Juliana Hodkinson (Daiwa Scholar 1995)

Differentiating ‘Japanese music’

Having lived in Japan and studied Japanese in the mid-1990s, I am often asked about the impact of Japanese music on my own.

At such moments, it seems an uncomfortable matter of verbal habit that we can even talk about ‘Japanese music’ - a cultural bias whose unhelpfulness becomes apparent as soon as we try to capture its defining characteristics. There are of course particular historical genres which are unique to Japan, whose location in a culturally and geographically specific society we desire to find significant. Curious to understand these, I practised the ryuteki in an amateur gagaku ensemble for a year, and have since researched bunraku in rehearsal and performance. I also made issues of notation and practical convention - in traditional gagaku as well as in Toru Takemitsu, Makoto Shinohara and Yoritsune Matsudaira’s handling of traditional instruments and forms in the 1960s and 70s - the focus of a dissertation I wrote while in Japan.

Yet these traditional forms, which we group aesthetically with representations of harmony and repose, seem irreconcilably far from the nation’s modern experience. Repeatedly levelled by earthquakes, fires, warfare, and the two largest bombs ever released on urban populations, and awaking in the 1990s with a prosperity-hangover from decades of corporate bingeing with terrible environmental consequences, the relentless 24-hour peak that is contemporary urban life in Japan can hardly be comprehended on the basis of Japan’s poetic golden age.

As young Japanese artists grapple with their post-war heritage, and their richly confusing turn-of-the-millenium situation, the classical Japanese arts can hardly be said to be enjoying a renaissance among this forward-looking generation; unfortunate associations with nationalism and the negative aspects of imperialism make it politically discreditable to indulge in cultural nostalgia. Young musicians therefore look to western power structures for liberation from the repression of hierarchical restraints at home and from the fear of becoming ‘bamboo composers’.

A European entering this matrix of east-west nostalgia-regret, I strongly felt a mute accusation of japonisme, arising from my curiosity about gagaku and bunraku. These classical forms have primarily been a research passion for me, and in so far as they might inform my own writing, the degree of deflection is so great that parallels only become apparent to me in retrospect. I have never composed with instruments, timbres, modal or temporal structures from Japan, and any perceived identification between my music and Japanese genres is often projected by listeners. However, the first work which I wrote after arriving in Japan for the first time, Water like a stone (scored for piccolo, clarinet, percussion, celeste, harpsichord, guitar, violin and cello), did become the shock-absorber for two contrasting non-musical impressions, from rural and urban Japan, respectively.

My first month had been spent in the family of a Shinto priest at Akama shrine in Shimonoseki, where daily life - lived in the sliding-door wide-screen format, and imbued with a strong sense of temporal nobility - was centred on the service of the shrine, the upkeep of traditional arts and the appreciation of golden-age aesthetics. From this month, I gained a great respect for horizontality, for the apertures which open up interiors to be breathed upon (even by typhoons!), and for an expansive perception of time, subdivided only infrequently by organically repeating cyclical events. In the score of Water like a stone, there are few vertical columns to support the ensemble structure; instead, events are distributed quite evenly along a time-line which almost always allows individual parts a few seconds’ room for horizontal ‘sliding’ or shifting in relation to one another. The musicians’ parts are not fastened onto a universal grid of pulse, but are merely lashed loosely together with sporadic cues, so that their connections can be tightened or loosened from performance to performance. The apertures which then arise between sounds allow the presence of silence within a dynamic structure – the pauses (between phrases) are openings, not cadential closures. I had already attempted such temporal flexibility before, and in a later piece (Some reasons for hesitating, 1999, for sinfonietta) I undermined verticality even more, by removing the score entirely.

In my second month, I moved to central Tokyo, where one of my strongest early experiences was the melody-shock. Jingles, adverts – what in Europe would be a two- or three-note introduction at the start of a platform announcement becomes, in Tokyo, a whole tune whose length almost replaces the announcement itself, such that, for example, Yamamoto-line commuters can recognise stations by their individual signature-tunes, long before the name of the station is briefly announced. My work on Water like a stone absorbed this sudden burst of melody immediately, making use of fragments of blatant tunefulness – repetitive, self-similar, tonal. I took the metropolitan liberty of using melodies to interrupt one another abruptly, pasting different types of expression end-to-end, without transition. In this piece, contrasting stylistic dialects stand isolated within a larger context, not attempting to resolve into any common coinage.

