The Emergence of a Contemporary Repertoire for the Shō

Suzuki, Seiko; Mizuno, Mikako

doi:https://doi.org/10.7202/1088786ar

The shō is a Japanese free reed musical instrument, the only instrument of gagaku that can create chordal sounds. It descended from the Chinese sheng in the 8th century, but it has a smaller body. It is mainly played in ensembles in the Japanese traditional gagaku. In ensemble music, the hichiriki (double reed instrument similar to the oboe) plays the main melody, the ryūteki (transverse flute) also plays the melody, with added ornaments, and the shō plays the basso continuo. The shō has a more prominant role in Japanese cultural identity than the hichiriki and the ryūteki; Japanese musicologists have used analysis of shō and gagaku, to understand “Japanese harmony,” and it has been the preferred instrument of some Japanese composers. It has also been adopted in the West; how the traditional shō came to be used in contemporary Western classical music since the 1960s has not been studied in detail until now. In examining this issue, we reveal that the particularity of the traditional shō and the emancipation of the contemporary shō repertoire in the last three decades from a historical perspective together with the special activities by contemporary composers and players. This article begins with a short history of Japanese gagaku and a description of the shō’s anatomy. This is followed by a socio-historical survey of the shō’s position at the crossroads of nationalism and tradition. Finally, we examine innovative uses of the instrument in contemporary Western classical music.

The cultural identity of the shō

a) Short history of the Japanese shō in pre-modern times

The term ga-gaku 雅楽 (yă-yuè in China, a-ak in Korea; literally “authentic music” or “elegant music”) appeared for the first time in the Analects of Confucius (c. 551 b.c. to c. 479 b.c.) in China. The Japanese gagaku was created by a fusion of Chinese and Korean “authentic music” or “elegant music” and various types of music that had been brought to Japan from the Chinese continent from the 5th century to the 9th century. The sheng/shō was introduced to Japan from China during the Nara period (a.d. 710 to 794). Due to the passage of time, it is not known when the present form of the shō became fixed. The Shōsō-in—the imperial treasury house (Nara, Japan)—preserves the oldest musical instruments in Japan, dating back to 752.[1] Differences between the shō in the treasury house and the current shō include a projecting mouthpiece and the number of reeds. In the Heian period (794-1182), when gagaku was instituted in imperial court ceremony and it prospered in the life of the noble class, it has been determined that the shō, without a mouthpiece, was used for making chordal sounds rather than for playing melodic sounds as the Chinese sheng did. Subsequently, due to the Onin civil war (1467-77), gagaku fell into disuse, but it was eventually reconstructed between the 16th and 19th centuries.[2]

In the latter half of the 19th century, Japan was forcibly opened to the West by the American army. At this time, the Tokugawa military government (Edo period: 1603–1867) ended and, with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Meiji emperor was reinstated as head of Japan and Westernization/modernization and reconstruction of the imperial state began. Aiming to reactivate the ancient imperial court of the 8th century under the Taiho code (701), the most famous Japanese imperial legal code that incorporated both administrative and penal laws, the Section ofgagaku was formed under the Ministry of Supreme Affairs in 1870. It became the Department ofgagaku in the Ministry of the Imperial Household in 1889.[3] At this time, the traditional gagaku repertoire was reconstructed as court music for the new government.

b) The Western influence in modern times

In 1879, the Ministry of Education founded the Music Investigation Committee (Ongaku Torishirabe-gakari), which became the National School of Music in 1887. The Ministry of Education implemented song books for music classrooms in elementary schools to teach the Western heptatonic scale (do-ré-mi-fa-sol-la-si).[4] The Music Investigation Committee considered the heptatonic scale an international standard—a marker of modernity—which Japan had to adopt to show itself as modern. The idea of “singing together” through the instruction of the heptatonic scale was directly inspired by the U.S. elementary education program, founded in 1838 in Boston.

