Biwa There are two broad classes of Japanese lutes, biwa and shamisen. Of the two, biwa have the far longer history. Biwa bear a number of characteristics in common. Each comprises a shallow, pear-shaped body and neck cut, with the exception of the upper board, from a single piece of wood. Each has four or more wooden frets and a shallow cup-shaped wooden bridge that transmits the vibrations of four or five strings of entwined silk. The strings are plucked with a large wooden plectrum

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(called a bachi, the same word used to denote percussion beaters) and are secured to tuning pegs inserted into a peg-box bent back nearly perpendicular to the neck. Common to the forms of biwa played as accompaniment for sutras and oral narrative is a distortional timbral element, a buzzing quality called sawari, which is produced by contact between a short length of fretted or open string and the upper surface of either a fret or the joint of the neck and peg-box. The historical instruments played by m6s6 and other blind professional ritualists and narrative performers (generally grouped under the term zato) in south-western Japan have not been standardized. (Beginning in the early twentieth century, however, many m0s0 and zato began to use standard four-string chikuzenbiwa and satsumabiwa, albeit with carrying straps made from a string of juzu prayer beads.) Common to all instruments of the region, however, have been four strings, a pronounced sawari, and relatively tall frets that allow for the manipulation of pitch by up to a minor third at some frets. Moso and zato developed an instrument which could easily be dismantled and packed for travel during seasonal ritual work. Two relatively small, light forms were used. One was the slender sasabiwa, while the others are what scholars have dubbed uguisubiwa and hyoichi biwa. The latter two are both shorter, rounder-bodied instruments (Plate 22). A large form of sasabiwa with a relatively deep resonating chamber was used by zato in the Higo region (Fig. 5.1). Various techniques were employed to regulate sawari on the sasabiwa, including the insertion of a detachable strip of bamboo between the strings and the bridge (tsunbari), and the insertion of extra sound-posts called nekoashi |‘cats’ legs’). The method of securing the strings by tying them around small wooden pegs (itodome) above the bridge is also unique to this instrument (all these aspects are visible 82

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5.1 Large form of sasabiwa, typical of the Higo region, played by a blind zato named ‘Manshan’. Photograph by Kimura Yusho (mid-1950s). Courtesy of Kimura Riro.

in Plate 5). Styles of bachi used and tunings vary by region, but extant data points to a distinction between tunings used for Buddhist sutras (usually called rokuchoshi) and those used for secular narrative repertory (honchoshi, identical to the shamisen tuning of the same name). The strings of the gakubiwa are touched lightly against the upper edge of each of four frets, without the use of additional pressure to produce higher pitches at a given fret. Unlike all other biwa, this instrument’s tone lacks any sawari. The plectrum is relatively thin and round-tipped. The strings are tuned differently for each of the principal modes of the modern togaku and saibara repertories. Like the gakuso, the gakubiwa once played ornate, unique

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versions of the melody in heterophony with the gagaku wind instruments, but it now seems more percussive than melodic in function, as its accented cross-string strokes rarely occur with greater frequency than once per measure. The heikebiwa is closest in form to the gakubiwa, although it is much smaller and is sounded by a larger, sharptipped plectrum. Little is known of the instruments played by performers of pre-Edo period heike katari, but the existence in the late Heian period of small, portable gakubiwa suggests that heikebiwa may have been developed from such instruments. In the Todo Yoshu, a Muromachi or early Edo period record of the Todoza, moreover, the claim is made that some heikebiwa melodies were adapted from solo pieces of the courtly biwa tradition. In modern practice there are two slightly different forms of the heikebiwa, played within the Nagoya and Tsugaru traditions. Both varieties have five frets, but the positioning of the frets differs between them. While the first fret of the Nagoya-school instrument is used only to create a slight sawari in the sound of the open first and third strings, Tsugaruschool players sound tones at all five frets, without sawari. Unlike in gakubiwa technique, left-hand pressure is applied between the frets, and the left hand is used to produce pitches raised by a major second or less at some frets. The tunings used in the Nagoya and Tsugaru traditions of heikyoku differed until the mid-1960s but have since been made identical, with the exception of a revised tuning used by the Tokyo-based performer Hashimoto Toshie. The heikebiwa has been played in both cross-legged and half-kneeling positions, but in either case the instrument is held horizontally, so that the upper part of the player’s body can freely produce the recitation (Fig. 5.2). Vocal performance is the primary element of heikyoku and is framed by the biwa’s interludes and punctuating figures. 84

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g

5.2 Heikebiwa performance by Imai Tsutomu. Courtesy of Imai Tsutomu and Komoda Haruko.

The satsumabiwa and chikuzenbiwa derive from instruments formerly played by moso, and both have been remodelled in various ways during the twentieth century. The foremost distinguishing features of the satsumabiwa’s structure are its large, thin plectrum, tall frets, slightly convex soundboard, and strong sawari, which is regulated by carving and sanding the tops of the frets and the surface of the ivory upper bridge (Plate 23). The size and shape of the plectrum (up to 30 centimetres across) is traditionally accounted for in terms of the need for it to double as a weapon among samurai of Satsuma who played the instrument as a pastime. Often it is intentionally struck against the soundboard, either by itself or concurrently with a string being plucked. The outward curve of the soundboard is said to have been an innovation of Fuchiwaki Juchoin, the putative designer of the modern instrument, and may have been influenced by the form of European string instruments introduced by Jesuit priests in the sixteenth century. 85