Later, as my initial culture-shock was overcome, the edges of these musical objects blurred increasingly, and the biographical impact of Japan on my music has become more abstract and distanced, seeking more nuanced outlets. What forms can an east-west encounter take, then, other than culture-shock, sentimental nostalgia and adaptive japonisme? I ask myself this question both in respect of my own work, and of that of composers born in Japan.

The universality to which so much notated music aspires seems to be the cynical response. And also illusory. Universality bases its clean, non-contextual aesthetics on hardy invariables such as the unfragile piano, the printed score, and other standardised modern cultural goods which can be produced, shipped and used in any climate. These are aesthetics triumphantly advanced by the western world of former centuries. What are the supposed advantages of blank neutrality and homogenisation, which make all regional and local timbres that are not easily assimilable into the dominant practices, seem so unattractive? To what ultimate configuration does the collective movement towards similarity aspire, as it gathers up more and more corners of the cultural globe in its path?

A more fruitful alternative to either naïve sentimentality or identity-less universality can be sought in the expression of experiences of difference bridging the east-west divide. Difference depends for its definition on its subordinate relation to (challenged) identity, and identity insists on an essence, a point. Difference brings to the point, the centre, the aesthetic mantras of postmodernity - to undermine, to destabilise, and to transgress - in a push-pull process of identification, alternation and differentiation.

Thus, the east-west encounter becomes not only a trading and accommodation of actually eastern or actually western concepts, structures, techniques, instruments, rhythms and scales, but also an expression of various more or usually less accurate experiences of confrontation, of dis- and re-orientation.

Recognising the deeper, common sensibilities on both sides, art which has achieved the bridging of the east-west divide can no longer suffer the convenience of labels such as ‘Japanese’, with all the exotic or alien qualities the label implies. Advanced technology, bamboo and slowly-passing time are qualities often associated with Japan, and yet one of the leading proponents of bamboo architecture around the world is a Columbian (Simón Vélez), and one of the artists who most poignantly combines an aesthetics of stretched time with highly modern image technology is an American (Bill Viola). Again, the question ‘what is Japanese?’ seems elusive, even trivial.

One extreme example of the integration of modern Japan’s contrasting facets – the rich cultural heritage from the golden age, and the opposite experience of destruction and chaos – comes from the experimental rock-guitarist Keiji Haino. In Haino’s music (The book of ‘Eternity set aflame’ for instance), I seem to hear – reincarnated in the sound of a heavily-distorted electric guitar - the chordal sho, the nasal hichiriki, even the strained male voices of no or bunraku. Despite the brutality of the surface of the music, still the aesthetic seems extremely delicate. Although noise obscures melody, the result is that the focus of the musical experience is veiled behind an inscrutable layer of ‘difficulty’. Haino’s integrative approach - in which harmonies waver microtonally, drones breathe and time is one undivided organic sweep - embraces, through these memories of inherited sound-memories, the modern experience: the music is never-ending noise, its life-blood is electricity.

In Keiji Haino’s use of traditional musical metaphors deployed by a contemporary consciousness, I recognise emotional and formal elements from gagaku. Stringent clarity of line, inscrutable sensuality – an aesthetics of extremity which yet does not employ excessive means. Also, a transfer of importance from the explicit and defined to the residual, in which the blank - in depriving the listener of information - is subjected to heightened imaginative speculation. The surface of Haino’s music presents only an out-of-focus periphery for perception – a zone on the outskirts of ‘music’, almost evacuated by human expression, which yet, in the scant traces of recognisable expressivity which do remain, forces our attention into this circumference of potential value, embarrassing our expectation of unambiguous centre.

This mode of expression purposefully retains a firm grip on time, as does also that of no, and gagaku. Far from appearing meditative or trance-like to me, these demonstrations of extended duration sharpen my concentration to knife-point, giving me the opportunity to take in every ephemeral detail in its fullness and singularity. Slowing things down in this way represents the way events are lingered over in memory, in which the slightest gestures take on monumental significance.

Together with the prioritisation of horizontality over verticality, and – to a lesser degree – the melody-shock, the stretching of time is one of the aspects of some music from Japan which has impressed and influenced me most. Still, the weight and quantity of other, opposite experiences makes me hesitate to describe these as attributes of a supposedly Japanese music.

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