Japanese music history

In this completed draft I explore the ways in which gagaku, Japanese Imperial Court music, is deemed as other and not a part of Japanese culture. Utilizing the concepts of place as advanced by Jeff Malpas and practice as advanced by Todd May and Noel Carroll, I argue that scholarly narratives have contained gagaku in several counterfactual ways and try to undo those appraoches by seeing gagaku as a practice.　(Please also see the published version of this paper above.)

This chapter considers the posthumous duet as a performance medium in relation to the visual as well as aural. It considers the positive and negative rhetoric of ‘resurrection’, from a miraculous Christ-like second coming which encompasses a pleasurable nostalgia, to an uncomfortable morbidity associated with the gruesome exhumation of a corpse. This chapter summarises and challenges the positive and negative discourses of performing beyond the grave, with a focus on
performances on television – the more common incarnation of the posthumous duet. It begins by theorising the posthumous duet as sonic recontextualisation, explaining the overlapping modes of performance that reach beyond the binary categories of ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ (see Auslander, 2008; 2002). It continues with a short history of the posthumous duet before examining three case studies of televised posthumous duets from 2006 and 2007.

A look at the genre of music that is considered "Japanoise". The paper in question is a person reflection of what is "Japanoise" and how it influenced my work as a composer. The meat of the paper is reflections on Japanoise on a Canadian composer in the 21st century.

The work of Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955 in Hiroshima) exemplifies a connection between silence and the sphere of the sacred which is characteristic of Far East cultures. The goal of this paper is to determine the role of silence in the work of Hosokawa in the light of Japanese tradition, with particular reference to Zen Buddhism. The article discusses chosen aspects of the composer’s oeuvre already mentioned in the research, but present also in theoretical and aesthetic texts, interviews and commentaries provided by the composer himself. These elements are, inter alia, traditional Japanese music (gagaku, shōmyō, shakuhachi music), calligraphy, dō arts, ma principle, breath, and the nonlinear model of time or the concept of emptiness.

Revised and expanded version of a paper read at the 15th EAJS International Conference 2017 (Lisbon, Aug. 30 – Sept. 2, 2017) - Section 5, Panel S5b_15: Sound and music as medium. For the published version, see http://doc.rero.ch/record/329598.

Commonly said to embody the 'urbane' and 'refined' lifestyle of metropolitan Tokyo and to prefigure the transnational and consumerist characteristics of today's mainstream J-Pop, Japanese City Pop has undergone several recontextualizations since it first surfaced in the last quarter of the 20th century. I use City Pop as an example to interrogate the intermedial qualities of the processes at work in the emergence and sustenance of popular music genres. I first examine some common multi-semiotic (aural, visual and textual) characteristics of the musical products most commonly classified as City Pop, conceptualizing the genre as an example of intermedial translation. I then relate the results of this examination to select material from a small diachronic corpus of Japanese-language musical intertexts built from music history books, disc guides, and newspaper and music magazine articles published between 1977 and 2016. I identify actors in the discursive construction of City Pop as a genre and trace changes in the musical and extra-musical qualities attributed to it. Our contemporary understanding of the term 'City Pop' and our perception of the artists it points to are shown to have been strongly shaped by enthusiast press articles and popular musical histories written by a relatively small number of Japanese music journalists who integrated disparate and often contradictory artistic productions into a coherent genealogical narrative centered on the folk-rock band Happy End. My findings indicate the comparatively strong importance of etic text-based narratives over emic musical properties or short-term music industry marketing strategies in the construction of City Pop as a popular music genre, pointing to the fundamental primacy of language/writing in what Jens Schröter has termed 'ontological intermediality.'

In conversation with Arvo Pärt Enzo Restagno rightly noted: ‘I believe that a real point of contact between Japanese musical tradition and your music is to be found in the role that silence plays in both.’ Indeed, the comparison of musical aesthetics of Pärt and Toshio Hosokawa, who represents the musical tradition of Japan, do exhibit many surprising similarities. Neither of them would see silence as absence of sound. It constitutes an important element of thinking about music and creating the pieces. For both of them silence may be connected with the sphere of the sacred, the non-linear model of time, the practice of meditation (metaphors of breath) and concentration. The last one is something they practice as composers while writing music, and something they expect from performers and listeners of their pieces. Both artists entitled their entire works or parts of some compositions making some references to silence. It is important, however, to remember the difference in perception of silence by the traditions to which the composers ascribe to (Hesychasm and Zen Buddhism).