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The four-stringed biwa is now often called the seiha (‘correct’ or ‘orthodox’ school) instrument, for many players in other schools of satsumabiwa have adopted the fivestringed instrument called the nishikibiwa. Yet the seiha instrument remains common, and is distinguished by the placement of the left hand in one of two basic positions, where it regulates pitch by as much as a major ninth by pulling the thinnest, highest-tuned string down over the top edge of the fret. Ornamental figures produced by this technique are especially elaborate during the decay period of plucked tones (yuri or yoin no henka). The nishikibiwa is exploited as a resource for many kinds of sound effects, produced in coordination with the plectrum edges and handle. The latter instrument is also often modified by Tsurutaryu players (followers of the school of performance established by Tsuruta Kinshi, 1912-94) by the use of a set of frets that are slightly bent in the middle, allowing rapid linear passages to be played without adjustment of the pressure of the left hand. The four-string chikuzenbiwa is a little-changed version of a form of biwa played by moso in the Chikuzen region. Its tuning is the same as the shamisen’s basic system, honchoshi (unison for strings three and four), for all repertory except hikyoku (‘secret pieces’; a simple instrumental repertory taught to select students). It also inherited from the mO6so0 instrument a strong sawari, enhanced by the attachment of bamboo strips to the top of each of its five frets. Popular among many thousands of amateurs between about 1900 and 1920, the four-stringed instrument was produced and sold cheaply. Since the 1920s it has gradually been displaced by a five-stringed version, which provides a far larger range of melodic and technical possibilities (Fig. 5. 3). Both versions are sounded with hard wooden plectra (often 86

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5.3. Five-stringed chikuzenbiwa, being played by Yamazaki Kyokusui. Courtesy of

Silvain Guignard.

with ivory tips) that are in shape and size a compromise between those of m0s0 instruments and the satsumabiwa plectrum. The elaborate instrumental patterns developed for both varieties of chikuzenbiwa require rapid left-hand movement over the frets, as well as subtle microtonal inflection of individual pitches within melodic phrases.

The Shamisen The shamisen is defined as a spike lute, for the reason that its neck penetrates the length of its square soundbox. As with biwa, most shamisen are plucked with a single plectrum. The body is a wooden box—redwood and Chinese quince are the most favoured varieties of wood used— enclosed by taut cat or dog hide. All forms of shamisen lack frets and have three silk or nylon strings that are tied with cords onto the ‘spike’ extension of the neck at the base of 87

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the soundbox. The strings pass over a small detachable bridge and an upper bridge, then through tuning pegs in a peg-box that arches back from the neck. On most forms of the modern instrument the upper bridge runs only part of the width of the edge of the peg-box, so that the lowest-tuned first string does not pass over the bridge, but rather over a notch in the wood’s edge, then over a slight extrusion (the sawari no yama) of the neck’s surface, a centimetre below the notch. The result is a distinct sawari buzzing tone in the open first string, which due to sympathetic vibration can frequently be heard even when the string is not plucked. The strength of sawari varies with the type of shamisen. The technical innovation required to produce sawari on the instrument may have first been made in order to imitate the sawari of biwa played by popular joruri performers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The shamisen developed from the sanxian, a Chinese three-stringed lute believed to have been brought to Japan through Okinawa in the sixteenth century. The Okinawan sanshin is structurally close to historical forms of the Chinese instrument, with a rounded-square soundbox covered on both sides with snakeskin and no sawari notch (Plate 24). The sanshin is played with a single small fingerpick made from buffalo horn, rather than a plectrum. Although now played primarily in folk-music styles, the sanshin was an instrument of the Okinawan court music tradition until the Meiji period. Most shamisen are between 95 and 100 centimetres long, and they are classified firstly by the thickness of their necks and secondly by their use in different styles of song and musical narrative. Thus, the largest shamisen (that with the thickest neck), the futozao (Fig. 5.4), exists in two versions. These are the gidayujamisen, played in gidayubushi music 88

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of the bunraku puppet theatre, and the tsugarujamisen, played in the folk music of the Tsugaru region from which has developed the spectacular solo instrumental style also called tsugarujamisen. The thinner-necked hosozao is used for nagauta, various styles of jOruri music of the kabuki theatre and the Edo pleasure districts, as well as hauta and Kouta (the last of these is a style associated principally with geisha, and its instrumental part is played not with a plectrum, but with the fingernails). There is also a shorternecked hosozao used for some folk-song styles, the tanzao (also called minyOjamisen or minyO-yo tanzao), whose length is about 82 centimetres. The term chuzao (middle-thickness neck) is used for some instruments but without consistency. All of these instruments use detachable bridges that vary slightly in their shape, so as to effect subtle differences of timbre. The same can be said for the plectrum, whose dimensions vary with instrument and performance style. Most of the various kinds of shamisen have been played sitting in seiza style, however stools could be used for performances outdoors (Fig. 5.5). The tsugarujamisen played in modern, non-traditional compositions, and to a lesser extent the minyOjamisen, are nowadays usually played sitting on a chair. In all cases, the instrument is positioned against the

