Everything Connects and Forms an Intertext

                In order to sustain music, there has to be an effort to preserve it.  Preservation efforts include cultural tourism, school courses including music appreciation and the textbooks that go along with it, as well as music-making.  All these efforts contribute to the sustainability of music along with the various cultures associated with the music different people work to preserve.  Jeff Titon connects heritage and music in his blog with the different points of cultural tourism and conservation efforts, and provides an example of when he visited China.  Through these points, we can examine how they manifest themselves in sustaining heritage through music as well as provide an intertext to our recent studies on the nō Ataka and Bonnie Wade’s Music in Japan.

Ataka

                One way of conserving music is through cultural tourism.  Bonnie Wade begins her book, Music in Japan, by describing the festival of May in which millions of people come and engage in Japan’s culture, including the music scene.  This is more of an inward tourism, where people inside Japan’s borders travel through the country to engage in such activities.  People from all over experience culture at its finest where there are bands performing outside and also productions of nō taking place within the theatre, representing and sustaining both modern and classical music.

 Jeff Titon presents another way to look at cultural tourism in which he looks at music appreciation as a form of it.  Music books, which coexist in music courses, are meant to sustain the types of music the students are learning about.  Titon talks about how the authors of these books base their purpose for writing on acquiring culture, however they seem to leave out the principle of aesthetics and the feeling the music often reflects.  Nevertheless, the collecting of information and buying of musical materials created a market and supported the music business and its connoisseurs.  To write about different musics, one must go and explore and experience it themselves, like that of Bonnie Wade. To do this, cultural tourism must take place.  Bonnie Wade describes her experiences in Chapter 3 in which she took shakuhachi lessons and became apart of a ryū in order to experience the music and culture at its fullest.  This not only represents the effort to preserve music, in this case Japanese hōgaku music, but also remains to be an example of cultural tourism.

Jeff Titon also writes about his recent trip to China and the policy they have implemented to preserve traditional music.  He states that the government was threatening the traditional expressive culture especially during the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution.  This includes their ability to collaborate as a group and express themselves through music. Titon then writes of his experience of listening to a concert performance in the village where he was staying.  Immediately, I related this conversation with intertextuality and its link to preserving Japanese traditional music.  Ataka, the nō play, was written from an epic poem The Tales of the Heike in which Bonnie Wade describes in Chapter 4.  Different guilds/ryūs of various classes form and practice the repertoire of nō plays.  (Ataka uses characters from different ryūs.) Each ryū  comes together and meets and essentially, the knowledge of the particular group and the art forms the ryū possesses gets passed down from generation to generation.  The members are participating in their heritage that their ancestors created and are also working to sustain the music inherent in a nō play.  For example, the main character, the shite Benkei and his companion, the tsure which are the nine retainers come from the same guild of nō, while the waki  and the kokata each come from a different one.  The musical elements in nō reflect gagaku Japanese music which was the music at the time of the imperial court.  How might this relate to intertextuality? Take this picture, for example, that Titon displays in his blog of the Chinese orchestra:

Titon notes that the full Chinese orchestra consists of percussion, winds, transverse flutes, and a sheng which is a traditional Chinese mouth organ.  The sheng immediately caught my attention because it related back to the shō, the traditional Japanese mouth organ.  Although only three drums and a nōkan flute are used in Ataka, this picture drew me back to something familiar which I had learned (the shō) from Music in Japan, establishing an intertext for me personally to draw back on.  This intertext continued as I continued to read Titon’s blog and began to understand the intermingling between Japan and China.  This relates back to the first chapter when Wade described Japan whose culture has been influenced by many cultures because of its position of an island, with many people of different backgrounds coming on and off its shores.  He notes that a lot of the Chinese orchestra’s music was played in free rhythm and how the percussion did establish a pulse.  This too related to Japanese music.

                Preservation efforts such as cultural tourism through textbooks and traveling to different areas to experience music in its original culture along with participating in one’s own heritage through music-making all are associated with the sustainability of the music and the culture.  We see this in the organization of a nō play such as Ataka beginning with its origins in the script of it as well as the different ryūs the different characters come from.  All these forces come together to support this particular art form and provide awareness to others who find it intriguing as well.  Without culture tourism or the want to learn how to play a particular instrument, the music cannot be sustained and that element in the culture will eventually disappear.

 

 

Bibliography

Book

"Ataka." In Japanese Noh Drama, vol. 3, translated by Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, 149-72. Tokyo: Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, 1960.

Wade, Bonnie C. Music in Japan. New York: Oxford, 2005.

Web

Titon, Jeff Todd. Sustainable Music: A Research Blog on the Subject of Sustainability and Music. Accessed October 27, 2012. http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com.

 

 

Tony Takitani

There were two moments in Tony Takitani that can best be understood if we look at Bonnie Wade’s Music in Japan.

The first moment occurred at the start of the film at 5:40.  The narrator was speaking of Tony’s father and how he spent many days in prison after being in the war playing jazz on his trombone.  Wade supports how “Japan is home to an important and highly profitable market for jazz, boasting numerous clubs, some of the best jazz magazines in the world, and a steady core of avid fans.”  (Wade, 139).  During Shazboro’s (Tony’s father) time in prison, I found it interesting how the music was juxtaposed.  One could hear the solemn, lonely music with a steady beat resembling life in the prison at the same time as the swung, flowing melody of a jazz tune.  Life seemed relentless because of how lonely he was feeling, yet at the same time he used jazz as an outlet. 

The lonely music continued throughout the movie while relating the same lonely life Tony led.  This music seemed to suggest that he was living in a prison, like his father did, because of how truly alone he was throughout his early life. However, in 26:33, the music changed to a piano playing at a freer rhythm then the steady beats played before.  Before it was a static, lonely motif that reoccurred over and over and when he met and married Ekei, his life turned upside down and he began to feel free.  He noted that he was in terror which lasted for three months of being lonely again and while describing this, the static, hollow motif juxtaposed the freer beat of the piano melody.  Japanese music as stated in Wade’s Music in Japan, had many influences from Europe.  This can be seen in the free piano music played.

 

Wade, Bonnie C. Music in Japan. New York: Oxford, 2005.

Ataka and Kajincho

The main difference I see between the nō play Ataka and the kabuki  Kajincho, is that in Kajincho, there are singers that interrupt the actors as Benkei and his men talk to Togashi, for example when the guards are questioning Benkei and his men.  In  nō, the actors interact in dialogue just between each other, while in kabuki, a phrase that would be said by the actors, is taken and sang by professional singers. (i.e. not the actors in kabuki).  However, these professional singers also act like the chorus in nō which provide a similarity between nō and kabuki.  Each time the chorus (nō ) or singers (kabuki) sing, it adds to the drama of the play.  For example, at the end of the fifth dan of Ataka, the chorus and and the singers are functioning in the same way (pgs 94-95).  "Oh, all you guardsmen,/ what are the reasons,/ Oh, all you guardsmen,/ what are the reasons,/ that you draw the swords and blades/ against so lowly..."