Analytical Perspectives on Traditional Japanese Music

The Hitoyogiri Shakuhachi, originally known simply as “shakuhachi” until modern variants arose, is an ancient Japanese transverse flute made from a “one-node cut” (the meaning of hitoyogiri) of bamboo. This five-holed flute was played most notably by Pure Land and Zen Buddhists such as the monk-poet Ton’a (d. 1372) and Ikkyu (d. 1481). Its free-rhythm melodies, rather than being used in entertainment contexts as with popular music, were used more as a means of contemplation. While the instrument’s repertoire died out some time in the 19th century, its players left behind ample clues and instructive manuals to allow us in the present to reconstruct something close to what was being played, provided that we are allowed to supplement science with some degree of art and intuition. The first task falls in the realm of science, however. From existing score collections and commentaries (written primarily by Omori Sokun in the early 1600’s), we are able to determine the nature of the music (free rhythm, modal melodies that shift with the seasons), the fingerings that are indicated by scores, and the various tones that are employed in each mode, as well as techniques that are specific to the instrument. Much in terms of musical theory can also be gleaned from these documents, and further elucidated by means of theoretical texts of adjacent musics of the same period – namely, Shomyo (Buddhist chant) of the Tendai school, and secondarily Gagaku. At this stage, the fundamentals are well situated so as to be able to play the pieces, but questions still remain. Where scientific inquiry using primary and secondary sources fails to provide answers, we are not without recourse. Stories from players, as well as the cadence of Gagaku and Shomyo, can also provide hints for the execution of the music. Once this is in place, the core philosophy of the instrument, which might be put roughly as “expressing one’s true self,” provides all that we need to fill in any gaps that may remain in our understanding.

Gagaku—literally “elegant/refined music,” rendered by Nelson (2008) as “proper music”—encompasses court instrumental (kangen) and danced (bugaku) repertoires for winds, strings, and percussion, with dancers added in the latter. Many pieces follow explicit metres: Sattō and Juha, for example, use four‑beat measures grouped into eight‑ or six‑bar cycles that repeat sixteen times, each cycle defined by a taiko stroke (Kamata & Clayton 2025). Others, termed jobuki, apparently without any metre, rely instead on extended wind phrases sparsely punctuated by percussion. When a piece is performed as bugaku, additional choreographic timing demands emerge. How peformers achieve synchrony across these contrasting frameworks makes gagaku ideal for examining ensemble coordination beyond metre‑centred models. This paper compares ensemble coordination across three contexts: metred instrumental, unmetred instrumental, and metred dance performances. Our empirical analysis employs sound information from multitrack audio, as well as movement information extracted from video using the OpenPose algorithm, to examine the onset timing of each part and the bodily movements of the performers before and after. Building on prior studies of contemporary gagaku performance (Shiba 1971; Nelson 2008; Terauchi 1996, 2011), we first compare the timing features and structural markers across metred and unmetred kangen pieces. Audio‑visual annotations of onsets, phrase boundaries, and convergence points reveal that in the absence of metre, wind-phrase lengths remain consistent (unlike metred movements, which accelerate), but the alignment between parts becomes more variable. We then introduce preliminary observations from recent recordings of kangen and bugaku. In bugaku, music shows more variation in dynamics and more rhythmic intensity (Endō 2000: 139). Interviewees note that a four‑beat unit is counted “1234” in kangen but “1and2and” in bugaku, linking this to a great emphasis on the beat (as opposed to melodic phrasing) (2024 interview). The constraints for danceability influence coordination, increasing beat clarity and tempo change. This empirical comparison enriches previous accounts of gagaku coordination and contributes to broader discussions of metre, synchrony, and distributed coordination in traditional ensemble music.

References:

Endo, Toru. 2020. Gagaku: Eizō kaisetsu vol. 1, 6th printing. Tokyo: Shimonaka Memorial Foundation.

