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State Ceremony and Music in Meiji-era Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2014

Yasuko Tsukahara
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Abstract

The music culture of Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is characterized by the coexistence and interdependent development of three types of music: (1) traditional music passed down from the Edo period (1603–1867) as exemplified by gagaku (court music); (2) the Western music that entered the country and became established after it was opened to the outside world; and (3) modern songs that were the first to be created in East Asia, such as shōka and gunka (school and military songs). These three types of music each played the role required of them by the Meiji state, and they became indispensable elements of the music culture of modern Japan. Traditional music is an irreplaceable fund of original musical expression intrinsic to Japan, Western music offers a common language facilitating musical contact in international society, especially with countries of the West, and modern songs are an essential tool for unifying the Japanese people through the act of ‘singing together in Japanese’.

This article examines the way in which the coexistence of these three types of music began, from the perspective of the musical expression of national identity in the state ceremonies of the Meiji era, namely imperial rites, military ceremonies and school ceremonies. Gagaku was reorganized and strengthened in the 1870s as the music of Japan's imperial rites, and it was given priority both within Japan and overseas, as the most intrinsic of Japan's genres of traditional music. The gagaku scales, defined clearly only from 1878 onwards, were used to amalgamate the musical language of Japan's state ceremonies by their use in ceremonial pieces for military and school ceremonies. This article clarifies the special role played by gagaku in post-Restoration nineteenth-century Japan.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , December 2013 , pp. 223 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Nakamura Rihei, Yōgaku dōnyūsha no kiseki: Kindai yōgakushi josetsu [Footprints of those who introduced Western music: Towards a history of Western music in modern Japan] (Tokyo: Tōsui Shobō, 1993)Google Scholar

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2 Gagaku is a composite of a number of music genres with differing origins and performance styles. Based on the way that it has been transmitted since the Meiji era at the Kunaishō (later Kunaichō) Shikibushoku Gakubu (Music Department of the Board of Ceremonies of the Imperial Household Agency), it is generally said to be composed of the following three categories:

  1. 1.

    1. accompanied vocal music and dance of indigenous origin, employed in imperial and Shinto ceremony, referred to as kuniburi no utamai (including kagura, azuma-asobi, kumemai);

  2. 2.

    2. instrumental music and accompanied dance transmitted from the Asian mainland in the fifth to ninth centuries (tōgaku and komagaku);

  3. 3.

    3. accompanied vocal music originating at the Heian-period court of the ninth and tenth centuries (saibara and rōei).

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3 This sub-section on imperial rites and gagaku is largely based on the author's Meiji kokka to gagaku (2009): Chapters 1 and 3.

4 In the Edo period, economic support from the Tokugawa shogunate made possible the revival of various court ceremonies, including the Daijō-sai (Rites of Imperial Succession), which had not been celebrated for more than two centuries. Revival of the ceremonies also required the revival of genres of gagaku (such as azuma-asobi, kumemai and saibara) that were indispensable parts of the ceremonies, often after gaps of several centuries. These revivals reached a peak in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the reigns of Emperors Kōkaku (r. 1779–1817) and Ninkō (r. 1817–1846). Azuma-asobi was revived in complete form in 1813, and kumemai in 1818. Emperor Kōmei (r. 1846–1866), who reigned during years when the shogunate was threatened by foreign forces, played the six-stringed zither wagon in kagura performances celebrated in prayer that the country be delivered from its difficulties; and between 1864 and 1866 he oversaw the revival of five major festivals at shrines in the vicinity of Kyoto. In this way, immediately before the Meiji Restoration, he succeeded in reviving court ceremony, and the gagaku that was necessary for its celebration, to the highest level it reached in the Edo period.

The Tokugawa shogunate, too, employed gagaku in its rites. Buddhist rites commemorating the ancestors of the Tokugawa shogun family were held in Nikkō (north of Tokyo) and Edo Castle (Tokyo), while the Confucian rite Sekiten was celebrated with gagaku (tōgaku) at the shogunate school Kōheikō. Many daimyō [feudal rulers], including Tayasu Munetake (1715–1771) and Tokugawa Harutomi (1771–1853), cultivated gagaku, collecting instruments and music notation, and performing themselves.

5 The designation of the Gagaku Kyoku has changed several times in subsequent years, as has the designation for the musicians who staff it, but matters have been simplified here to avoid confusing detail.

6 For further detail on the study of Western music by the court musicians, see Chapters 2 and 4 of the author's Meiji kokka to gagaku.

7 From 1879 several of the court musicians began independent study of string instruments, and the group eventually turned its hands to orchestral music.

8 This kindergarten was the first in Japan, and the songs, composed for the children to sing at the opening ceremony of the kindergarten, were hence called hoiku shōka. The first texts used were translations of those of Western songs in Froebel-method manuals, which were then set to melodies in the gagaku modes. But later the court musicians began to use older Japanese poems and newly written ones. For further detail about gagaku songs, including the hoiku shōka, see Hermann Gottschewski's article in this issue.

