Gagaku, Ensemble OnoTeruhisa Fukuda, maître de shakuhachi. Offrande musicale

These two recent recordings on CD of gagaku court music and shakuhachi honkyoku are reminders of just how demanding Japanese traditional music can be for listeners. Solo shakuhachi playing in the Zen style of the Fuke sect may lure the listener in simply by the unique tone of the five-holed bamboo flute, but such minimal music demands that the listener concentrate on individual sounds themselves. The primacy of the single sound is an essential part of Japanese music, and this mode of listening is mentioned in the notes of this CD of shakuhachi music (18). John Cage, who once claimed solo shakuhachi as his favorite genre of music, explained how very few musicians or listeners were able to fully focus on the quality of individual sounds from moment to moment, accustomed instead to listening for relationships between sounds.Compared to the minimalist solo shakuhachi repertoire, the maximalist gagaku orchestra poses a different challenge to the listener. The gagaku orchestra does not lure the listener into the music at all. Instead, its monolithic sound, thick with unfamiliar instrumental timbres, is fascinating upon first hearing, but the extremely slow pace of formal development in any given piece leaves the listener feeling lost, giving a sense that nothing new is happening. Listening to either gagaku or solo shakuhachi for an extended period has a hypnotic effect that can lull a listener to sleep unless one concentrates intensely on the music. Fortunately, both these CDs on the French MEG label provide a stimulating listening experience with high-quality recordings that are supported by beautiful packaging. Each one contains a handsome booklet filled with color photographs and extensive notes on music history, instruments, repertoire, the artists, and the individual tracks. Most importantly, both albums feature some of the leading performers of Japanese traditional music.Gagaku court music is one of the oldest and most venerated traditions in Japan. A collection of stately instrumental, vocal, and dance pieces, gagaku has been performed in Japan from the eighth century to the present in Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, and, most significantly, the imperial household of Japan in Tokyo. Made up of a diverse repertoire that includes ancient music and dance from China and Korea, as well as indigenous Japanese songs and dances, gagaku is performed on traditional instruments that have remained relatively unchanged since the ninth century. While historical research by ethnomusicologists has shown that the music has undergone changes over the centuries, the sound of gagaku nevertheless provides an aural glimpse into the past that inspires awe in listeners. Comprised of instruments mostly of Chinese origin, the sound of the gagaku orchestra is unique to Japan, and although the music influenced later Japanese musical genres, gagaku stands apart aurally and conceptually from all other Japanese musical traditions that developed in the centuries that followed. The listening experience of gagaku, especially for the first-time listener, can be quite startling.Most of the instruments of the gagaku orchestra are used only in the context of gagaku and only occasionally appear in other Japanese genres. The wind section of the orchestra provides the most distinctive sounds. The hichiriki, a small double-reed instrument, and the ryūteki, a transverse flute, play melodic lines in heterophonic phrases. The shō, a seventeen-pipe mouth organ, is notable for its sustained chord clusters, which spread a background wash of color across the gagaku canvas. The string and percussion instruments provide rhythmic and time-marking functions crucial to this ensemble in a highly flexible and elastic rhythm. The string section includes the long zither sō and the pear-shaped lute gaku biwa, both playing set patterns to stabilize tempi. The percussion section marks time with a taiko drum and a small gong, which are hung on stands, and two kinds of barrel-shaped drums, which are played horizontally.This CD of gagaku features a performance by the Ono Gagaku Kai, an ensemble formed in 1887 by Ono Sukemichi at the Ono Terusaki Shrine in Tokyo. Dedicated to maintaining traditional gagaku performance, the Ono ensemble continues to perform gagaku of the highest quality and is one of the best ensembles in the country, alongside the royal musicians at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and its related group, Tokyo Gakuso. Record releases of gagaku are numerous, but years ago many albums of gagaku featured poor-quality recordings by lesser ensembles. This situation began to change in 1980 with the release of an LP by the Ono Gagaku Kai on the Ocora label, a superb recording featuring some of the more well-known pieces, such as “Etenraku,” a standard that may be heard at Japanese weddings.With this recent album from 2015, the Ono Gagaku Kai are featured in a live concert recorded at the Alhambra Theatre in Geneva in 2012, with the album consisting of an entire concert from start to finish with audience applause included. The concert begins with “Tuning,” a traditional introduction piece called netori that introduces the mode and sets an atmosphere for the music to come. A set of three pieces follows, two of which, “Shukoshi” and “Kaden no Kyū,” are classified as kangen, literally “winds” and “strings,” the gagaku term for instrumental music without dance. The other piece in this first half is a vocal piece, “Kashin,” from a repertoire of vocal gagaku called rōei, made up of Chinese poems translated into Japanese. The second half of this concert set features two lengthy dance numbers, “Nasori,” an umai dance of Korean origin, and “Konju,” a samai dance of Chinese origin.The excellent performance notwithstanding, if there is any fault with this