The Occupation of Japan by Allied forces following World War II marked an unprecedented incursion of outside (soto) influence into Japanese affairs.  From the Meiji Restoration through WWII, the Japanese government had practiced censorship, especially of Western ideas, but General MacArthur’s “Press Code for Japan,” enforced by Occupation forces, codified appropriate topics of national discourse from a new, foreign angle.  This paper examines one facet of postwar music culture: the censorship of published ryūkōka, a style of popular song mixing Japanese and Western musical idioms.  Ryūkōka—popular in the decades before WWII but ostensibly forced out of public attention in favor of military tunes as Japan focused on the war effort—surged into popularity again after the war, and its publication was subject to Allied censorship following the new Press Code.  While this music was first subject to choices made by Japanese songwriters and performers about what kinds of topics should be “in” and “out,” the published music that consumers could purchase was subject to a second, foreign interpretation of appropriateness, and these two viewpoints, one from inside and one from outside, did not always agree.  Through an examination of censored materials in the Gordon W. Prange Collection, this paper explores the negotiation of these viewpoints and ideas about Japanese musical identity during the Occupation.

This paper traces a single f apanese folk song, the herring-fit\ing song 'S6ran -Bushi', as it suriives the loss of its original function to flourish in versions suited to a number of different contexts and musical genres. No longer a functioning work song, it can instead be found: in nearly its traditional unaccompanied form as performed by 'preservation societies' ; in professional folk song stage arrangements with traditional instruments added; in veisions accompanied by Western instruments, whether jazz, rock or classical; in quotations-in the enka genre of popular song as a symbol of traditional lifeways; and in yet other guises.

Among the myriad of writings on Takemitsu, the theme of the Japanese garden, conceptualized here as the “Musical Garden”, is not infrequent, but is seldom examined as an aesthetic end in Takemitsu’s works. This essay’s goal will be to provide and conclude on a comprehensive synthesis of previous analysis on the subject, in order to understand the concept of the Musical Garden and how it sheds light on Takemitsu’s music, especially in regards to the listener’s experience. Unlike other publications on Takemitsu which deal with advanced analysis of musical notation, this essay will be focusing mainly on the aesthetic principles which frame both his music and the Japanese garden and give meaning to our encounters and exposure to these artforms. In this study, and in a concern of aesthetic heritage, cultural Japanese specificities will be written in kanji characters. Ultimately, this subject is abstract and metaphorical, and one must not expect a rigorously scientific or demonstrative approach, but rather a free, hypothetical yet strongly supported one.

Minoru Miki’s orchestral work Jo no kyoku, Prelude for Shakuhachi, Koto, Shamisen and Strings (1969), exemplifies the postwar synthesis of atonality and Japanese tradition. Miki adopted pitch-class sets from the Japanese modes as dominant motivic cells, and modulated the nuclear tones by transposing the cells to articulate musical space and pitch organization. He aimed to reemphasize that Japanese modes are rooted in the cycle of fifths from Chinese modal theory. His progression through nuclear tones separated by fifths conforms to the jo-ha-kyu structure, an asymmetrical arc (gradually rising to a climax and then falling sharply) found throughout the Japanese performing arts. Jo No Kyoku’s cross-cultural characteristics reflect Miki’s conviction that intercultural communication and harmony between the East and West are necessary and fundamental sources of world peace.