9 The terms rissen (from ritsusen) and ryosen are combinations of terms used traditionally to describe modality in tōgaku, namely ritsu and ryo, with the first character of the term senpō, a comparatively new word used to translate ‘mode’. As technical terms, they have been used since the Meiji era to indicate the modal structures of the gagaku modes. Rissen, the ritsu mode-type, is church Dorian in nature, with the first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth degrees as the five main tones, and the third and seventh degrees as two additional tones, forming both pentatonic and heptatonic structures. Ryosen, the ryo mode-type, is church Lydian in nature, with the first, second, third, fifth and sixth degrees as the five main tones, and the fourth and seventh degrees as two additional tones, again forming both pentatonic and heptatonic structures. The two 1877 hoiku shōka were the earliest examples of explicit naming with this system: ‘Kazaguruma’ [‘Windmill’] was composed in the pentatonic rissen ichikotsu-chō mode (on D), while ‘Fuyu no madoi’ [‘Winter gathering’] was composed in the pentatonic rissen banshiki-chō mode (on B). The theoretical range of modes made possible by treating each of the 12 tones of the octave as the tonic was later demonstrated using a circular graph with rotating plates (see Figure 1). This led to theoretical explanations similar to those concerning the Western keys; the 24 possible modes, 12 ritsu and 12 ryo, were likened to the 24, 12 major and 12 minor, of Western music (see the author's Meiji kokka to gagaku, 162–77). The scales of zokugaku, that is, the genres of Japanese traditional music other than gagaku, were first dealt with in Uehara Rokushirō's Zokugaku senritsu-kō [A study of the scales of common music] (Tokyo: Kinkōdō, 1895), where the terms yōsen and insen were used, with the approximate meanings of ‘major’ and ‘minor’. Uehara's theory was clearly informed by an understanding of the two mode-types of gagaku (Meiji kokka to gagaku, 176).

10 Two copies of the Nihon gagaku gaiben are held in the collection of Tokyo National Museum (call numbers Q–Wa1338 and Q–To2993). A copy of the English translation has yet to be found in Japan. What are believed to be the nine scrolls of music notation survive in the collection of the Archives and Mausolea Department of the Imperial Household Agency. For further detail, see the author's Meiji kokka to gagaku, 143–50.

11 A drum corps is a band with drum, flute or fife, and bugle. From the late Edo period to the dissolution of the feudal domains in 1871, the Western-style armed forces maintained by the shogunate and various domains had drum corps. The Army of the Meiji era, which adopted the French model, only had a bugle corps, while the Navy, which adopted the British model, had both a military band and drum corps attached to its Marine Corps, but with the abolition of the latter in 1876 the drum corps was also dissolved, with many of its members joining the military band. For details, see Chapter 3 of the author's Jūkyū seiki no Nihon ni okeru seiyō ongaku no juyō (1993).

12 Dutch drum calls were transmitted by the Dutch Navy at the shogunate's Nagasaki Naval Training Centre in 1854 to 1859. British bugle calls and drum-and-fife were introduced by way of the British regiment stationed in the Yokohama foreign settlement for its protection from 1863, while French bugle calls came via the military training provided by the first French military mission to Japan from 1866. This account of military music in Japan from the Bakumatsu years of the late Edo period to the Meiji era is based on Chapter 3 of the author's Jūkyū seiki no Nihon ni okeru seiyō ongaku no juyō. The following account of military ceremonial pieces is based on Chapter 7 of the author's Meiji kokka to gagaku.

13 Hermann Gottschewski points out that, while the current ‘Kimigayo’ uses a gagaku scale, its melodic shape echoes that of Fenton's earlier version. See ‘Hoiku shōka and the melody of Japanese national anthem Kimigayo’, Tōyō Ongaku Kenkyū [Journal of the Society for Research in Asiatic Music] 68 (2003), 8–10.

14 Since ‘Ashibiki’ is not in the Rikukaigun rappa-fu of 1885, the text appears to have been written between 1886 and 1891. In addition to the ceremonial pieces listed here, the Navy had two of its own ceremonial pieces composed: Ōkimi no (1882), the use of which is unknown; and Mizu tsuku kabane (1914), for worship at the Yasukuni Shrine and memorial services.

15 The author discovered a copy of the music notation (in the hand of Shiba Fujitsune) sent from the Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency to the Ministry of War in Gagakuroku [Record of gagaku] 1892 Issue 4 (in the collection of the Archives and Mausolea Department of the Imperial Household Agency). The revised melody was published in Kaigun gunka [Navy military songs], published by the Training Bureau of the Ministry of the Navy in 1914.

16 Furuya was a graduate of the Yokohama French School, and entered the Ministry of War, where he translated for Dagron. In 1882, as the first overseas students dispatched from the Army Military Band, he and Kudō Teiji travelled to Paris, where Furuya studied oboe under Georges Gillet at the Conservatoire from 1884 to 1885. Returning to Japan in 1889, he obtained a supervisory post with the Army band.

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18 This account of the birth of the eight ‘grand festival’ songs is based on the One-Hundred Year History of Tokyo University of the Arts, 498–505. The gazette included the texts and melodies of the songs; versions harmonized by Dittrich were published later as Shukujitsu taisaijitsu shōka jūon-fu [Songs for national holidays and grand festivals in multiple parts] (Tokyo: Tokyo Music School, 1900). ‘Niiname-sai’, which was written in a gagaku scale, was left unharmonized, while both ‘Genshi-sai’ and ‘Kigensetsu’ were only partially harmonized.