Japanese music
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Religious and military music
Christian music had, in fact, been introduced into Japan as early as the mid-16th century with the arrival of Portuguese merchants and Roman Catholic priests. With this importation came Roman Catholic music and Western musical instruments, the most lasting of which was the double-reed shawm, which survives today as the tuneful accessory of itinerant noodle sellers. The bowed rebeca lute may have combined with the Chinese huqin in the creation of the bowed kokyū of 17th-century Japan. However, the suppression of Christianity in that century destroyed the bamboo organs, choirs of mass singers, and most of the other direct Western musical imitations until the Meiji Restoration. The official doctrine of new religious freedom in 1872 brought large numbers of Protestant missionaries into action, and collections of hymns with Japanese text were printed by 1878. Interdenominational editions were necessary by the 1890s. Since that time, typical Catholic and Protestant musical activities can be found and, with the international growth of Tokyo, one can even add the sounds of synagogues and mosques. But the growth of musical acculturation in Meiji Japan is better seen in its other foreign imports.
Band music, as part of a military table of organization, had already been tried in Dutch style at a military school in Nagasaki during the early 19th century. After Matthew C. Perry’s arrival in 1853, every foreign delegation to Japan did its best to impress the natives with marching bands (Perry added a minstrel show). Thus, the various Japanese regional and national military leaders were quick to add such organizations to their modernized armies. The emperor was equally aware of the Western musical values displayed by the first foreign missions and ordered that the gagaku musicians be trained in band music as well. A navy band from the Satsuma clan gave the first Japanese public performance of this new music at the opening of the railroad in 1872, and in 1876 gagaku musicians made their debut as band musicians on the occasion of the emperor’s birthday. The training of the many new ensembles was in the hands of English, French, and German bandmasters, and new music was created by them or by their Japanese students to match the spirit of Meiji modernism. The most famous case is the national anthem, “Kimi ga yo,
” which was one of the few successful early attempts at combining Western and Japanese traditions. A British bandmaster, William Fenton, teaching the Japanese navy band, worked together with gagaku musicians through several unsuccessful versions; and the search continued through his German successor, Franz Eckert. A court musician, Hayashi Hiromori (1831–96), is credited with the melody shown in notation XIV, which was given its premiere in 1880 and has remained the national anthem since that time. Hayashi first wrote it in traditional gagaku notation; and Eckert “corrected” it with Western harmonization, noting that it fit in both a gagaku mode (ichikotsu) and one from the Western church tradition (Dorian). As Japan’s military prowess grew, standard Western-style marches and patriotic pieces dominated the repertoire. They also influenced popular music with such genres as rappa-bushi (literally, “bugle songs”) as well as music in the schools.
Music education
Public-school music in Japan was organized by a member of a Meiji educational search team, Izawa Shūji (1851–1917), and a Boston music teacher, Luther Whiting Mason (1828–96). Mason went to Japan in 1880 to help form a music curriculum for public schools and start a teacher-training program. Although there was much talk of combining the best of East and West, the results of the sincere efforts of an American late-Victorian and a Japanese bureaucrat were less than glorious. The first children’s songbook, the Shōgaku shōkashū (1881), contained either Western pieces with Japanese words or songs newly composed by Mason.
The primary sources of Western tunes were those pieces from Boston schoolbooks that appeared to be pentatonic. Through this method songs like “The Bluebells of Scotland
” spoke of beauty (“Utsukushiki”), “Auld Lang Syne
” concerned fireflies, and Stephen Foster became the song composer best known to educated Japanese children. The newly composed songs with their artificial tunes and moralistic words quickly faded away and eventually were replaced by more popular children’s school songs based on military music (gunka) from the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars. The teacher-training school became the Tokyo School of Music by 1890 and included instruction in koto and, because of the lack of proper violins, the bowed kokyu. The music department of the modern Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music is still located at the spot of the original school in Ueno Park, Tokyo, with a bust of Beethoven beside the entrance. Koto, samisen, Noh music, and Japanese music history are now found there, along with extensive offerings in Western music. However, until the late 20th century, music education was totally Western in orientation. Japanese music was presented in middle-school music appreciation courses only some 10 years after the end of World War II. The teaching of Western-style singing and the use of choruses were fundamental to a proper education in Japan, with the results that youth and workers’ choruses of the 20th century were cut off from original Japanese music. Only with the worldwide rise in the mid-20th century of the search for cultural or ethnic identities did Japanese music education begin to accommodate a new approach, using the public-school choral tradition in new textual contexts. Behind the robust volume of such functional, harmonized tunes lies the equally viable if quieter sounds of older, traditional music.
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