大都市・東京における「都会的」で「洗練」されたライフスタイルを具体的に表現し、こ んにち主流となっている J-POP のトランスナショナルで消費主義的な特色を先取りするも のとして、日本の「シティ・ポップ City Pop」は最初に登場した 20 世紀最後の四半期から 現在にかけ、様々な再文脈化を経験してきた。本稿ではこのシティ・ポップを、ポピュラー 音楽のジャンル概念が出現し存続していくプロセスにおける、間メディア的（intermedial） な本質を調査するための一例として用いる。まず、もっとも一般的にシティ・ポップとして 分類されている音楽製作物に共通する複数の記号的（聴覚、視覚、テキスト）特徴がジャン ルとして概念化されていく過程を、間メディア的変換の一例として考察する。そして、1977 年から 2016 年にかけて出版された音楽史の書籍、ディスク・ガイド、新聞、音楽雑誌の記 事によって構成される日本語の音楽関連の小規模なコーパスから資料をピックアップし、調 査結果と結びつけていく。その上で、本稿はシティ・ポップをジャンルとして言説的に構築 していった行為者を特定し、それらが音楽に、あるいは音楽以外の性質に与えていった変化 を追っていく。そして現在におけるわれわれの「シティ・ポップ」という用語に対する理解 や、この語が指し示すアーティスト認識が、比較的少数の日本人音楽ジャーナリストによる、 熱狂的でマニアックな雑誌記事やポピュラー音楽史によって大きく形作られてきたことを明 らかにする。このような人々の手によって、多種多様でしばしば正反対の特徴を持つ音楽作 品群は、フォーク・ロックバンドのはっぴいえんどを中心に据えた一貫性のある系譜的「語 り」へとまとめ上げられていったからである。以上の分析を踏まえ、本稿はイェンツ・シュ レーター Jens Schröter のいう「存在論的間メディア性」における言語／記述の根本的な優 位性を参照しつつ、ポピュラー音楽ジャンルとしての「シティ・ポップ」の構築において、 イーミック（文化内在的）な音楽的特性や短期的な音楽産業のマーケティング戦略よりも、 エティック（文化外在的）なテキストベースの「語り」の方が強い重要性を持つ、というこ とを示す。

"This article examines the songs that Japanese schoolchildren learned during World War II and their impact on children’s lives. These songs were filled with propaganda such as Japan’s superiority over other nations, the glory of dying for the country, and the joys of working in weapons factories. The study addresses questions such as: what values were these songs reinforcing? What behaviors were being encouraged? What legacy did they leave in the minds of the children who sang them, after the war had ended? Personal stories were obtained from individuals who attended elementary school during World War II. It is shown that the children who grew up during the war internalized the values promoted by these wartime songs and acted upon them as adults; they also passed it on to their own children.
"

Keywords: Maori music / Brass bands / Ratana bands / Juji Nakada

Genre: Original cross-national historical research.

Discusses: "some musical implications of the historical relations between Maori prophet Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana (1873-1939) and Japanese Rev. Juji Nakada (1870-1939), as reflected in contemporary brass bands and liturgical practices."

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15th EAJS International Conference 2017 (Lisbon, Aug. 30 – Sept. 2, 2017) - Section 5, Panel S5b_15: Sound and music as medium.

For the paper to this presentation, see https://www.academia.edu/34512419/Intermediality_and_the_discursive_construction_of_popular_music_genres_the_case_of_Japanese_City_Pop

This presentation examines the discursive history of Japanese City Pop to interrogate the intermedial processes at work in the construction of popular music genres. A corpus of musical intertexts is examined and related to the (extra-)musical qualities of media artefacts commonly associated with City Pop.

Music in The Tale of Genji and the Heian Period is not only conveyed by traditional instruments such as the flute, koto, and strings, but also deeply affected and enveloped by the sounds of nature. The euphony of the surroundings profoundly bears upon the result of great music in reciprocation to the fact that the channel of great music also deeply affects the liveliness of the surrounding source. This interrelation is emphasized to a great extent in The Tale of Genji, and contribute greatly to the birth of emotion, attraction, romance, sadness, and guilt in the novel. There are several instances in this novel in which the sound of nature bore the exposure of deep emotions in the character and draw a path to where the story and the character's fate is headed. Of the several instances, the following depiction by Shikibu conveys an idea of the music, itself, in the Heian Period:

The music of Tōru Takemitsu is often stated to be essentially Japanese. However, previous studies on Takemitsu tend to highlight the composer’s reception of Japanese aesthetics and philosophy rather than his preoccupation with Japan’s various musical traditions. This study traces the influence of these traditions in a particular segment of Takemitsu’s oeuvre, namely, the piano works. Analyses of selected pieces from this repertoire will show how tradition and innovation (the provenance of which is not always apparent) have merged into Takemitsu’s highly distinctive musical language.

This seminar examines Japanese popular culture from historical and theoretical perspectives. It offers a deeper understanding of various pop-cultural phenomena as they developed in historical and contemporary Japan. While introducing students to the basic social theories of popular culture, we conduct analyses of topics such as kabuki, ukiyo-e, kami-shibai, moga, anime, J-cinema, and J-pop. Throughout the course, we will also take a closer look at the affective-economic relationship between the Japanese idol industry and the devoted subcultural communities "otaku". The general implication of the course is that popular culture is not always a spontaneous representation of our ideas and beliefs. To examine this, we will observe the mutual influence of institutional environments and (pop)cultural scripts throughout the course of Japanese history. This will enable students to study how Japanese popular culture is both generative and constitutive, simultaneously creating and reflecting the zeitgeist in which it emerges.

