Books › The music and musical instruments of Japan, 1909 › scan 224
Scan 224
The music and musical instruments of Japan, 1909
8 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 184. See the scan on archive.org.
1duty of the Japanese musician is to learn to play tunes; he only concerns himself with the notes necessary for each tune in the scale, qua scale, and is indifferent to anything more. He looks at the music from an emotional rather than from a scientific point of view; hence, Western musicians, with their fuller knowledge, are better able to analyse and reduce Japanese music to its elements than are the native musicians themselves.
313 [Page 72].—The different tunings of the Kotos, Biwas, and Samisens, seem arbitrary and unmeaning to us, and in investigating Japanese music there is a danger that we may confound the tuning with the scale; but the two things are quite distinct. We can no more judge of what the scale is like from the tuning of these instruments, than we can assert that the different notes employed for the lowest strings of the Violin, Viola, Violoncello, and Double-bass, or the Pianoforte and Organ, form the tonic foundation on which the scales of these instruments rest. The lowest note is a mere accident of convenience. During the reign of the Lute it was common to vary the tuning of its strings according to the pitch of the song to be sung. Paganini, for certain pieces, altered the tuning of the strings of his Fiddle from the orthodox method, and Berlioz has directed the lowest string of the Double-bass to be altered in pitch for playing some of his works. The tuning, therefore, of an instrument, teaches us but little. The Japanese have an infinite number of modes of tuning, which, together with the occasional alteration of the bridges during the performance in order to obtain some lower notes, makes their free system seem arbitrary and very complicated to us.
514 [Page 89].—The answer to a fugue subject with us is not always strictly regular, so far as the exact intervals are concerned. The point to be aimed at is, to get the same motion of the notes comprising the phrase; it often happens that, without going out of the key, or introducing extraneous notes, the subject cannot always be repeated exactly spaced as it appeared in its initial setting forth.
715 [Page 96].—The examples which are given show that the Japanese have some acquaintance with harmony, and occasionally use it. The description of the classical "Form," and the analysis of the two pieces of Koto music given, will come as a surprise to most persons who look lightly on the music of this Eastern race. It is clear that they set forth a first and second subject, and that the form is what we know as the variation type; then their music displays imitative and sequential phrases, fanciful treatment of a simple recurrent theme, episodal passages, balanced sections; and the figures show considerable ingenuity in construction, even if we do not perceive any planned artistic effect. It would not be fair to place this music side by side with our own sonata form for the sake of comparison; but still their "Plum-branch" and "Rokudan," together with the graceful "On the Road to the Kasuga Temple," exhibit thought in construction and some distinct art-purpose. No doubt the large intervals employed in these pieces, and a prevalence of harsh intervals rarely used with us, make the music sound ungraceful to our ears; but the music is not without grace. As Dr. Hubert Parry has thoughtfully pointed out, our melodies are based on certain harmonic considerations; were the Japanese accustomed to hear our richly-harmonised themes, their ears would recognise certain laws which underlie the construction of melody itself, and their music would no doubt show the effect of this wider knowledge.
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