5.4 Futozao. Courtesy of the Museum of Musical Instruments, Osaka College of Music.

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right thigh and held at a diagonal, with the right forearm resting on the top of the soundbox. Shamisen tunings are numerous, but as is the case for

koto, there is one tuning regarded as standard: honchoshi. Others are thought of as variations of honchdshi and named accordingly. For example, honchoshi and two other common tunings are as follows: honchoshi: c-f-c’ ni-agari (‘second-string raised’): c—g—c’ san-sagari (‘third string lowered’): c—f-b flat

Closely related to the shamisen is Japan’s only bowed lute, the kokyu (Plate 25). The kokyu is an instrument played by very few today, but it was of importance in Edo-period music. First played in the seventeenth century, it was adopted in the eighteenth century in the sphere of jiuta sokyoku as a third melodic element in ensemble with zokuso and

5.5 Female shamisen players sitting on stools to accompany an outdoor dance performance. From Seikyoku Ruisan. Courtesy of the Research Archives for Japanese Music, Ueno Gakuen.

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shamisen, the format that came to be known as sankyoku. The kokyu’s construction resembles that of a very small shamisen, about 67 centimetres long. It exists in both threeand four-string versions, the latter of which was probably developed late in the eighteenth century. Horsehair is loosely attached to the long bow-stick, and bow tension is regulated with the fingers of the right hand. The detachable bridge is broader than that of a shamisen, and it is positioned toward the top of the soundbox. The kokyz is gripped vertically, between the knees, and is stabilized by the spike extension of the neck, which protrudes well below the soundbox. The bow-touch is light and the instrument is rotated when the bow moves between upper and lower strings. The tuning is the same as the shamisen’s san-sagari, with the third and fourth strings tuned as a double course in the case of fourstringed instruments.

The Okinawan kokyu is structurally distinct from that of central Japanese tradition. Like the sanshin, it was used primarily in Okinawan court music until the modern age. Its small soundbox of coconut shell or wood is round, and it is covered at the front with snakeskin. Its bridge and bowstick are of bamboo. The bow has a smaller quantity of horsehair than that of the mainland kokyu, but in this case the bow is taut. Nowadays a violin bow is very often used instead—something, in the case of the Yamato kokyu, only seen in performances of contemporary compositions.

Koto and Other Zithers In East Asia, zithers have been plucked either directly with the fingers, with one or more plectra, or bowed. Only the former two techniques have been employed in Japan. Apart 9]

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from the wagon, Japanese zithers were developed from the thirteen-stringed Chinese form introduced by the early Nara period with the gagaku ensemble repertory, and they have been plucked only with finger plectra (tsume) attached to the thumb, ring, and middle fingers of the right hand. The Tang instrument was known as so-no-koto or gakuso, which means ‘the koto of gagaku’ (Plate 26). Although the gakuso, like the gakubiwa, in modern practice is played only in togaku, it is clear that both were originally played in particular pieces across the gagaku repertories. Certain characteristics of the gakuso’s construction are shared by all major forms of koto except some varieties developed in the twentieth century. The body of a quality instrument is made of two wooden boards about 180-190 centimetres long and no more than 25 centimetres wide; paulownia (Kiri) is considered the best wood. The top board is thicker than the lower one, is convex both lengthways and across, and is hollowed out to form the resonating chamber. The lower board has two large sound-holes, through one of which the strings are passed and secured. There are two fixed bridges of wood or ivory set into the top board. The thirteen equal-length strings (historically made of silk, but now most often of tetoron) are set over these bridges at a high degree of tension, then tuned by the positioning of movable bridges (ji) made of wood, ivory, or plastic. The finger plectra are of ivory, bone, bamboo, or plastic, and they are attached to the thumb, index, and middle fingers of the right hand. There are two permanent legs at the left end of the instrument and detachable ones at the right; both are just a few centimetres high, as koto were always played sitting on the floor until the twentieth century. The principal forms of koto historically have been the gakuso, the tsukushigoto, or chikuso, developed in northern 22

