Overthinking the apocalypse

European (classical tradition) music: Unusual focus on harmony. Middle-East (areally and broadly): Focus on modality. African tradition (ibid.): Focus on polyrhythms and rhythmic complexity generally. Indian: Long rhythm cycles, broader conception of “mode”. Gamelan: Harmony not based on the harmonic series (strings/pipes). Thai: Another type of non-string-based harmony.

I was thinking how one would characterise traditional Japanese music in broad terms like this, like, in a nutshell, what is emphasised in Japan more than elsewhere? I would characterise premodern J music by its restraint.

I often feel like honkyoku, for example, is the music that bamboo would make if bamboo made music spontaneously, without intention or human involvement. One Japanese scholar, Saitō Takao, has drawn a scale with “nature sounds” in one end and “European music” on the other, and posited Japanese music to be halfway between the two. If you think of the (kinda ethnocentric) definition of music as rhythm+melody+harmony, all of them get restrained in one context or another:

Rhythm: Honkyoku deliberately eschewing any simple repetition or beat, notes having a certain rhythmic identity but following the breath and emotion of the performer without fixed guidelines. Hayashi ensemble deliberately opting not to have a beat drum or conductor and instead using shouts. “Jo” sections of jo-ha-kyū structures meandering and free; ha accelerating without a set defined pace.

Melody: Folk instruments like the hayashi-shinobue not being tuned to anything. Each nohkan sounding different, with octaves not octaving. Tunes being defined by fingerings not by note, resulting in modulation whenever played in an instrument of different size. Melodic structures that use “bad” intervals, unclear progressions, or what appears to be isolated random notes in a sea of silence, yells etc. Or, conversely, a minimal 5-note melody that repeats, in, a, loop, forever (in matsuri music). Noise as a feature (flute breathiness, shamisen sawari/buzz etc.), allowing among other things higher tolerance for imprecise tuning.

Harmony: The above details of tuning and fingering blocking harmonisation (there's only two melodic instruments in a hayashi ensemble, voice and nohkan, and it's impossible for them to harmonise; also for nagauta flute vs. voice, etc.). Dissonance as a feature. Absence of chords in string instruments traditions (in any of the various styles played with koto, shamisen, or biwa). Small number of performers on most traditional ensembles; focus on solo (shakuhachi, hōgaku), monophonic melody+percussion (hayashi), or like 3 performers (sankyoku). Inclination to counterpoint and unison.

None of those things are like, universal or absolute: gagaku cared a lot about being in tune and harmony, tsugaru-jamisen is characterised by well-defined, dizzyingly fast rhythms, etc. However, compared with other music traditions, I think Japanese music is more prone to go like, “ok now let's not do this obvious/pleasant thing: aw yiss, that hits me right in the mono-no-aware”. A bit like the musical equivalent of writing poems about withered branches in winter rather than cherry blossoms in spring.

Accordingly, this is the musical tradition I know of that makes the most use of silence. I think it's a basic factor of art in general that “the silences are notes too” and musicians everywhere will be acutely aware of the importance of the notes you don't play. But I don't know any other type of music where silence is so frequent, long, and present; so energised, sitting there with you in the room with the meaning-laden stillness of cowboys in a Wild West movie staring at one another at dawn before drawing the gun. If the European tradition loves to have tons of different instruments playing together at the same time, the Japanese tradition loves to get all the musicians in the room to stop playing altogether.

These tendencies are about old music, not the modern musical landscape; still they come out in the oddest little places, like the quick spread of the melancholic miyako-bushi scale with its dissonant 1-semitone interval (which I take to be something like the blues, in context of origin and mood, except it would be like the blues scale took over children's songs and nursing rhymes); or the way that, for example, Ghibli's Laputa soundtrack was rebuilt from scratch for the USA release because the original movie was considered to have too many minutes without any music at all, which for a North American audience was considered uncomfortable.