Synopses & Reviews
Music in Japan is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with
Thinking Musically, the core book in the
Global Music Series.
Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study.
Music in Japan offers a vivid introduction to the music of contemporary Japan, a nation in which traditional, Western, and popular music thrive side by side. Drawing on more than forty years of experience, author Bonnie C. Wade focuses on three themes throughout the book and in the musical selections on the accompanying CD. She begins by exploring how music in Japan has been profoundly affected by interface with both the Western (Europe and the Americas) and Asian (continental and island) cultural spheres. Wade then shows how Japan's thriving popular music industry is also a modern form of a historically important facet of Japanese musical culture: the process of gradual popularization, in which a local or a group's music eventually becomes accessible to a broader range of people. She goes on to consider the intertextuality of Japanese music: how familiar themes, musical sounds, and structures have been maintained and transformed across the various traditions of Japanese performing arts over time.
Music in Japan is enhanced by eyewitness accounts of performances, interviews with key performers, and vivid illustrations. Packaged with an 80-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book, it features guided listening and hands-on activities that encourage readers to engage actively and critically with the music.
Review
"With the current academic trend towards interdisciplinary research, teaching materials that lend themselves to this approach are needed. This book is an excellent example of one, which is equally suited for use with other materials in an interdisciplinary context, as well as for use on its own as a basis for a music-only class. . . . All in all, Wade has provided an exceptionally well-balanced book, which will prove useful both in the music classroom and beyond."--MJ Sunny Zank, Ohio Northern University, from a review in Japan Studies Association Journal, Vol. 6, 2008
Review
andldquo;In this highly original book, Bonnie Wade skillfully presents a complicated story by weaving together the connections between political conditions, cultural environments, and social expectations. By focusing on these connections between social domains, she establishes a dynamic scene that cannot easily be captured by single concepts such as modernization, westernization, or globalization. She provides a study that is as much about composers, music organizations, and social history as it is about the making of Japanese musical modernityandmdash;a process that is still ongoing.andrdquo;and#160;
Review
andldquo;The concept of andlsquo;composerandrsquo; was once alien in much of East Asia; it is, largely, a part of modernity, and of the adoption of Western art music and its systems, part of something that in Japan can be charted from the Meiji restoration onwards. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade takes us on what is essentially an ethnographic journey. Her account is heavily informed by interviews and discussions with composers and their audiences and is theoretically grounded by affordance theoryandmdash;how music is used and receivedandmdash;rather than analyses of music structures. This is a welcome change to the approach adopted by other scholars. Although she situates her account within ethnomusicology, she brilliantly challenges the otherness embedded in much that is associated with this discipline. And so it must be, since the Japanese music culture she describes is heavily enculturated by the precepts of Western art music. That does not make Japanese composers Western, and Wade finds distinction in the continuance of the age-old tradition of performer-composers and with an identity of place. The latter means that Japanese composers today still connect to the people, creating music for social good rather than maintaining the outdated Eurocentric andlsquo;art for artandrsquo;s sakeandrsquo; mantra. Where other accounts have concentrated on either the traditional music of Japan (and those who create music relating to it) or on those who compose using systems associated with European orchestral and ensemble forms, Wade usefully brings both sides together. In doing so, she charts elements of distinction, teasing them out and#160;in three broad sectional sweeps, each framed by a distinct environmentandmdash;the environment of modernization (where composers and musicians create for government, education, industry, and commerce), the environment of a shared cultural space (in which Japan has adopted Western music systems and in which Japanese composers travel abroad), and the environment of specific instrumental and choral groups (and of music composed for these groups). In sum, this is a welcomeandmdash;and overdueandmdash;correction to the literature on Japanese contemporary music.