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Nineteenth-Century Gagaku Songs as a Subject of Musical Analysis: An Early Example of Musical Creativity in Modern Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2014

Hermann Gottschewski
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Abstract

Nineteenth-century gagaku (Japanese traditional court music) songs, composed mainly between 1877 and 1884, are almost forgotten today; but they deserve special attention for their function in the development of modern composition in Japan. More than 100 compositions by 28 composers, belonging to two collections, can be counted as gagaku songs in the narrowest sense. Most of them are accompanied by an individually composed ostinato pattern played on the wagon, a six-stringed zither. The songs are strongly shaped by Restoration thought, one of the characteristic aspects of the early modernization period in Japan, although the genre originated in response to the need for music for a modern Western method of education.

An analysis of the two collections, of intertextually related pieces and of different versions of single songs shows that the collective process of genre development and the individual process of song composition were closely intertwined. The aim of my analysis was to uncover the problems faced by composers when they composed a single song. Particular solutions were often required to fulfil all the demands of the strict stylistic framework of the genre, while meeting the conditions of a specific poem. While similarity to an already existing song was not avoided when a new song was composed, the effort to create a difference can also be observed clearly in some cases. My analysis gives special attention to heterophonic techniques that characterize the relation between voice and accompaniment. Their use is constitutive for the musical form, and their analysis sheds light on the aesthetic significance of each song. An analytical approach to the gagaku song repertoire provides us with a fascinating insight into how musical creativity was performed under the circumstances of a quickly changing cultural environment in the early modernization period of Japan.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , December 2013 , pp. 239 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 12, ‘Japan’, for example, labels the period after 1868 as ‘period of international music’ (816), ‘Western influences’ (817) and ‘period of Westernization’ (884) (the first two citations are from parts written by Kishibe Shigeo, the last one by David W. Hughes). The section of the ‘Japan’ article in MGG devoted to the period 1868–1945 addresses only developments in Western music and mentions traditional music only as a matter of continuation. See ‘Japan’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, second edition, edited by Ludwig Finscher, Sachteil, vol. 4, (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1996): 1372–4, written by Wolfgang Burde.

2 Many historians today prefer to call the political changes after 1868 the ‘Meiji revolution’ rather than the ‘Meiji Restoration’, because they believe that the revolutionary elements outweigh the Restorationist ones in importance; but the existence of a Restorationist ideology cannot be denied, and it has special significance for our case study.

3 That gagaku musicians were pioneers in the study of Western music can be read in almost all writings about late-nineteenth-century Japanese music history, and that the same names occur as composers of gagaku style and Western style songs is also frequently mentioned, but the relation between these two creative activities is seldom discussed. In her important study ‘Meijiki no kyūchū ni okeru sakkyoku katsudō: Hoiku shōka no keifu’ [Musical composition in the Imperial Court during the Meiji era], Journal of the Society for Research in Asiatic Music (Japan) 74 (2009): 25–46), Nakamura Mayuko has shown that the step from traditional to Western composition was not ‘typical’ for the gagaku musicians of that time: only a minority of composers later engaged in Western composition, while the majority continued to be involved with gagaku style compositions, although they were also forced to develop their ability in the performance of Western music.

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8 Later, songs that shared a melody were eliminated, and every song text was given a melody originally composed for it. An exception is a melody that was originally composed by Tōgi Yoriharu (1834–1898) for the song ‘Sazareishi’. It was re-used for another poem, ‘Futami no ura’, by Fujiwara no Kanesuke (877–933), when ‘Sazareishi’ disappeared from the collection (see Gottschewski, ‘Hoiku shōka and Kimi ga yo’, note 8). In effect, then, ‘Futami no ura’ neither has an original melody, nor shares a melody with any other songs of the collection. Both songs can be heard on Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/27 and 6/26 (see below note 19).

9 For an example see note 9 in Tsukahara Yasuko's article in this issue.

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12 In the second half of the Meiji era and later, a number of single gagaku songs were commissioned from inside the court, as Nakamura has pointed out (‘Meijiki no kyūchū ni okeru sakkyoku katsudō’, 35–41). They were mainly composed for private occasions at the court and for representative festivities such as the silver wedding of the Emperor (1894), the 1100-year-anniversary of the old capital of Kyōto (1895) and the wedding of the crown prince (1900). Since the songs are spread over a longer period and composed for special occasions, each of them would require a separate consideration.