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Kyushu (Tsukushi) during the medieval age; the zokuso, with its variants (Plate 27); and various twentieth-century inventions, including the jushichigen, a seventeen-stringed instrument tuned in a low register, the nijugen, a twentyone string version, and the thirty-string sanjugen. With the exception of its plectra, the tsukushigoto is physically identical to the gakus6, as it was an instrument made for the sake of maintaining remnant forms of the Heian- and Kamakura-period koto repertory of court society. The term zokuso (‘common koto’) came into use after the mid-seventeenth century, when Yatsuhashi Kengyo founded a new, popular style, but the zokuso instrument’s difference from the gakuso was one of status, not structure, until the founding of the Ikuta-ryt in 1695. Ikuta-school instruments were different from gakuso in their bridges, plectra, and the degree and type of visual ornamentation, which included makie lacquer paintings, tortoiseshell, silver, and ivory inlays on the sides and end sections. With the formation of the Yamada school in the late eighteenth century, the tone of the instrument was modified and its volume increased by changing the shape of the backboard sound-holes and the plectra (the latter are squared in instruments of the Ikuta school and rounded in those of the Yamada), the size of the movable bridges, and the thickness of the strings. Yamadaschool instruments were also distinguished from those of the Ikuta school by the elimination of almost all visual

ornaments. The first of various twentieth-century modified versions of the koto was the jushichigen, first played by the blind composer and performer Miyagi Michio in 1921. It is tuned in a low register (its range is from B’, two octaves below middle c, to e’) and, due to the tension of its thick-gauge strings, requires large movable bridges and tuning pins above 93

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the upper fixed bridge. The nijtigen and sanjugen were both invented in the post-war era for playing contemporary compositions, and they have ranges that span from the low register of the jushichigen to more than an octave above the highest pitches of the standard zokuso. A great many tunings are used for the zokus0’s traditional repertory of danmono and jiuta sokyoku, but one tuning is regarded as basic: hirajoshi (literally, ‘plain tuning’). Hirajoshi includes the semitone steps that characterize much urban music of the Edo period, but it is a modification of a gakus0 tuning (for one of two versions of the gagaku mode, Taishiki-cho) that has been used in transposed form in the repertoire of tsukushigoto: Taishiki-cho tuning for gakuso and tsukushigoto (transposed), and hirajoshi tuning for zokuso: gakuso B E F# G# B c# e f# gt b c#’ e’ f#’ tsukushigoto e A’ Bch ett a bh ck eat ea ep: hirajoshi

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The kutu (koto) in Okinawan music traditions is structurally similar to the standard thirteen-string instrument, but its plectra are neither as rounded as are Yamada-school examples nor as squared as the Ikuta-school style (Plate 28). Its basic tuning is that of the tsukushigoto. The Okinawan repertory includes seven danmono related to but structurally distinct from those of the standard instrument’s classical repertory, as well as three songs. The structure of the koto has enabled the development of both solo and ensemble repertories of great complexity. Not only in its Heian-period solo repertory but also in gagaku ensemble performance practice of the time, the gakusd played melodic parts replete with left-hand ornaments and right-hand glissandi. By the late Muromachi period this repertory had 94

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been lost, and the original togaku melodies had been fragmented and slowed down so that the gakus0 was relegated to the essentially percussive, rather than melodic, role that it has in modern-day gagaku. In the danmono instrumental repertory composed by Yatsuhashi and others since the seventeenth century, however, the virtuosic potential of the instrument has again been exploited. Twentieth-century composer-—performers, such as Miyagi Michio, Sawai Tadao, and Nakanoshima Kin’ichi (1904-84), in turn have developed new techniques and approaches. Two zithers of minor traditions, when compared with other koto, are the one-string ichigenkin, or sumagoto, and the two-string nigenkin, or yakumogoto. Both are played to accompany the performer’s singing. They are long zithers without movable bridges, whose string or strings are attached to tuning pegs that extrude vertically from the body. They are placed on low stands and are usually played from a seiza position (that is, on the knees with the legs folded under), with small cylinders called rokan worn on a finger of each hand (rather like the ‘bottle-necks’ of blues slide-guitar playing.) They are made of horn, ivory, or whalebone. The rokan on the middle finger of the left hand is used to depress the strings at points marked on the face of the instrument, while the short rokan worn on the index finger of the right hand is used to pluck. The origins of both instruments are unclear, but the modern form of ichigenkin (Plate 29) was developed in the early Edo period, with a Ming-dynasty Chinese instrument as its model. Simple bamboo forms of the nigenkin are said to have been remodelled as the yakumogoto (Eight-cloud koto) at the end of the Edo period by the leader of a Shinto sect associated with the Izumo Shrine in western Honshu, who instituted its use in ritual and forbade it to be played in

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ensemble with others. In the Meiji period, a Tokyo-based secular Azuma school of nigenkin performance appeared and carried out further remodelling of the instrument. Finally, a zither developed early in the twentieth century, which is now popular as a hobby among many thousands of people (most of whom are women over the age of fifty), is the taishogoto. Named for the brief Taisho period, during which it was invented and popularized, it has a short, oblong wooden body with keys that are depressed onto the strings to produce pitches of the Western diatonic scale. Both fiveand six-string instruments exist, with thin and thick-gauge strings tuned an octave apart. The keys are pressed with the left hand, while the right hand strums back and forth over all strings at once with a small plastic guitar pick. Lessons and performances are almost always given in groups of about ten players. Figure 5.6 shows a group of women and one primary-school girl playing together at an evening concert in the town of Yamaga, Kumamoto prefecture, to showcase the achievements of hobby groups in the community.

