10/27 - The Music-Culture of Japan

I told Zoe I'd be writing about South Indian or Navajo music today, but I couldn't find enough about Navajo music and you already know all the South Indian stuff. Even though it is a Wednesday. Sorry Zoe.

I'll bet that she will like this topic more, though.

Japan may seem like a pretty intimidating place. Don't let it be that way. Think of them as excited.

Japan was a pretty isolated place for a while. People have been living there since 30,000 BC, learning how to grow rice and make pottery and make music without help from the outside world which may have figured it out first, who's to say. But for over 30,000 years, Japanese people didn't have any influences but themselves. So they made their own style of music, which is truly uninfluenced Japanese classical music. Around 400 AD, Japan met China, and they fell in love and spoke each others languages and made each other porcelain and fancy silks and sang each others love songs to each other, and that's where Chinese influence trickles in. Soon after, some Koreans came over, and some other SE Asians, and some Mongolians, and brought their musical styles with them, and the Japanese people were really excited to play with their new toys. Japanese classical music history really revolves around when people arrived from different parts of Asia with new instruments and practices, and when they picked up on it.

Even today, when Western pop is going strong, the Japanese have put Western ideas to work for themselves. Japanese pop is similar to today's American pop, but in my opinion, overdone, which I guess is what makes it popular? If it were in English, American kids would eat it up and sit around all day listening to it. But they still play their folk music, our classical music, our country music (why?!), and even jazz. We learned about Toshiko Akiyoshi, a Chinese-born, Japanese-raised American citizen who arranges jazz charts and has her own big band, and some of them certainly have Japanese textures, melodies or tones in the music.

They're not just copycats though. They appreciate the music of the cultures surrounding them AND learn about their own musical heritage. Japanese children learn to play recorder (which is pretty similar to the shakuhachi, we'll get there) and sing Japanese, American, and European songs, and most of them also take private lessons on another classical instrument. No wonder they're all geniuses. They're being told to have a broad focus, and to take as much in as possible, as much as they can stand, while we just make sure our kids are meeting the standards.

Wow. Sorry this blog is kinda judgmental today.

Fortunately, the Japanese learned their scales from the Chinese, who used the 12 tone system like Europe did. So nothing like slendro or pelog today. But, sometimes the exact frequency intervals differ in traditional music depending on the genre and who you learn it from.

It is widely believed that there are three scales commonly used in Japanese traditional music, two for folk songs and one for koto and shamisen music, all three pentatonic.

In/or/Miyako-bushi - C Db F G Ab C (Eb and Bb rarely played)
Yo - C D F G A C (Eb and Bb rare)
Minyo - C Eb F G Bb C

I don't know why people always think of music played solely on notes in the Western pentatonic scale sounds Japanese; I guess Yo is close, but it's not C D E G A C, it C D F.

Japanese musicians often recreate the sounds of nature while playing melodies since, in Shinto (the indigenous Japanese religion), rocks and trees and mountains and rivers also have spirits that can be communicated with. So whether it's the shakuhachi player sounding breathy to imitate wind in the trees or the twang of the shamisen, they're doing it on purpose, remember that.

By the way, the shakuhachi is a bamboo flute, held like a recorder; it's known to be a more spiritual and meditative instrument. The shamisen is a lute, and it is emotional and dramatic. A koto is a 13 stringed zither, and it is graceful.

Japanese melodies are kinda hard to briefly generalize. They often contain short little themes that are often repeated, like a theme in a classical work or a raga in Indian music, and they use these quotes to inform audiences of the kabuki theatre of the thoughts of a character, or perhaps to foreshadow. Sometimes the melodies may seem to change rather slowly, while, to the trained ear, the dynamic and timbre changes very rapidly. Japanese music has little harmony before being exposed to Western music, and if there are leaps, they prefer to use perfect 4ths.

Japanese music usually has a very flexible pulse. Western music, which has dynamically accented, even notes in groups of two, three, four, or even six, tends to lend itself to having a time signature, and the patterns of accent dictate which one. Since Japanese music has more irregular intervals between beats, it would be hard to describe a time signature, so they don't use one, therefore there's little need for a pulse.
- If it does have a pulse though, it will be in duple meter. Triple meter is most commonly found in children's songs. The pulse ranges from very slow to very fast, and in kabuki music, tempo builds when excitement or tension builds.

Common Japanese musical form is Jo-ha-kyu.

Jo "introduction", slow beginning section.
Ha "breaking apart", the falling apart of the beginning slow tempo, tempo escalates
Kyu "rushing", tempo reaches its peak, then slows to the end of the piece.

Here's a little example:



Then the book talks about the music of the main three instruments for twenty pages. I don't have time for that, and neither do you.

Kabuki theatre music is traditionally performed by a shamisen player and a tayu, a singer-narrator, and if other instruments are needed, they sit on a smaller stage and appear from behind a rotating wall when they need to play. It's dramatic. The shamisen and tayu try to fill the puppets with life and human emotion so that the audience is moved by the performance. They don't use microphones, so full fortes are only achieved with years of practice, training, and stamina.

Japanese folk song is similar to any other place's folk songs. They are songs of the people, for the people by the people, in the past used to accompany daily tasks while in the present used as a romantic vision of what it would be like to get out of a desk job; Japan is a very desk job-y place, to be honest. Folk songs sound different according to region of the country, and can be categorized as such, but no matter where they're from, they're still enjoyable today because they were traditionally sung by workers, not professionals, and Japanese people can still easily learn and appreciate them. They have a version of American Idol where the panel of experts judges a singers rendition of a folk song and tells them if their vibrato is too broad or if they're being too dramatic. It's funny to think about.

Japanese pop fits these five characteristics, which could probably sum up all pop music:
1. It has a set time limit (3 to 5 minutes). The longest Ke$ha song I can find is 3:57, and you're still making me pay $1.29 for it? I should be paid to listen to Ke$ha.
2. It focuses on themes relevant to a broad public, see "You Belong With Me" (though sometimes regions or specific groups are targeted, see "California Girls")
3. Stanza form and a steady beat, making the music more accessible. See "Golddigger"
4. Performers' attempts in live performance to duplicate recorded performance so as to fulfill audience expectations. (Usher might want to look into that, actually...)
5. Dramatic rise and fall in popularity in time. Side note, Justin Bieber doesn't have a song in the iTunes Top 100. Not even close.

Karaoke is a Japanese style of music, since it was invented by a Japanese man. Karaoke songs were originally and still are predominantly "enka" in Japan. Enka were political songs about the tyrannies of other parties at the start but it slowly progressed to nostalgic, longing tunes. So I guess those old people you see singing on cruise ships are doing it right. Traditionally, of course.

Fortunately, the chapter has run out of information important to us at approximately the same time that my patience and energy have worn out, if you can't already tell in my writing, hehe.

I'm going to bed. I hope you enjoyed your little break from South Indian Wednesdays. This was a lot of info to read though. Dang. Congratulations, you intelligent, charming character.

Oh man.

M