13 I have adopted the translation ‘Childcare songs’ from Soga, ‘Creation Process of ‘Singing Dance’. The term shōka has two different meanings in Hoiku shōka. In the wider sense, it means ‘singing’ as opposed to playing instruments, or ‘singing instructions’ for education. In the narrower sense, it means accompanied ‘singing pieces’ as opposed to unaccompanied ‘play-songs’. Hoiku shōka includes both singing pieces and play-songs. In other contemporaneous sources, the word shōka is used with other meanings, for example ‘words of a song’ as opposed to the melody, or ‘singing instrumental melodies with mnemonics’. In traditional Japanese music the word is still used with the last mentioned meaning, but it is pronounced ‘shōga’ (written with the same Chinese characters), while since around 1900 the word ‘shōka’ has meant mainly Western style ‘school songs’. Since most sources give no explanation, it is difficult to know which of the various usages of the word were pronounced ‘shōka’ and which ‘shōga’ at the end of nineteenth century. There is good reason to believe that the ‘Hoiku shōga’ would be historically more correct, but the pronunciation ‘Hoiku shōka’ is most widespread today.

14 See also the article by Tsukahara Yasuko in this issue, page 226.

15 See also note 11, above.

16 Tsukahara Yasuko, Jūkyūseiki no Nihon ni okeru seiyō ongaku no juyō [The reception of western music in nineteenth century Japan] (Tokyo: Taga, 1993): 567Google Scholar

17 Gottschewski, Hermann, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme und die Bedeutung ihrer “Perspektive” für die Musikkultur: Ein Vergleich europäischer und japanischer Quellen’, in Schrift: Kulturtechnik zwischen Auge, Hand und Maschine, ed. Gernot Grube, Werner Kogge und Sibylle Krämer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005)Google Scholar

18 Nakamura, ‘Meijiki no kyūchū ni okeru sakkyoku katsudō’, 30–35Google Scholar

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23 Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 269–271Google Scholar

24 See note 19.

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27 See Tsukahara Yasuko's article in this issue, note 8.

28 Linguists use the term ‘mora’ rather than ‘syllable’ for the smallest rhythmic unit of the Japanese language, but for the application of classical Japanese lyrics to songs the difference between the concept of ‘mora’ and ‘syllable’ is not very important. The ‘mora’ in classical Japanese consists of a short vowel preceded or not preceded by a single consonant. The half-vowel ‘n’, however, can also form a mora and is thus often treated like a syllable in songs. Except for the short postpositions, most Japanese words have between two and five syllables, and there is no stress accent. When five-syllable clauses and seven-syllable clauses are mentioned in this article, I include cases where the actual number of syllables is six or eight due to certain rules of syllable augmentation.

29 Although literary scholars prefer to speak of one or more 5–7 pairs followed by a 5–7–7 clause, due to the semantic structure of the ancient poetry, the description given here better fits the musical structure of gagaku songs. It seems that when the court musicians of the nineteenth century read ancient poetry they were influenced in their reading by a rhythmic feeling acquired from the experience of more recent Japanese lyrics.

30 In the two collections discussed here, the only songs that are neither tanka nor chōka are those discussed in note 44, below, and the song ‘I ro ha’ (Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/22). The text of the latter is the traditional Japanese syllable alphabet, which is also a poem, but in another metrical form.

31 A more comprehensive description of the metres of Hoiku shōka can be found in Gottschewski, ‘Hoiku shōka and Kimi ga yo’, (3)–(4).

32 ‘Yin’ – read ‘in’ in Japanese – refers to the dualism of yin and yang in Asian thought. I conjecture that this naming refers to the ‘darkness’ of the musical time that is not ‘highlighted’ by a beat in performance.

33 Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 266–277Google Scholar

34 Tanabe Hisao, Nihon ongaku kōwa [Lectures on Japanese Music] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1919)Google Scholar

35 Kikkawa Eishi, Nihon ongaku no seikaku [On the character of Japanese music] (Tōkyō: Wanya , 1948)Google Scholar

Petra Rudolph, as Vom Charakter der japanischen Musik, Studien zur traditionellen Musik Japans 2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984)Google Scholar

36 This technique is also described in Kikkawa, Nihon ongaku no seikaku, 210–11 (176–7 in the German translation).

37 The words of the song are a versification of a prose translation of the second stanza of an English winter song, ‘Now we are in Winter’, which is itself a translation of the German song ‘Der Winter ist kommen’. See Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 5/12.

38 There is only one (much) later example in Hoiku shōka where a composer re-uses an accompaniment, in that case one from his own songs. Many songs in Kōtenkōkyūsho shōka share their accompaniments for a different reason, discussed below. A special case is a song cycle called ‘Muttsu no tama’ [ , Six Balls] or ‘Tama to iro’ [ , Balls and colours], for Froebelian kindergarten education, consisting of nine songs composed by nine different court musicians (Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/38–46). The nine songs share their key, scale, metre, length and wagon pattern. The song cycle was a late addition to the Hoiku shōka and was abandoned shortly afterwards; it is found in only a few manuscripts. See Gottschewski, ‘Hoiku shōka and Kimi ga yo’, note 8, sources (3) and (5).