In order to create a song book for the music classroom, Shuji Izawa (1851–1917), director of the Committee under the Japanese Ministry of Education, invited a Boston music educator, Luther Whiting Mason (1818–1896), to Japan. Izawa then invited five gagaku musicians from the Section ofgagaku as researchers-teachers-composers: Fujitsune Shiba (1849–1918), Sanemichi Ue (1851–1937), Taketaka Togi (1855–1892), Noritsugu Tsuji (1856–1922) and Yoshiisa Oku (1858–1933) (Figure 1). Indeed, before the establishment of the Committee, the musicians of the Section ofgagaku had been obligated to learn 19th century European orchestral music to play at dinners at the imperial palace. The Section ofgagaku therefore can be considered the first European orchestra in Japan.

The Music Investigation Committee learned “Western harmony” from Stephen Albert Emery’s manual of harmony, Elements of harmony (1879) which was presented to them by Luther Whiting Mason. From 1883 on, the Committee used the manual of harmony by Ernst Friedrich Richter, Lehrbuch der Harmonie [A Manual of Harmony] (1853) which was translated and used throughout the world during this time period. The musicians of gagaku learned the notion of tonal harmony through these manuals. They created new school songs by mixing gagaku and Western harmony. They also transmitted the traditional gagaku repertoire, reconstructed as court music for the new government.

Anatomy of the shō

a) The pipes: itchiku 一竹

A shō consists of 17 slender bamboo pipes, each of which is fixed on its base with a metal free reed. The shape of the shō is said to imitate the phoenix; the two silent pipes represent its wings. The shō has been produced continuously from the Nara period to the present day, but shō makers are quite rare in Japan today. Players usually receive old instruments from their predecessors, meaning that newly born instruments are different from traditional ones. However, the fundamental structure has been preserved.

Six fingers control the pitches while the other four fingers support the weight of the instrument. Each of the 17 pipes has a name which is attached to a specific tone—sen 千, ju 十, ge 下, otsu 乙, ku 工, bi 美, ichi 一, hachi 八, ya 也, gon 言, shichi 七, gyo 行, jo 上, bo 凢, kotsu 乞, mo 毛, hi 比. Mo and ya have names but never make sound in the traditional repertoire (Figure 2). Some of the names of the pipes and chords are said to be taken from the gakubiwa— a stringed instrument for gagaku. Although the shō and the gakubiwa have names in common, the pitches in the two instruments are different. The arrangement of the pipes does not correspond to ascending/descending pitches. Two of the eleven chords, hi and ju, have names that correspond to the pipe names, but not all of the pipes play the root tones for the chords.

During the performance, six fingers control the pitches and the other four fingers support the weight of the instrument. Figure 3 shows the fingering of each hand and Figure 4 shows the alignment in the order of fingering and in the descending pitches.

b) The chords: aitake 合竹

There are 11 chords used in the traditional shō repertoire, two of them only rarely. These 11 chords are called aitake 合竹. There are two pentachords and nine hexachords. There are neither trichords nor tetrachords. The names of the aitake are the same words as those of the itchiku: hi 比, gyo 行, bi 美, ju 十, ge 下, otsu 乙, bo 凢, ku 工, ichi 一, and kotsu 乞. Four of the itchiku—sen 千, gon 言, hachi 八, shichi 七—have no corresponding aitake (Figure 5). In the aitake, we can find ju 十 twice: in the first and second positions. The first is used only for sojo, one of the tunings that will be described in the next section.

All 11 chords include the pitches A5 and B5, that is, shichi 七 and gyo 行. These pitches always sound during performances. Shichi 七 and gyo 行 never sound alone, always with the other pitches. There are four chords that include an octave. Each of these includes either the F# octave or the E octave. D, C#, B, and A have octave-related pitches in the single pipe series but never make harmonies that include octaves.