recording, it is in the sound mix. A gagaku orchestra is certainly challenging to record, and it is an even bigger challenge to achieve the proper balance in a live performance. In the case of this recording, the shō mouth organ is quieter than all the other instruments. Undoubtedly, this is the result of the live mix in the concert hall, but this is unfortunate. For many first-time listeners of gagaku, the mouth organ is the most intriguing sound, as it provides a sustained wash of sound that all the instruments seem to float within. On this recording, the shō is so buried in the mix that it can easily go unnoticed during the kangen pieces. However, when the listener gets to the fifth track, “Nasori,” which is an umai dance that traditionally does not feature the shō, the absence of the mouth organ is suddenly noticeable. Teachers could turn this into a game by having students compare “Nasori” with the previous tracks and ask them to try and identify the difference.Nevertheless, this latest offering by Ono Gagaku Kai is certainly worthwhile for listeners to hear the beauty of gagaku. The forty-page booklet contains photographs of musicians, dancers, and instruments, with several pages of detailed notes by ethnomusicologist Akira Tamba in both French and English on gagaku history and instruments and a very clear, concise explanation of rhythm and notation. Musically, any of these tracks would make excellent listening examples that could be used in ethnomusicology or music appreciation classes. The distinctive sound of gagaku never fails to surprise young listeners because of the sheer unfamiliarity of its sound. It is so unfamiliar that even the audience in Geneva during this concert lost themselves in the program, applauding between movements of the dance piece “Nasori.”The shakuhachi is one of the most well-known instruments of Japanese traditional music due in large part to the colorful history of the instrument and its distinctive timbre. The use of the shakuhachi as a tool of Buddhist meditation by the komusō, or “monks of emptiness,” of the Tokugawa era, combined with its rich, airy tone, suggests the life breath of a solitary mendicant in quiet contemplation of the cosmos. That kind of romanticized description of shakuhachi as an instrument of suizen, or “blowing zen,” is typically invoked by listeners, artists, record labels, and concert promoters to describe a tradition that has been imbued with a heightened aura of spirituality, especially in the West. Though much has been made of Western conceptions of shakuhachi spirituality as an Orientalist fantasy, the solo tradition nevertheless does have a spiritual aspect that originated in Japan and continues to be an important aspect of playing the instrument.This CD of shakuhachi music by veteran shakuhachi master Teruhisa Fukuda is evidence that many Japanese players indeed approach their performance as an explicitly spiritual practice. The collection demonstrates the extent to which Fukuda, known for his involvement with contemporary music for shakuhachi, especially as a participant in the prestigious ensemble Pro Musica Nipponia, is first and foremost a practitioner of classic shakuhachi honkyoku and the tradition of sonic meditation with a consciously spiritual intent. In the liner notes by Fukuda and Madeleine Leclair, Fukuda states that he presents these pieces as a “musical offering dedicated to my instrument because in playing the shakuhachi I am able to follow the path to illumination” (20).All the pieces are from the shakuhachi solo tradition of honkyoku, pieces that were composed for Buddhist meditation by the legendary Fuke sect. Several of the pieces are among the most recorded shakuhachi works. The oldest and most venerable pieces are “Kokū” (Empty sky) and “Reibo,” of which there are many different versions. Another commonly recorded piece is “Ajikan,” the title of which refers to meditating on the sound of “ah” to seek enlightenment. “Tamuke,” which means “hands folded in prayer,” is commonly used as a requiem for the deceased. “Saji” is one of the most technically challenging works in the repertoire, with its title referring to the compassion of the Bodhisattva and featuring an impressive variety of special techniques, such as muraiki (a breathy sound using forceful blowing), for which the shakuhachi is well-known. Other tracks included are “Echigo-sanya,” of which there are numerous versions, and “Takiotoshi,” which represents the sounds of a cascading waterfall in the Izu area.Fukuda's musical offering is quite generous, with seventy-one minutes of music and four of the seven tracks over ten minutes in length. While there have been countless recordings of shakuhachi honkyoku to choose from over the years, this recording stands out for its superb quality. The close microphone placement picks up every nuance of breath, which is crucial to the focus on individual sounds. Even the tiny overtones produced by the pursing of the player's lips are audible, revealing a deeper layer of sound, as if heard with the aid of an aural microscope. The only fault with this CD package is that the booklet could use more extensive notes. Specifically, listeners could gain a deeper appreciation of the subtleties of these pieces with some explanation of the underlying aesthetic principles of Japanese music. Although the aesthetics of silence expressed by the term ma and the three-part form known as jo-ha-kyū tend to be overused in research on Japanese music, they are nevertheless useful, especially for approaching such challenging music. For teachers of ethnomusicology and world music survey classes, both these CDs of traditional Japanese music offer excellent audio examples demonstrating the use of ma and jo-ha-kyū that invite new ways of listening and deepen understanding of Japanese aesthetics and culture

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