Japanese Shamisen Music Research

Culture “at Work” in Music: Traditional Japanese Nagauta Shamisen by Arthur Li: 1002129467 HMU111 Word Count: 1200 TA: Jennifer Horton October 6th, 2017 !1 The purpose of this essay is to challenge our traditional Western perception of world music, and act as a learning process for others to experience second-hand and perhaps draw from in their dealings with unfamiliar cultures. I compare the performance and treatment of a music that I am familiar with with one that I am not: traditional Japanese music. In learning more about the culture of Japanese music I hope I can expose some internal biases many people have toward world musics and take steps toward understanding the “musical ideals”—the criteria with which a people judges its own music (Nettl, 1-19)—of a culture vastly different from my own. My instance of ‘familiar music’ is the Men’s Chorus I am a part of at the University of Toronto. The ensemble is currently preparing for several performance events to be held later in the semester, open to the general public. One of the pieces of our repertoire is “Don’t Give Me the Whole Truth”, a piece for TTBB chorus & Piano by Imant Raminsh. Heavy emphasis is placed during rehearsals on the precision and accuracy of each sections’ tone (e.g. subtle differences in vowel sounds), diction, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, etc: as is expected of a coordinated choral ensemble. There is less room for artistic freedom and interpretation in a setting where the homogeneity of our sound is more important. We are taught to isolate the rhythm of the piece (a tricky one alternating between 3/4 and 7/8 meter), and to pay attention to the timings and phrasing as noted on the score. Sectionals are held to ensure that each member understands their part in the piece’s harmonies. The approach is similar to the construction of a building, in that the layers of the music are checked for uniformity and stacked one by one before eventually reaching a completed artistic product. !2 In beginning to understand the culture and music of traditional Japanese music, I listened to an audio recording of a nagauta recorded by the Kineya Ensemble. The nagauta, literally “long song”, is a kind of traditional Japanese music which accompanies classical dance-drama theater. The genre was developed in the eighteenth century. It is typically accompanied by the shamisen, a type of Japanese plucked lute about a meter long and with three strings, and by drums. (Johnson, 1) I was struck by almost every aspect of the music upon first listen. The diction of the Japanese language in song is immediately impressionable. It is animated and vivid, with force and expression behind each word. The voices, either solo or in what appears to be two-part unisons, tend to slide and inflect with ease, never staying on a pitch for long but often holding a line for impressive durations. There are added interjections voiced behind the melody in certain parts, surfacing for one or two vowels at most. The samisen sounds twangy, and the plucking seems forceful but precise. It is usually plucked with a plectrum held in the player’s hand (Johnson, 1), which may explain its percussive quality (there is an example of this at 16:39 in the cited recording). The shamisen is played very rhythmically, but there is no clear meter as the playing is an indistinguishable and unending drone of quarter and eighth notes that seem to rest on only a few pitches. A flute joins the instrumentation intermittently, and soft drums are heard for the majority of the songs’ durations. In some stretches (and in my humble opinion), the singing starts to drag on, with little to no development of a clear musical motif or structural progression in the song. There are instrumental sections from time to time; these can get rather spirited and allow for the samisen, drums and flute to take the center stage. When they were not interacting with !3 each other rhythmically, I found myself getting complacent and viewing them as dry accompaniment at best. To understand the culture of this music further and move beyond my initial impressions, I studied the research several ethnomusicologists have done on shamisen music and especially nagauta shamisen. I learned that the teaching of nagauta shamisen involves a very intense training process. Ethnomusicologist Jay Keister, who himself studied the genre under master artist Kikuoka Hiroaka, describes it as a “powerful experience” and a “rite of passage” having undergone 22 months of lessons. The training is “tailored to the individual and results in a personal transformation of the student, which is the primary goal of nagauta.” (Keister, 29) In traditional Japanese music, as is true for other traditional music of East Asia, less value is placed on the finished artistic product than on the development and mastery of the skills and principles of the art form by individual musicians. This is why, according to Keister, “acclaimed master musicians of nagauta such as Kikuoka [have] the ability to discern the character and feelings of individual players solely through listening to their performance of the music.” (Keister, 36) That concept of innately apparent personalized musical quality is different from the way the individual performer is treated in the Men’s Chorus. Through my research I also learned that the majority of traditional Japanese music is composed in duple meter. The meter is however applied “in such a flexible manner that a regular, pronounced alternation of strong and weak beats does not occur. This feeling of rhythmic freedom is enhanced by a tendency of the voice to lag somewhat behind the !4 instrument.” (Adriaansz, 15) This explains perhaps why I could not discern a stable meter and why the singing seemed to drag on to me. Keister explains in some detail the idiosyncrasies of the nagauta style: “learning from Kikuoka how to sing properly involved knowing which words receive special emphasis through the use of slight microtonal pitch movement up or down, special embellishments such as glissando or grace notes, timbral modification of the voice, and other subtle vocal techniques not indicated in the notation.” (40) The tendencies to deviate slightly in pitch and modify the timbre of their voice are examples of stylistic differences in nagauta that a musician from a vastly different culture might initially perceive as jarring or non-musical. To learn that these qualities are skills and techniques so subtle that they are not even notated is humbling; it also makes me consider what qualities of my own culture’s music are so deeply ingrained in my mind and my scores that I don’t realize how strange they may seem to an outside listener. Listening to the nagauta again, a few things are different: I don’t hear the lag of the voice or its unstable wavering as failings, but as signs of style. The emotion in the voice is not a part of a finished product, but a part of the performer’s long-winded aesthetic and personal pursuit of the art form. I believe in modifying my own perception of the music I have come to understand how traditional Japanese arts differ fundamentally from the Western world’s. To understand that these differences manifest themselves in the sound of the a culture’s music is to stray away from ethnocentrism and immerse oneself in other cultures as rich and historied as our own. !5 Bibliography “Nagauta - Kabuki Music - Kineya Ensemble.” Collection Ocora Radio France, Youtube. 1 Dec. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD1Rfi5OoZY. Johnson, Henry Mabley. The Shamisen: Tradition and Diversity. Brill, 2010. Adriaansz, Willem. Introduction to Shamisen Kumiuta, Uitgeverij Frits Knuf Buren/Netherlands, 1978. Nettl, Bruno. Excerpts from Chapter I, Introduction: Studying Musics of the World's Cultures. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004, pp.1-19. Keister, Jay. Shaped by Japanese Music: Kikuoka Hiroaki and Nagauta Shamisen in Tokyo. Routledge, 2004. !6