Although we are speaking of chords, the pipes do not actually make multiple sounds at once; rather, they gradually make layers or clusters of sound. To use Tamami Tono’s words, the sound invades space just like a cloud gradually invades the sky. The chords are unstable and sometimes sound very different from the Western chords. The interval of an octave is not precisely twice a cycle, and this approximate notation is irrational. Each breath makes a complex, uncontrolled harmony or timbre.

c) The tuning: chōshi 調子

Chōshi means tuning, but a choshi is not a tonal tuning. It is an atmospheric foundation, that includes melody and harmony. Each chōshi symbolizes a direction, season, and color (Figure 6).

One representative performance that testifies to the succession of the traditional repertoire with innovative new styles can be found in Tono’s recording of six tonalities (six chōshi). Japanese tradition had no repertoire for solo shō. Yet, the six chōshi played by a solo performer implies melodic pattern and contour. Chōshi is not a title of a musical piece in the Western sense, but is a kind of announcement of the specific world which dominates the whole piece. Large-scale structure can be created by using a single tonality to unify a musical scene. Chōshi is to be played as a ritual canon just before the performance and has unique atmosphere which opens the specific spiritual space.

The shō’s position at the crossroads of nationalism and tradition

As mentioned above, gagaku and the 11 chords of the shō do not use harmony the same way that 19th century Western music does. In modern times, Japanese academics have used the concept of Western harmony (which was considered more musically developed) to explain Japanese music. For example, in the 1920s, Hisao Tanabe (1883–1984), an acoustic physicist and founder of Japanese music studies, attempted to describe gagaku in his book, The Lecture on Japanese Music, published in 1919. The book includes several sub-chapters entitled the “harmony of shō”:

The dissonance found in the harmony of gagaku is not a defect. Furthermore, the use of dissonance in Europe has increased since the end of the 19th century; Wagner, in particular, often uses it. […] Looked at this way, we may see the music of the Heian period, which is rich in dissonance, as being related to recent movements in music from other parts of the world.[5]

He develops this theory in another sub-chapter with the same title: “Those who know only Western science criticize the harmony of the shō as imperfect, but it is not. It is our responsibility to complete the areas where Western science falls short.”[6]

He elaborates his vision in “History of the Development of Japanese Music,” where he places gagaku as the source of all Japanese music. It is in the countries under Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” policies that we find the origin of gagaku. In the 1940s, as an affirmation of Japanese colonial policies and the creation of a Greater East Asia, Tanabe published the 78-rpm collection Toa no ongaku [Music of East Asia] (Japan Colombia, 10 discs, 1941) and Daitoa ongaku shusei [Collection of Music of the Greater East Asia] (Japan Victor, 1942). In the liner notes to Music of East Asia, he says that “gagaku is the common music of the soul of Great East Asia in the area of ancient Sumerian culture.”[7]

After World War ii, a department of gagaku was reformed in the Imperial Agency with half as many members as it had before the war: 25 musicians. Most were descendants of musicians from the Heian period. Even after the defeat of World War ii, Tanabe continued to expound upon his theme, but now there was a difference: now he wished to designate gagaku as a “National intangible cultural property” under the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties’ (bunkazai hogohō), which was enacted in 1950. “Among the forms of classical music in our country, it is gagaku that is respected around the world as a universal art. Because gagaku has the harmony of modern Western music.”[8] The problem here is that he asserts the Department ofgagaku of the Imperial Agency as the sole bearer of defining authenticity of gagaku, despite the existence of other gagaku ensembles and musicians: “Only the Department of gagaku of the Imperial Agency can authentically preserve gagaku for future generations and perform it artistically.”[9]

Expanded tradition in the contemporary repertoire of the shō

a) Toshirō Kido, a visionary at the head of the national theatre

The rapid expansion of repertoire for the shō has been enabled by the restoration of ancient instruments and by creative collaboration between composers and players. Shō musicians are currently influenced—more or less—by the modernization of Japanese traditional music that started in the 1960s. The 30-years history of contemporary shō music is a testament to the influence of the National Theatre’s productions realized by Toshiro Kido (born in 1930). Kido opposed the imperial agency’s monopoly on gagaku. He rebuilt the traditional instruments kept at Shōsō-in, which were originally built between 710 and 784 a.d., and commissioned composers, such as Toshi Ichiyanagi, Akira Nishimura, Masahiro Miwa and many others to write new pieces for them.