This article discusses the state of music theory in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan, where musicians were invested in finding ways to map theories of traditional Japanese music and those of European tonality onto each other. By focusing on two theorists from the late nineteenth century (Isawa Shūji and Uehara Rokushirō) and one from soon after World War II (Koizumi Fumio), I demonstrate the coexistence of many contradictory ways of analyzing much of the music that came out of this period and afterward. My analysis of their various types of mapping draws out the cultural implications and goals that lie behind their strategies, which reflect the different ways in which they were hoping to situate Japanese music in a wider global context, whether as part of nineteenth-century nation-building or postwar reemergence.

Through analysis of several pieces written between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I suggest that the most effective lens is one that freely borrows elements from various theorists and traditions to create analyses that are as hybridized as the pieces themselves. Examples are drawn from a wide variety of genres—children’s songs, wartime soldiers’ songs, enka (nostalgic popular music), and film music—to demonstrate the wide reach of these hybridized tonal systems. By extension, analogous models could also be applied to musical traditions elsewhere in the world that blend Western tonal and non-Western elements.

Hide es quizá una de las figuras mas influyentes en la historia de la música japonesa contemporánea porque más allá de su trabajo y luego de su muerte su figura se elevo a alturas nunca antes vistas en su país.

Hide is maybe one of  the most influential figures in the contemporaneous japanese music history because beyond his work and after his death his figure rose to heighs never seen before in his country.

Chapter available in Music in Video Games: Studying Play (Routledge, 2014).

"The Temporary Avatar Zone: Pico-Pico Parties in Tokyo" examines the ways the aesthetics and experiential affordances of gaming can re-emerge as components of music cultures and how music can serve as a tool to invoke these components in the absence of the game. Drawing on fieldwork completed in Tokyo in 2004, it approaches these themes through an examination of the recordings and live performance environments of the Pico-Pico music scene. Close readings of recordings by the groups YMCK and Hazel Nuts Chocolate reveal Pico-Pico's unique approach to invoking the sonic environments of gaming and positioning listeners as avatar-like bodies occupying game space.

Integral to the multifaceted and arguably elusive contextuality of musicology is a network of shifting dynamics between musical and extra-musical forces. Ironically, Stravinsky’s writings on his early cross-cultural explorations – namely japonisme – expose the diversity and magnitude of the latter force (sources of inspiration from Japanese poems and artworks) but evade altogether the important issue regarding the former force (musical influences from Japan). Unacknowledged yet indispensable to the compositional craftsmanship of Stravinsky and his Parisian circle, the musical undercurrent in japonisme is a crucial context to be reconstructed through a combination of textual interpretation, analytical scrutiny and archival research endeavour. Probing into the reception of traditional Japanese music in as monumental a piece as Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire (1913), the present study unravels a modernist appropriation of Japanese scales in Stravinsky’s Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise (1912–13). I contend that the pitch materials essential to his pentatonic procedures are paradoxically not the five-note scales (in scale and yō scale) in their entirety, but two cells central to the melodic heritage of Japan: the “in-scale trichord” and the “yō-scale tetrachord”. Contextualizing Stravinsky’s Japanese musical influence, I pinpoint a quartal harmony in Sept haï-kaïs (1923) by Maurice Delage – the dedicatee of Stravinsky’s piece borrowing the “in-scale trichord” – and interpret it as a remarkable derivative of the in-scale. The revealed facet of musical forces underlying japonsime – (an)hemitonic pentatonicism – renews our perspectives on Stravinsky’s French connections in the early twentieth century.

It is often pointed out that Japanese religion centers on “worldly benefits” (genze riyaku) and on practices allowing a petitioner to attain divine boons. Since high and low, rich and poor, young and old have always pined for such benefits, religious practice is easily viewed as a force unifying all social
classes and strata. This article questions such a notion by examining the religious activities and performances of blind women (goze) of Echigo province (present-day Niigata prefecture). Like other itinerant performers, goze often
performed songs linked to the procurement of this-worldly or practical benefits. One favorite was called harugoma, and was intimately linked to silk production; another was manzai, which ushered in good luck, health, and wealth during the New Year’s season. This article presents annotated translations of these two goze songs and analyzes the social meanings of performances, both for performers and listeners. It demonstrates that the pursuit of this-worldly
benefits through religious practice contributed just as much to the identification, maintenance, and reproduction of social differences as to social harmony and unification.