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, the distinguished ethnomusicologist Bonnie C. Wade provides a systematic historical and institutional study of contemporary Japanese art music, thereby illuminating its social development and intricate connections with Western music. This book is a model for future explorations of this kind. Composers of other cultures should be so lucky!andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Bonnie C. Wadeandrsquo;s new work is significant and enjoyable, supple and deft in its use of cultural theory, and attentive to historical specificity. As an author she is generous to the composers and performer-composers who are her subjects, allowing them to speak for themselves at length. And this they do, intelligently and sometimes poignantly. Wade skillfully shows that, for Japanandrsquo;s musical world, the dark decades before 1945 represent not just something andlsquo;badandrsquo; to be renounced but something institutionally and organizationally significant. And by the same token, she also delineates the political stakes of cultural work in the postwar era. In the broadest sense, she illuminates the vectors of modern cultural choice across the globe.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Wade offers a new understanding of Japanese concert music from the Meiji era to the present. . . . Throughout, she shows how Japanese composers have remained connected with the people and artistically flexible. Flexibility, even among the most noted composers, translates to a variety of compositional styles (conservative tonal to highly experimental) and compositions for amateurs, children, film, television, and anime in addition to concert music for professionals. An unusual, interesting cultural-historical account.andrdquo;and#160;
Review
andldquo;An important and overdue study of Western concert musicandrsquo;s naturalized presence in modern Japanese life. Wade generously allows many of her informants to speak at length for themselves; we see firsthand how intelligent, articulate, and broad-minded these composers, performers, entrepreneurs, and activists are. Wadeandrsquo;s critical attention to idiosyncrasies, discrepancies, and inconsistencies among their profiles and accounts never wavers, yet she also comes across as an empathic ethnographer who took clear delight in her fieldwork and its many opportunities to share and discuss experiences of music. I highly recommend this book to students and scholars of Japanese public culture. It does justice to the quotidian details and expressive magic that contribute to a musical performance. More significantly, I think, it is further proof of how much there is to be learned more generally about Japan when historians and social scientists include and incorporate music as an object of analysis.andrdquo;andnbsp;
Synopsis
When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestraandmdash;someone alone in a study, surround by staff paperandmdash;and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japanandrsquo;s musical history, however, no such role existedandmdash;composition and performance were deeply intertwined. and#160;Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. Inand#160;
Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large and global cosmopolitan culture.
Wade examines the short history of the composer in Japanese society, looking at the creative and economic opportunities that have sprung up around themandmdash;or that they forgedandmdash;during Japanandrsquo;s astonishingly fast modernization. She shows that modernist Japanese composers have not bought into the high modernist concept of the autonomous artist, instead remaining connected to the people. Articulating Japanese modernism in this way, Wade tells a larger story of international musical life, of the spaces in which tradition and modernity are able to meet and, ultimately, where modernity itself has been made.and#160;
About the Author
Bonnie Wade earned her B.Mus. from Boston University in 1963, her M.A. in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 1967, and her PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 1971.and#160;She taught at Brown University until 1975, when she moved toand#160;toand#160;the University of California Berkeley, where she isand#160;professor of music.and#160;
Table of Contents
ForewordPreface
CD Track List
1. International Interface: Looking Westward
Setting the Scene
"The West" Goes to Japan
Meiji-Period Modernization
World War I and Immediately Following
2. International Interface: Looking Eastward
Tradition in a Time of Change
Interface in the First Millennium
The Gagaku Ensemble as We Hear It
Aerophones
Chordophones
Membranophones and an Idiophone
Percussion Parts in Gagaku Music
Strokes and Stroke Sequences
Coordinated Percussion Patterns
Gagaku through Time
3. Focusing Inward and Across Boundaries
Beyond Classical Music Training
Beyond the Palace
Beyond the Temple
Fuzzing of Folk and Popular
Tsugaru syamisen
The Syamisen
Drumming Ensembles
Matsuri bayashi
Within the World of Koto
Keiko Nosaka and the Twenty-stringed Koto
Tsukushi-goto
Yatsuhashi Ryu and "Rokudan"
Ikuta Kengyo and Yamada Kengyd=o
Michio Migyai and Shin nihon ongaku
Traditional Music for Koto
Contemporary Composition for Koto
From Theater to Film
4. Intertextuality in the Theatrical Arts
The No Drama and Ataka
The Staging
The Plays and Musical Setting
The Acting Forces
Movement
The Musicians and Instruments
The Kabuki Theater
From No to Kabuki
Kanjincho
The Musicians
The Music
The Film Men Who Step on the Tiger's Tail
5. Managing International Interface
Continuing Interface
Looking to the East
Niche Musics from Around the World
Jazz and the Authenticity Issue
Hip-hop in Japan
Continuing the Inward Look
National Cultural Policies
The Choral Phenomenon
Music and the Media
Film Music
Enka
J-pop
Theme Songs
The New York Nexus
Noise
6. From Japan Outward
Japanese Diasporas
Karaoke
Jazz and "Japaneseness"
Kurasiku ongaku
Sharing the concern about "Japaneseness"
Expressing "Japaneseness" Aesthetically
The Seasons in Japanese Music
Keiko Abe and the Marimba
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Resources
Index