5.6 A group of amateur taishogoto players in a community concert in Yamaga, Kumamoto prefecture.

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Selected Bibliography

Readings on Japanese Musical Instruments

and Music Traditions Blasdel, C. Y., and Kamisango Yuko (1988), The Shakuhachi: A Manual for Learning, Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomo Sha. Department of Performing Arts, National Theatre of Japan (1994), Reconstructed Music Instruments of Ancient East Asia, Tokyo: Japan Art Council. Haags Gemeentemuseum (1979), Traditional Musical Instruments of Japan, The Hague: Haags Gemeentemuseum. Hughes, David (1984), Entries on Japanese instruments in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, London: Macmillan. Johnson, Henry (1996/7), ‘A Koto by Any Other Name: Exploring Japanese Systems of Musical Instrument Classification,’ Asian Music 28(1)(Fall/Winter): 43-60. Malm, William (1959), Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, Tokyo: Tuttle. Matisoff, Susan (1978), The Legend of Semimaru, Blind Musician of Japan, New York: Columbia University Press. Miyazaki Mayumi (1993), Haniwa no gakki: gakki-shi kara mita koko shiryo |The instruments of the haniwa: archaeological evidence viewed from the perspective of the history of musical instruments), Tokyo: Sankosha. Osaka College of Music (1998), Catalogue of the Museum of Musical Instruments. Osaka: Osaka College of Music. Philippi, Donald (1979), Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Shosoin Office (1967), Musical Instruments in the Shosoin (Shosoin no gakki), Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbun Sha. Tanimura Ko and Kitahara Kozo, eds. (1990), The Shakuhachi. Tokyo: Tokyo Ongakusha.

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Readings on Japanese Literature and Culture Dorson, Richard (1962), Folk Legends of Japan, Tokyo: Tuttle. Hearn, Lafcadio (1904), Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. Hibbett, Howard (1975), The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, Tokyo: Tuttle. Kawabata Yasunari (1974), The Izu Dancer |E. Seidensticker, trans.), Tokyo: Tuttle. McCullough, Helen Craig, trans. (1988), The Tale of the Heike, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mishima Yukio (1974), The Decay of the Angel (E. Seidensticker, trans.), New York: Knopf. Murasaki Shikibu (1976), The Tale of Genji (E. Seidensticker, trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nagai Kafu (1965), A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories (E. Seidensticker, trans.), Tokyo: Tuttle. Plutschow, Herbert (1990), Chaos and Cosmos: Ritual in Early and Medieval Japanese Literature. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Rodd, L. R. and M. C. Henkenius, trans. and annotation (1984), Kokinshu: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Sakihara Mitsugu (1987), A Brief History of Early Okinawa Based on the Omoro Soshi, Tokyo: Honpo Shoseki Press. Seidensticker, Edward (1965), Kafu the Scribbler, Berkeley: University of California Press. Singer, Kurt (1973), Mirror, Sword and Jewel, Tokyo: Kodansha. Tyler, Royall (1987), Japanese Tales, New York: Pantheon. (1992), Japanese NO Dramas. London: Penguin.

Recordings and Audiovisual Resources A number of recording anthologies and series feature examples from the various genres of Japanese music. A general collection

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is Harmony of Japanese Music (Seven Seas, Tokyo: KICH 2021). Music of the gagaku repertories is presented in Gagaku: Traditional Sound of Japan (Nippon Columbia, 1988: 28CF2487) and Gagaku (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2021). Buddhist ceremonial music is collected in Japan: Shomyo Buddhist Ritual—Dai Hannya Ceremony of the Shingon Sect {|Audivis/ Unesco, 1991), and Japan: Buddhist Drums, Bells and Chants (Lyrichord 7200). Music from no drama is featured in Nogaku: Japanese Traditional Music (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2002) and Japan: Music of the Noh Theatre Hayashi Ensemble (JVC World Sounds 5355). Kabuki music is heard on Geza Music from the Kabuki (Nonesuch Records H72012), Japan: Kabuki and Other Traditional Music (Nonesuch, 1995: 9 72084), and Kabuki (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2003), while Music of the Bunraku Theatre (JVC World Sounds: 5356) collects pieces that accompany bunraku puppet dramas. Sources for folk-songs, festival pieces, and taiko ensemble music include Percussion (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2010), Japanese Dance Music (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2022), Japan: O-Suwa Daiko Drums (Audivis/Unesco, 1990: D 8030), and Japan: Semiclassical and Folk Music (Audivis/Unesco, 1989: D8016). Among the musical styles of ethnic minorities in Japan, Ainu music is collected on Japan: Ainu Songs (Audivis, 1993: D8047) and Sigeru Kayano: Yukar, the Ainu Epic Songs (World Music Library 5217), while Okinawan music is heard on Music of Japanese People: Okinawa (World Music Library 2025) and Folk Songs of Okinawa (JVC World Sounds 5360). Many recordings are devoted to individual instruments. Ones devoted to the biwa include Heike Monogatari no Ongaku (Nippon Columbia 1991: COCF-7889), Biwa (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2004), and Yoshitsune: Songs of a Medieval Hero of Japan, Accompanied by the Biwa (BMG Victor Japan, 1988: CR10080-81). The shakuhachi is featured on Japan: Shakuhachi, the Japanese Flute (Elektra/Nonesuch 1991), Japanese Masterpieces for the Shakuhachi (Lyrichord LLCT 7176), and Shakuhachi (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2005). Koto music and