The musicians attached to the Music Department of the Japanese Imperial Household are responsible for the performance of many kinds of music: Western music for the Emperor's banquets, the various types of court music, Gagaku for ceremonial events as well for some secular performances. The large group of songs used in connection with the sacred Shinto Mi-Kagura ceremony are regarded by these musicians as the most important aspect of their tradition. Yet they are perhaps the type of Gagaku least known outside the court. The term Kagura is widely used throughout Japan in reference to music employed in connection with the Shintoism. The etymology of the word is unclear. In ancient Japanese it seems to have meant " place of the gods, " or " seat of the gods. " Like many other native Japanese words, Kagura came to be written with Chinese characters the meanings of which differed from the original Japanese. In this case the Chinese characters employed mean " Music of the Gods. " The Chinese and Korean musical styles that were introduced into Japan with Buddhism beginning in the fifth century A. D. exerted some influence on Shinto music. Court life in Ja-pan of the sixth to the twelfth centuries and the complex system of instrumental music which it required and supported were indeed based on Chinese patterns. The vocal music, however, and in particular those songs used in connection with Shinto ritual, followed the irregular phrase and rhythmic patterns of Japanese poetry. Two separate governmentally established departments of music and dance existed, one for the practice and performance of foreign instrumental music, the other for the practice and performance of Japanese vocal music. Although many kinds of music are known as " Kagura, " only the Kagura used by the court musicians in connection with the Mi-Kagura ceremony has a long history of continuous performance , making it the oldest autochthonous tradition in Japan. We can be certain that the tradition has been continuous, but not that it has remained unchanged. The Kagura songs seem to have been established in the early eleventh century at the old capital city of Heian, now called Kyoto. Most of the songs were new compositions though some may have been incorporations of earlier Shinto ritual music and others were adaptations from the large number of folk songs that were then very popular at court. From the time of its inception, the Mi-Kagu-ra ceremony was performed by the court nobles, often including the Emperor himself, and the highest ranking of the professional guild families of musicians, the Ono clan. Later, when wind instruments were added to the performance, other court musicians from the Kyoto families were required to perform. The Abe family supplied the hichiriki player and the Yamanoii family or the Toyohara family supplied the fue player. Performance of the Mi-Kagura seems to have always been an event of great solemnity held far from the populace within the walls of the old palace in Kyoto. In modern times when the capital was moved to Tokyo, Emperor Meiji requested the Imperial Court musicians to continue the Mi-Kagura performances without his participation and without that of the court nobles. Whereas in former times only the Kyoto musicians performed the Kagura, today they are joined by the Osaka and Nara families of musicians and all three groups perform as a unit, the Court Musicians of the Tokyo Imperial Palace. Although his presence is no longer required, the emperor must, on the night of a Kagura performance, await a signal from his chamberlain informing him that the ceremony is

Dear colleagues,
We invite expressions of interest for the role of interlocutor for the Study Session "Decoloniality and the Global Turn: New Perspectives for the History of Early Music" that will take place at the next Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society (Athens, 22-26 August 2022).

We are looking for six interlocutors that will actively participate in the Study Session by responding and formulating questions, each to one of the three invited speakers: Janie Cole (University of Cape Town), Liam Hynes-Tawa (Yale University), and Andrew Hicks (Cornell University).

Ценова-Нушева, Миглена. "Японски разбирания за музиката и проявлението им в театър Кабуки (歌舞伎). Влияние на дзен (禅) върху японската традиционна музика и върху театър Кабуки". - В: Музикални хоризонти, 2017, № 6, с. 16 - 21.

Tzenova-Nusheva, Miglena. "Japanese Understandings of Music and Their Manifestation in Kabuki Theatre (歌舞伎). The Influence of Zen (禅) on Japanese Traditional Music and on Kabuki Theatre" In Musical Horizons, 2017, No 6, pp. 16 - 21.

Key words: Japanese understandings of music, Japanese traditional music, music in Kabuki theatre

Abstract
Kabuki theatre was found in 1603 by Izumo no Okuni (出雲阿国), a supplementary priestess – miko in the Shinto Grand Shrine of Izumo (Izumo Taisha, 出雲大社). Izumo no Okuni was a talented dancer with creative and progressive thinking who started performing short theatrical plays in 1596 in order to provide for the upkeep of the shrine. Preserved images of her performances show the constant presence of musicians on the stage. Okuni herself is often depicted with a little gong in her hands.
While I was studying the music of the genre of Kabuki, I was left with the impression that Kabuki theatre reflects the Japanese understandings of music and sound. Although, I hadn’t come across such an approach, I decided to carry on studying the connection between the music of the genre and the Japanese understandings and rituals, because in order to be fully aware of the place that music took in Kabuki we have to comprehend the Japanese understandings of music, sound and the creative process.
The research work is based on interdisciplinary approach, which combines historical, analytical, comparative, music-theoretical, social anthropological, etc. knowledge.