Kido organized gagaku concerts in different ways—beginning in the 1970s, he endeavored to free it from traditional practices. He commissioned and produced new work from Stockhausen, LichtDer Jahreslauf (1977),[10] and Jean-Claude Eloy, À l’Approche du Feu Méditant (1983),[11] before he began rebuilding the ancient traditional instruments in the 1990s. Many critics thought that foreign composers should not touch gagaku.[12] Indeed, as part of the social changes in 1960’s Japan, there was a musical “return to Japan” movement. It was in this context that Kido invited composers to create/reconstruct traditional music,[13] wishing to popularize and democratize it.

While Kido contributed greatly to the expansion of the gagaku ensemble repertoire, a new solo repertoire for the shō was developed by Mayumi Miyata (born in 1954), the first solo shō player to perform outside of the imperial agency.

b) Mayumi Miyata and her disciples

Mayumi Miyata, today an internationally renowned shō player, first began to play in Kido’s program at the National Theater in 1979. In 1986, she released her first compact disc, which was also the first album of non-traditional gagaku in Japan. On this album, we find Hoshi no wa [Circle of Stars] composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi (born in 1933), the first composition for solo shō in the world.

For Miyata, the shō’s harmony is very different from the harmony produced by the equal-tempered piano. She points to “combination tone” and “harmonic overtone”[14] as the important qualities in the harmony of the shō. For her, it approaches the idea of the “harmony of the spheres.”

At the university I had majored in piano, and from that time I also had an interest in music aesthetics. At the time, I had some doubts about why I had to spend so many hours a day practicing music that was from a limited time period in history, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries to the 20th century, and that being mainly from Europe as well. I felt that there must be other kinds of music besides what I was studying. […] I like the piano, but when you press the keys of the piano the sound it produces begins to die away so quickly that I felt that it could not probably give me an experience of something like the Harmony of the Spheres. And I thought that if I studied more about music aesthetics, I might be able to get a little closer to the Harmony of the Spheres.[15]

Since the 1990s, shō players from the gagaku ensemble Reigakusha 伶楽舎 have spearheaded projects that include the restoration of ancient instruments and cross-cultural creation. In the past few years, several young shō players have organized concerts and performances in Western-style concert halls as well as in the traditional environments, such as shrines, Shinto rituals, and traditional Japanese theaters (e.g., no theater). Among these active players are Hideaki Bunno, Tamami Tono, Hiromi Yoshida, Ko Ishikawa, Hanako Nakamura, Remi Miura, Kazue Tajima,[16] and Naoyuki Manabe–the second generation of contemporary shō players, following the pioneer, Mayumi Miyata.

Hanako Nakamura, Remi Miura, and Kazue Tajima–all of whom graduated from Kunitachi College of Music–studied with Miyata. Their activities both of restoration and of creation seem to take a different direction from that of other players of traditional Japanese instruments, such as shakuhachi, koto, shamisen, or no flute.

Now a third generation of performers has emerged. For instance, Tetsuya Yamamoto (born in 1989), a composer and student of Mayumi Miyata at the Kunitachi College of Music, has been inspired by the technique of Miyata’s earlier student, Manabe, as well as by his two masters of composition: Motoharu Kawashima (born in 1972) and Régis Campo[17] (born in 1968). Yamamoto has composed several pieces with shō, including Vox humana for hichiriki and shō (2018).[18] Yamamoto emphasizes that his musical identity with the shō is not related to its traditional use nor to traditional gagaku, but to the musical creation with the shō in the context of contemporary music.[19] This historical shift in the cultural identity of the shō is a good example of the transmission of tradition without nationalism; in other words, the “invention of tradition” without nationalism.