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SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY

music of the sankyoku ensemble can be heard on Music of the Koto (JVC World Sounds 5358), Japan: Sankyoku (Ocora/ Harmonia Mundi 1995: C560070), and So (Koto)(King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2006). The various shamisen styles are featured on Traditional Shamisen, vols. 8 and 9 (World Music Library 2008-9), Shamisen I (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2006), and Shamisen II (King Records, Tokyo: KICH 2006). Finally, various instruments, including the gottan, tonkori, mukkuri, and ichigenkin, are featured on Music of the Japanese People: Unique Musical Instruments {World Music Library 2030). Two superb video anthologies of Japanese music and folk performing arts have been produced. Both are available through distributors outside Japan. Oto to Eizo ni Yoru Nihon Koten Geino Taikei (Sonic and Visual Anthology of Classical Performing Arts)(Victor Japan and Heibonsha, 1991) comprises twenty-five videocassettes with two explanatory books in Japanese. Oto to Eizo to Moji ni Yoru Taikei Nihon Rekishi to Geino (Japanese history and performing arts through sound, visual images and text}(Victor Japan and Heibonsha, 1990-2) is a set of videocassettes, each with its own explanatory book. During the late 1980s, the monthly magazine Hogaku Journal produced a valuable series of videos on instruments and musical genres, with English commentary by Elizabeth Falconer. The Early Music Television Series, produced by the University of Oklahoma between 1989 and 1997, includes a set of five videos on representative traditional Japanese music genres, with commentary by Professor William Malm. For fans of taiko drumming, several English-language videos devoted to the ensemble Kodo have been made. The most readily available of these is Kodo: Heartbeat Drummers of Japan (New York: Rhapsody Films, 1991).

100

Index ATINO alten

47

On 4 ONO =68716

ENKA (xa, 70

Aitake @¥i, 65, 67 Azuma asobi iz, 61, 79 Azuma no koto ®#, 78 Azusayumi f£5, 77

FESTIVAL Music, 29, 46, 56-7,

plate 3, plate 11 Folk music, 4, 23, 37, 52, 70, 89 Flutes end-blown, 8, 17-18, 69-73, plate 18 side-blown (transverse), 7, 46, 55-61, 68-9, plate 15, plate 16

BAcut #8, ##, 42, 46, 82, 83 Binzasara iA, 52 Biwa #8, 9, 11, 14, 21, 27-8, 31, 32-4, 37, 78, 79-87 Biwa hoshi #@y&6n, 9, 32, 34 Blind musicians, 9, 11-12, 17, 21, 27-8, 33-4, 37, 71, 79-80, 82, plate 5, plate 22 Buddhism, music and, 5, 6-8, 13, DO On 4 Ay PAS =e ao wale 73-4, 79-80, 83, plate 1, plate 5, plate 7, plate 9, plate 12 Bugaku #£38, 6, 42, 43, 47, 48 Bunraku X34, 15, 22, 89 CHANCHIKI Fv VF,

Fue f&, 55, 58, 61 Furitsuzum1 tk 0 &&%, 42, 47 Futozao Kt, 88-9 GAGA

He

om Orn a lnleelu

56, 57-67, 70, 80, 81, 84, 92, 94, 95 Gaikyoku Hh, 71 Gakubiwa ##®, 7, 28, 31, 80, 83-4, 92 Gakudaiko #XKs, 41, 43, 44, 48, 60 Gakunin #4, 18, 19 Gakuso 283%, 7, 79, 83, 92, 93, 94, 95 Geisha 245 16, 21035) 37938) 39) 89 Genji Monogatari ise, 7, 30-1 Geza FE, 51, 54, 75 Gidayt #AKK, 15, 16, 88 Gidaytjamisen #EKK="KR, 88 Gigaku (x38, 12 Gion no fue t#§ Offi, 75 Gogenbiwa Fiktée, 8, 81 Goze #&, 37 Gyoban fitK, 53

48

Charumera F¥¥)JVXF, 74 Chikuso (i, 92 Chikuzenbiwa Sinmité®, 21, 82, 85, 86-7 Chinese music, 5, 6-8, 41, 47, 49, 53, 64, 66, 73-5, 78-80, 88, 92, 95 Chuzao #*, 89 Dapalko KK, 41, 42-3, 48 Dance, 6-8, 12, 16, 26, 28-9, 35, 38, 40-3, 46-7, 52, 58, 61, 69, plate 6, plate 7 Danmono 4, 17, 94, 95 Dendendaiko Ch CHAR, 47

