Music—Japan

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Japan's long history of cultural influence from the continent, alternating with independent development and adaptation to suit indigenous aesthetics, has resulted in a rich and variedmusical culture reflecting the country's geographical location at the terminus of the Silk Road.

Several major characteristics typify the traditional music of Japan, many of which are common to other counties in Asia. With the exception of gagaku (court music), traditional music is monophonic, focusing on subtleties of tone, timbre, and rhythm rather than on harmony. Melody is based on the twelve-tone unequaltempered tone system, within which three types of scales can be identified: two five-tone scales, used in koto, shamisen, and folk music; a seven-tone scale, used in gagaku; and a tone system based on the tetrachord, used in shomyo (Buddhist chanting) and Noh drama. Melodic line is often based on the arrangement of recognizable melodic patterns. The range of timbre in traditional music is narrow, limited to plucked strings, bamboo wind instruments, and barrel and hourglass drums of differing sizes. Consequently, subtleties of timbre among Japanese instruments are highly refined. Each musical genre has developed its own notation system, with little overlap. As in many other Asian countries, much of Japanese music has been created in combination with literature, theater, and dance.

Gagaku, literally "elegant music," is the oldest surviving musical form in Japan. Gagaku refers to purely instrumental music as well as to music that accompanies the court dance called bugaku. Originally imported from Korea, China, and China's various vassal states during the Nara period (710–794), gagaku was fostered by the imperial court and served as ceremonial music at rituals and festivals and as a pastime for aristocratic nobles. It reached its peak of popularity in the tenth century, but lost favor in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), when the power and prestige of the court aristocracy waned in favor of the new, rising military class.

By the beginning of the Tokugawa period (1600/1603–1868), only fragmentary gagaku groups remained. The first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), consolidated the remaining gagaku ensembles into two groups, thus maintaining the tradition, though with a limited repertory. In 1955, gagaku was designated an important national treasure by the Japanese government.

Both music and dance gagaku are divided into compositions of the left (Chinese, Indian, and Japanese origin) and right (Korean or Manchurian origin); there are slight variations in the instrumental ensembles for each side. Though the ensemble consists of strings, percussion, and winds, these areas of sound remain distinct, with the winds (hichiriki, ryuteki) serving as the melodic instruments, and the stringed instruments (gakuso, biwa) and drums marking time units with stereotyped patterns.

With the rise of the military class in the late twelfth century, the biwa, a four-stringed lute plucked with a large plectrum, was used by blind musicians to accompany tales of the rise and fall of great warriors of the Heike clan. Though poetry had long been sung in court-music traditions, this new biwa music marked the beginning of a narrative musical tradition. The idea of narrative music was important in the development of Noh theater in the fourteenth century, as well as in developments in shamisen music beginning in the sixteenth century.

Noh music consists of solo speech and singing by actors, unison singing by a chorus of seven to ten, and an instrumental ensemble. The transverse bamboo flute (nokan) plays melodies independent of the vocal line, while the rhythm of the percussive instruments— shoulder drum (kotsuzumi), hip drum (otsuzumi), and stick drum (taiko)—is based on an eight-beat structure matched to the text in one of several clearly defined rhythmic modes. The tone system of Noh, which was influenced by the shomyo Buddhist chant, is constructed around three main nuclear tones: high, middle, and low, each separated by an interval of a perfect fourth, with additional important tones a perfect fifth above the high tone and a perfect fourth below the low tone.

As urban centers grew in the Tokugawa period, commercial theatrical forms and musical forms within the lively licensed quarters (where theaters and houses of prostitution were permitted) rapidly developed. Central to these developments was the shamisen, a three-stringed banjolike lute descended from the Chinese sanxian. It first arrived in Japan via the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) around 1562 and underwent several transformations, including the addition of sawari, a buzzing sound incorporated into the vibration of the first (lowest) string, and the borrowing of the large plectrum used to play the biwa.

Over the next three centuries, various genres of shamisen music developed: the heavy-sounding narrative of gidayu in puppet drama (Bunraku); lyrical nagauta in Kabuki (traditional dramas with dance and singing); and the versatile narrative genres of tokiwazu-bushi, kiyomoto-bushi, kato-bushi, shinnai-bushi, and others, which were heard in the licensed districts as well as on the Kabuki stage. Each genre is distinguished by subtle differences in timbre, achieved by varying the body size of the shamisen, thickness of the neck and strings, height of the bridge; size, composition, and attack of the plectrum; pitch range of the vocal line, and stereotyped patterns of the instrumental and vocal lines.

During this same period, new styles of music developed for the koto, a thirteen-string zither originally found in the gagaku ensemble. Yatsuhashi Kengyo (1614–1685), and later Ikuta Kengyo (1656–1715), created new tunings, solo compositions for koto, and compositions for sankyoku, a trio consisting of koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi (a long end-blown bamboo flute).

The Meiji period (1868–1912) was a time of rapid modernization, with overwhelming influence from the West. Education policies emphasized the need to study Western music. The imperial army and navy had military bands that performed the first public concerts, introducing popular Western music and in turn greatly influencing the popular songs of Japan. Christian hymns brought by missionaries shaped the composition of children's songs taught as part of the new elementary school music curriculum. The Tokyo Music School (now Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music), established in 1887, offered the first Western music conservatory training in Japan. Composers such as Miyage Michio (1895–1956) introduced the diachronic scale to koto music and fused Western and Japanese music traditions in orchestral compositions for thirteen-string and newly designed seventeen-string bass koto. One of Miyage's most famous compositions, Haru no Umi (The Spring Sea, 1929) remains a perennial favorite at New Year's time.

Today Japan boasts over twenty professional symphony orchestras and has nurtured internationally known talents such as Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996), a composer of more than one hundred works for piano and chamber and symphony orchestra, and Seiji Ozawa (b. 1935), conductor of the Boston Symphony for nearly thirty years. One notable phenomenon that spread from Japan throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas is the popular pastime of singing karaoke, literally "empty" (kara) "orchestra" (oke, in abbreviated form). Urban areas also boast hundreds of pop, rock, blues, jazz, and world beat bands that play in countless bars and "live houses" throughout the cities.

For many Japanese, Western music—classical and popular—is more familiar than are traditional Japanese music genres. Music education policies, a legacy of the Meiji period, include Western music in school curricula, but place traditional musical genres outside the formal education system, to be sustained by an apprentice system. Nevertheless, all of these musical worlds thrive side by side, and on any given day in Japan one may experience everything from ancient gagaku to modern electronic music.

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——. (2000) Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments. Tokyo: Kodansha International.

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