Kamata, Sayumi and Martin Clayton. 2025. “Temporal Structure and Synchronisation in the Tōgaku Ensemble of Japanese Court Music (Gagaku).” Analytical Approaches to World Music 12(1). 10.5281/zenodo.14561020

Nelson, Steven G. 2008. Court and Religious Music (2): Music of Gagaku and Shōmyō. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music, edited by Alison McQueen Tokita and David W. Hughes, 49–76. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. 10.4324/9781315172354

Terauchi, Naoko. 1996. Gagaku no rizumu kōzō: Heian jidai sue ni okeru tōgaku kyoku ni tsuite. Daiichi-shōbō.

Terauchi, Naoko. 2011. “Surface and Deep Structure in the Tôgaku Ensemble of Japanese Court Music (Gagaku)”. In. Tenzer, Michael, and John Roeder, eds. Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music. Oxford University Press. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195384581.003.0001.

Shiba, Sukehiro. 1971. Gosen-fu ni yoru gagaku sofu: maki san kangenkyoku nobegaku, taikyoku hen. Tokyo: Kawai gakufu.

In this presentation, it will be demonstrated that the field of Japanese shōmyō offers a unique avenue for the advancement of Asiatic Music Historiography. This will be shown with reference to two specific sub-genres of pieces in the shōmyō repertoire, namely, the bonsan and the kansan. The bonsan and the kansan are both esoteric Buddhist hymns of praise, the former with 7^th century Sanskrit texts in Sino-Japanese transliteration, and the latter with 8^th century Chinese translations of those same Sanskrit texts. While the bonsan represent a rare instance of notated, medieval Indian Sanskrit Buddhist chant melodies, these melodies have been somewhat obscured through their adaptation to medieval Chinese and Sino-Japanese phonology, transliteration schemes, and musical theory. Nevertheless, at least three elements of ancient Indian recitation theory can be seen to be at work in the bonsan, namely, the mapping of melodic types to chant texts based on prosodic features, including syllable weight, the use of scale-degree-specific ornamentation, and the use of registral modulation. In the bonsan, these three elements are intricately connected with each other, revealing an interdependence of prosodic structure, scale, register, and ornamentation that may have roots in ancient Indian Sanskrit recitation practices. While the bonsan demonstrate features of medieval Indian Sanskrit Buddhist chant melodies, the kansan offer rare insights into the way by which those same melodies were adapted fully to the prosodic, phonetic, and semantic environment of medieval Chinese and Sino-Japanese. All three of the elements listed above will be shown to have been mapped from the bonsan onto the kansan on the basis of certain criteria. In short, the bonsan and the kansan, when taken together, are an important window into one of the most impactful musical interactions on the medieval Silk Roads, namely, that between religious practitioners from the Indic and Sinitic cultural spheres. It is hoped that this presentation will stimulate interest in expanding the scope of this neglected field of study, one that offers clues that may advance our understanding of the nature of musical exchange in the ancient and medieval worlds from Japan, China, Central Asia, India, and beyond.

The solo pieces for the Japanese shakuhachi composed by the monks of the Fuke sect, a Zen Buddhist sect, during Japan’s Edo period (1603-1867), have few aspects that are distinctive from most other musics of our world. For example, they are made of short phrases, some of them with a single tone, separated by obligatory breathings and silences that break the flow of the melody. Most of these solo pieces, either from traditional or modern repertoires, have no rhythm as the term is commonly defined, except possibly for a kind of irregular pulse in some pieces. It has been suggested that the composition of traditional Japanese music is based on predefined patterns that are rearranged to create new melodies. Although the issue of patterns in honkyoku solo pieces for the shakuhachi has not been thoroughly tackled, as is the case with some other traditional Japanese musics, in particular shamisen music (e.g., kabuki theatre), one aspect that has not been explicitly raised regarding these solo pieces is the grouping of phrases, that is, groups of phrases that reappear together within a piece. Bruno Deschênes will present his analysis of a few pieces that clearly show that particularity in some old pieces of these solo repertoires. Grouping of phrases is not as present in modern repertoires. As a shakuhachi player himself, he shows that the grouping of phrases is not solely a matter of structure but also, and possibly more so, a matter of performance.