Assoc. Prof. Miglena Tzenova-Nusheva, Ph. D.
Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Gagaku is a centuries old tradition, dating as far back as 453CE. I examine the history and development of Japan's ancient court music, demonstrating how it has responded to cultural and political events, including the Meiji Restoration. I use musicians Togi Hideki, Toru Takemitsu, and gagaku ensemble Reigakusha as examples of how gagaku has been adapted to match Japan's current international status, and how UNESCO's current attempts at 'safeguarding' conflict with this.

This article interrogates how the small Japanese island of Enoshima (江の島) signifies island heritage across space and place. Applying a critical approach at the intersection of island studies and heritage studies, Enoshima is explored through the lens of observational study in connection with the three interconnected themes of environment, ritual, and creative arts, with each illuminating knowledge on the place of the island in a broader terrestrial and cultural setting. Rather than looking in detail at heritage roots, emphasis is given to interpreting key thematic routes of heritage construction. This interdisciplinary line of inquiry consolidates and extends scholarly thought within the fi eld of island studies and pertains to island boundaries on the one hand and island signifi cation on the other. These interconnected and overlapping areas of thought offer a way of situating Enoshima within an interpretative scholarly framework where an island and its heritage are considered within and beyond the physical and geographic borders of land and sea.

This article takes a look at the role of tone-colour in Japanese traditional music, in particular in shakuhachi music, suggesting that the solo pieces o the honkyoku repertoire are first of all tone-colour melodies, and not melodies as the term is currently defined in music.

When punk impressed itself upon Japanese youth culture in the mid-to-late 1970s, it arrived at a time when the nation’s film industry was in crisis. The studio system that had presided over film production for decades was in serious decline, curbing opportunities for the next generation of filmmaking talent by ceasing to take on new apprentices. Inspired by the DIY ideology of the emerging punk scene, young, aspiring filmmakers took matters into their own hands by forming small clubs to self-produce zero-budget short and feature-length films on their own terms, relying on friends, classmates, musicians and other hangers-on, and using relatively cheap Super 8 and 16mm filmmaking equipment. In doing so, punk-inspired 'jishu seisaku eiga' (‘autonomously-produced cinema’) became an exciting nonprofessional alternative to the stagnating professional studio system, with many of its amateur participants going on to become influential figures within the Japanese film industry of today. This presentation seeks to provide an audio-visual exploration of punk’s overlooked emergence in Japan, its impact on (and synthesis with) 'jishu' film production, it being a catalyst for important aesthetic schisms such as ‘cyberpunk’, and how it mobilised Japanese cinema to rejuvenate itself. [This paper was subsequently expanded and published as an article with the same name in: Punk and Post Punk, Vol.6, No.1. pp.97-121]

This paper illustrates an endemic vision of musique concrète that rises in 1950's Tokyo. By means of historical research and the analysis of two works by Toru Takemitsu, it deepens into aesthetical questions about Japanese musique concrète, evinces technical aspects of Takemitsu's works and proposes discussions about the contrasts between Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète and our object of study.

Elements in Hugo Riemann’s late universalist music theory - disclosed in condensed form in his "Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien" (1916) - took a surprising, even nationalistically biased turn in Japan during the 1930s and 40s. Riemann’s approach to Chinese and Japanese music is reviewed here in the broader context of musicology around 1900 (Rudolf Dittrich, Georg Capellen, Abraham J. Polak, Abraham/Hornbostel etc.) as well as the narrower one of Japanese musical modernity between 1900 and 1945 (Kōsaku Yamada, Shūkichi Mitsukuri, Klaus Pringsheim, Shōhei Tanaka, Fumio Hayasaka). The multiple re-interpretations of the fundamentals of East Asian music that resulted from these discourses provide ample evidence for the high relevance of "invented traditions" (Eric Hobsbawm) in global music history - attempts to demonstrate the constructivist character of musical identities as they are insufficiently covered by concept of "transculturality."