Dengaku 3K, 12, 52 Deroren saimon FOV YX, Dotaku #is#, 3

pulse

91-2, 36-7, 39, 41-4, 47, 48, 51,

Hacut &, 50-1 Haisho $i, 8, 67 Haniwa_ éitsi, 3, 41, 55, 78

74

Dora Si, 50

101

INDEX

Hauta smak, 89 Hayashi ¥&+, 12, 16, 29, 44, 46, 68

Heike ¥&, 11-2, 18, 27-8, 30, 34, 84 Heikebiwa -X##, 11, 84-5 Heikyoku Hi, 18, 34, 84 Hichiriki ®#,

29, 59, 61, 62-4

Hirajoshi “4#i+, 94 Hitoyogiri —#it), 18, 71

Hogaku #3, 2, 20, 21 Honchoshi Ai, 83, 86, 90 Honkyoku 4th, 71, 72 Horagai 3327

(RRR, PERERA),

Hosho IRE, 64 Hosozao #ilt#, 89 Hyoichi biwa %—#é8, Hyoshigi fAfx%, 51

7324

82

Kiyomoto ¥azt, 38 Kojiki Hac, 4, 26, 76, 77 Kokinsht hi, 30, 33 Kokya #A5 (5), 17, 18, 72, 90-1 Komabue BS, 58, 59, 61-2 Komagaku SB, 8, 42, 57, 61, 62 Komuso fe#{8, 71 Korean music, 5, 8, 41, 47, 78-9 Kosabue #Av>&, 55 Koto ® (8), 7, 14, 17, 18, 21, 26-7, 30-1, 39, 55, 69, 78, 90, 91-5 Kotsuzumi /\\8%, 44-5 Kouta /\\ak, 89 Kuchibiwa Hf, 54 Kuchishoga Hak, 60 Kudaragoto Hi®®, 78, 81 Kugo 2,

ICHIGENKIN —*Z, 95, 96 Ichikotsu €i&t, 66 Ikko —3%, 42 Imayo tk, 8 Inkin 5|#, 49, 51 TIwabue Hf G2), 55 JIUTA SOKYOKU Shak

Hh, 17,90, 94 JOruri #P238, 14-5, 16, 34, 88, 89 Jushichigen +t%%, 93-4

Kutu ®, 94

Kyokunsho #a#,

14, 15-6, 22, 37, 51,

54,57, 74, 75, 89 Kaco (kacho) 4#a—, 40 Kagura #238, 46, 50, 56, 57 Kagurabue #28, 57-8, 59 Kakko 48%, 41-2 Kane ## (HE), 46, 47-9, 50 Kangen **%, 44, 48

71

Lutes, 8, 9, 11-12, 14-17, 32-5, 37, 72, 79-91, plate 2, plate 4, plate 5, plate 22, plate 23, plate 24, plate 25, plate 26 ManyosHti

KaBuKi &#H{%,

8, 78, 81

Kumeuta AK, 58, 79 Kusemai #i##, 12

77#2, 26, 76

Matsuri-bayashi

® 0 #&+, 46, 48,

56-7 Mikagura (2%,

51,57, 58, 79

Miko-rei M$, 50 Minshingaku Aye, 53 Minyo Ri#, 23, 70, 89 MinyOojamisen Rak = "ke, 89 Modern compositions, 1, 21, 23,

70, 72, 93-5

Katarimono #& 0%), 14 Kei &, 50 Keiroko %3225% (AB5%), 42 Kin ®, 47, 49-50, 53 Kin (no koto) = (OZ), 78

Mokkin *,

53

Mokugyo ff, 53 Mokusho A&E, 53 Moppan AK, 53

102

INDEX

Moso B18, 79-80, 82, 85, 86, 87 Mukkuri

Avy 7,

Sanjugen =+#%, 93, 94 Sankyoku =#, 18, 70, 72, 91 San-no-tsuzumi =, 41-2 Sanshin =, 88,91 Sarugaku 22%, 8, 12 Sasabiwa jf, 82-3 Satsumabiwa pEFEEE, 82, 85, 86,

54

NacéuTA £98, 16, 38, 57, 89 Narrative recitation, 11-12, 14, 16, 25, 27-8, 32, 34, 74, 82-4

Nigenkin =,

95, 96

87

Nijugen —+%%, 93, 94 Nishikibiwa sf, 86 No #é, 12, 13, 16, 18, 23, 28, 29) 33, 39, 44-6, 68-9 Nokan fig, 68-9

Sawari +7), 82-3, 84, 85, 86, 88 Seiza IEE, 89,95

Shakubyoshi #fA+, 51 Shakuhachi RA, 8, 17, 18, 21, 39, 55, 69-73 Shakujo sakt, 50

Notation sources and systems, 6,

21, 60-1, 80

Opalko KK,

Shamisen =", 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 85) 36) 87, 88) 59) 07, Ol Gay 86) 87-91 Shikabue [f%, 56 Shinobue *#&, 46, 56-7 Shinto, music and, 3, 6, 7, 24, 26-9, 40, 46, 50-1, 56-8, 77, 95, plate 6, plate 13 Shirabyoshi Att, 8 Sho 4, 36, 64-7 Shoko Sik, 48 Shomyo A, 5, 80