Performing with the shō today

Conveying a traditional repertoire in a contemporary style demands historical research and the restoration of ancient instruments. The performing style of gagaku has been passed down through oral instruction. And even as a new type of shō has developed, the traditional repertoire must be preserved for sake of Japanese culture. Thus, it is a challenge for today’s gagaku specialists to find ways to perform, instruments to use, and suitable staging that will allow the traditional repertoire an contemporary music to co-exist.[20] It is for this reason that the players of Reigakusha, established in 1985, have dedicated themselves to the study and performance of the classical gagaku repertoire and the creation of new music for ancient instruments.

Some young shō performers are producing new pieces in collaboration with composers, and some compose themselves. A vibrant contemporary repertoire has grown since the 1990s. Among the pioneers in collaborative creation are Mayumi Miyata and Cort Lippe. Miyata’s first solo recital was held in 1986, when she was working on Lippe’s Music for shō and harp (1986), which was commissioned by and dedicated to Norio Kazama. The piece was written for Miyata and Masumi Nagasawa; they gave the world premiere at the Hara Museum of Tokyo in April 1986. It was performed again at the Tokyo Summer Festival of 1987 at a stone garden (shuttle concert). In this piece, the shō is prepared. In the first part of the piece, the holes that produce the notes B, G#, and E are covered with tape, so the notes sound without being stopped by fingers. In the latter part of the piece, the tape is removed from the B and E but left on the G#. Finally, at the end, the tape is completely removed. This intervention changes the traditional aitake harmony. But it is not only the pitches that have been changed in this piece; the breathing is also very different from the traditional performance style, including some that has never appeared in the traditional repertoire, such as “very fast à la shakuhachi.” For this fast inhalation/exhalation, the shō player moves gradually into flatterzunge, and the sounds resemble electronic synthesis. There are very fast inhalations and exhalations and trill and tremolo, and each group performs it at different rates of speed (some very rapidly and unevenly, and so on).

The shō solo performance style that Miyata originated was well-established by the time the ShōGirls began performing. Trained in the traditional gagaku orchestra, the three women–Hanako Nakamura, Remi Miura, Kazue Tajima–diverged from tradition and started playing as a group in 2011. Their concert series, Hibikikaï, was inaugurated in 2012, and the group has mounted a new production every year since. Hibikikaï is a coined word that indicates sound meeting, which has ritual and archaic nuance. Motoharu Kawashima—who wrote and dedicated a piece to the ShōGirls—intended to get away from the traditional associations of the shō and return to a primitive tuning. In Kansho, he counted 3,071 possible variants of shō harmonies and notated all 3,071 chords. As mentioned previously, the pipes ya and mo are not used to make sounds, traditionally, but the ya can make a Bb and the mo an F, and they are often used in modern shō; thus, the F# major chord and Db major chord are closer to the pure tone triad than the traditional shō, which is based on the Pythagorean tuning.

*

Gagaku went through a crucial period during World War ii. After the defeat of Japan, it was important for the Imperial Agency to preserve the authenticity of gagaku. Toshiro Kido opposed the agency’s monopolization of the idea and meaning of gagaku and rebuilt ancient traditional instruments that were being kept at Shōsō-in. Kido was also active in producing new pieces for gagaku by commissioning works from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean-Claude Eloy and other composers. The shō, the only instrument of the gagaku that makes chordal sounds, now has a rich repertoire of contemporary music. Performers of this work include Mayumi Miyata, the pioneering solo shō player. As Miyata collaborated with composers Toshi Ichiyanagi, Maki Ishii and Cort Lippe, younger shō players like Naoyuki Manabe and ShōGirls are working with contemporary composers and to enlarge the repertoire for the shō.

The Emergence of a Contemporary Repertoire for the ShōL’émergence d’un répertoire contemporain pour shō

Abstract

Résumé

The cultural identity of the shō