39 The dates that are given for Hoiku shōka generally refer to the handover to the commissioner or to another act by the court music department that made the songs an officially approved part of the collection. That means that the composition was certainly finished at that time, but it does not exclude the possibility of later revisions by the composer or another person of the department, either on demand of, or approved ex post facto by, the department.

40 Since the number of times per beat and the number of beats per bar varies by metre, but the length of a time is about the same in all metres, the length of songs can best be compared if not bars or beats, but times are counted. A full performance of ‘Ō Shōkun’, as included in CD 6 of Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/31–35, takes almost 20 minutes.

41 Those poems that had been set to pre-existent melodies before the interruption in mid-1880, were among those that were most often used for newly composed songs in 1882.

42 In ‘Kami no megumi’ [ ,‘The blessings of the deity’], poem by Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) by Hayashi Hirotsugu (1845–1917), the four-hyperbar pattern in quick four metre, which has a simple first half and a more complex second half, is shortened to its first half, which is now repeated twice as often. In ‘Omou dochi’ [ , ‘Friends’], poem by Taira no Kanemori (d. 990) by the same composer, a quick-four-metre song ten hyperbars in length, the five-hyperbar pattern is replaced by a two-hyperbar pattern, which is thus played not twice but five times. And in ‘Yukimeguri’ [ , ‘On the way’], poem by Fujiwara no Sanesuke (957–1046), composed by Tōgi Takekata, a three-hyperbar pattern in quick four metre was replaced by a one-bar pattern.

43 The Restorationist tendency is also obvious in the selection of the texts.

44 See also note 30. This scheme is also known as the form of bussokusekika [ ], an archaic form of Buddhist lyric. There seems to be no connection between this archaic form and its modern use, however. ‘Hana tachibana’ was the first song in Hoiku shōka to use this form. The other songs in this form are dated between April and June 1878, except ‘Kimi ga megumi’ [ , ‘The Emperor's blessings’], which is of unknown date. Most of the songs in this form are translated English songs or poems newly written at that time; but two (like ‘Shirogane’ below) are classical tankas with an arbitrarily added line. It is unknown why the compilers of the texts of Hoiku shōka felt so strong a need for that form that they added words to famous classical poems. Nakayama (Meiji shōka no tanjō, 33) also mentions this addition and suspects that the composers may have added the words for musical reasons. But given the diverse musical structures of the various examples in bussokusekika form this seems unlikely.

45 The original English text, itself based on a German song, is as follows: ‘The May is trav'ling hither, / The May is at the door, / The garden and the meadow / Will bloom again all o'er.’ The ‘fifth month’ in the lunar calendar is somewhat later than May and falls in the so-called ‘plum rain’ season. The source used by the Japanese translator is Adolph Douai, The Kindergarten: A Manual for the Introduction of Froebel's System of Primary Education into Public Schools (New York: E. Steiger, 1871), or another edition of that book. The song is found in German and English on pages 42–3. The prose translation contained in the Japanese edition of this book, Seki Shinzō, trans., Yochienki, ed. by the Tōkyō Women's Normal School, 1877, volume 2, 62 (reprint in Meiji Hoiku Bunkenshū, 1977), was used for the free adaptation. Seki's prose translation omits the second stanza of the song.

46 Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/9.

47 See, for example, ‘Aki no hikage’ [ , ‘Autumn shadows’] (text of unknown origin), dated December 1877 and composed by Shiba Fujitsune. The text in chōka form has eleven clauses, and the song is twelve hyperbars long.

48 The difference between G in the melody and F♯ in the accompaniment, in bar 30, creates a strong dissonant effect for European ears, but in gagaku the discrepancy between these two tones is rather perceived as a difference of intonation than as a musical interval.

49 The original poem has ‘kugane’ instead of ‘kogane’. The poems in this article are given as written in the sources of Hoiku shōka.

50 Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/10.

51 ‘Kiku no kazashi’ [ , ‘Chrysanthemum decoration’], also dated 9 April 1878, with a text of unknown origin, composed by Hayashi Hiromori, uses the wagon accompaniment of ‘Hahasoba’ [ , ‘Oak leaves’], translated from an English song, composed by Ue Sanetake (1825–1895). See Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/12.

52 Often in Hoiku shōka the first five-syllable clause, which is sung solo, is composed in the simple syllabic style, even if that style is not used in any other part of the song.

53 The original poem has ‘furi’, but the sources of Hoiku shōka write ‘furu’.

54 ‘Arare furu’ [‘hail is falling’] is a makurakotoba belonging to the name ‘Kashima’. So the use of the expression in this poem does not necessarily mean that it hailed at that time.

55 Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/11.

56 There are very few exceptions of this rule, and some of them are spurious.

57 ‘Harmonic’ not in the Western sense, but only in the broadest sense, as shown in our analyses: whether the full and half cadences of the melody and the accompaniment coincide or not.