46

Okawa K# (K#%),

44

Okinawa(n) }'P#E, 4, 25, 52-3, 74, 88, 91, 94 Omorosdshi BH4Z5 LU, 25 Oteki Bit, 58

Otsuzumi K&%, 44-5 Outa Kuk, 58, 79 POPULAR CULTURE AND MUSIC, 4, 8,

13-17, 23, 34-5, 70, 86, 88, 93, 96, plate 4

Shosdin ERB, 8, 9, 10, 41, 64, 67,

REED INSTRUMENTS, 29, 36, 59, 61-7, 74-5 Rei $i, 50 Repni VF=, 25, 40

70, 78, 81 So-no-koto #OZ&, 92 Suikinkutsu 7k# fi, 54 Sumagoto AB, 95 Surigane #24 GHG), 48

Rokuchoshi A#¥, 83 Ruika ##, 62, 79 Ryukyu §eek, 4, 15 Ryuteki fi, 58-61, 68

Surizasara th, 52 Suzu $i, 47, 50

TAIGENSHO {KifRdd, 19

SAIBARA #€F538, 51, 64, 79, 83

Taishogoto KiE*®, 96 Takebue ‘i, 57 Taku #, 51

Taiko K8%, 40-2, 44-6

Sanba =, 52 Sangaku ®C#, 8, 10, 12, 41

103

INDEX

Tanzao ‘ati, 89

Temple bells, 47-8, plate 12 Theatre music, 12, 14-17, 22-3,

34-5,

37-8, 44-6, 51-2, 54, 57,

68-9, 75, 88-9, plate 3 Togaku J#3, 6, 8, 19, 41, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 79, 83, 92, 95 Tojinbue Fe Ath, 74 Tonkori kY3)), 76-7 Tsuchibue +, 55 Tsugarujamisen (4% ="eR, 89 DSUKERY Tae

Wacon fl, 31, 78-9, 92 Waniguchi ffs, 48-9 Washi Fiat, 45, 63 Western music, 2, 20-1, 23

YAKUMOGOTO Yamatobue Yamatogoto Yamatomai

/\2*, 95 Kfilti, 57 Kfl® (&*), K*fi#*, 58

Yamatouta

K*flm&k, 51

Tsurigane s)#i, 48

Yotsudake Wy, 53 Yuchidaki 1+ 47+, 53 Nab one A— VAS, NS} Yumidaiko SKsx, 77

Tsuzumi %, 29, 40, 41, 42, 44-5, OY5); OV

ZATO JESH, 37, 82-3

Tsukushigoto i384,

17, 92, 93, 94

Tuition, 20-2, 60, 96 Tuning(s), 66-8, 79, 84, 90, 93-4 U , 8, 65, 67 Uchiwadaiko MimAsx, 46-7 Uguisubiwa 8, Unpan hk, 50

82

78

Zen, 12-13, 18, 71 Zithers, 3-4, 7, 17, 26, 30-1, 39, 76-9, 91-6, plate 20, plate 21, plate 26, plate 27, plate 28, plate 29 Zokus0o (#4, 90, 93, 94

104

During Japan's prehistory its musical instruments were seen as sources of ritual power, used by the islands’ inhabitants to call up folNilare wel gers tvacolallats)olie-yelelalrclalent-l(oPiy\imtalcyiar-la(elalnel=\"/-110) el-co mr oel¥|ae laremeatsvaleclamelgerslalr4=vecvevel(=1namllarciaaelpa\ciait-)im e\-)ace)snat-|aler-mereland]ale|-1e ce) fof= colat=ienmitarcy antessienlanl ele)atclaiere)anecur-|accya of-verolpallare tcl o)iaat-Iavalt\-l1aamelia aesthetic experience for the population at large.

\llustrated with images drawn from picture scrolls as well as photographs of instruments as they are used in performance, Japanese Musical Instruments presents a comprehensive survey of traditional instruments. Supported by references to music in works of literature from the tenth to the twentieth centuries, this handy guide studies musical instruments as ‘instruments of culture’ as much as devices for the making and ordering of sounds. The result is an easy-to-use, concise overview of the nation’s musical heritage, detailing the waykcice)aers)imaaterelaliareiseelaremUis\-lsy olel-lefoiaisy ugclelid(olarclaialciddelnaliauccn mle(elainel= Ferranti is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Musicology and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. ‘Images of Asia’ offers a range of titles covering aspects of life and culture in East Asia. Each book in the series combines FVaMiapcelell(o colatad->aemnatac-limcolaivit-MuCelp eryel-(at-| iti me-t-(o(-1 ae\iar-la) authority on the subject, with extensive illustrations both in colour and black-and-white. As such, ‘Images of Asia’ provides a means Colm-(ee flialate Mr: Mel-1-1el-Valliave(-texe-laroltalepe-lacei-lelele-tHr-l atoll of the region in all its diversity. Cover illustration: leddialeeyar- inVelularem Yolanr-lam 4 e)eeler ikiiaye] ‘Matsu no Uchi’, a famous kato-bushi song. Attributed to Okumura Toshinobu, mid-eighteenth century.

'O).6 FO)ND) UNIVERSITY

PRESS