After seventeenth-century Japan was forced from isolation into contact with the western world, Japanese music was first brought to the ears of people beyond the country’s shores. Distinct and ethereal though it is, the development and various roles of a few of Japan’s many pre-modern styles shows not the expression of a singular Japanese tradition, but rather the intermingling of the music belonging to cultures and kingdoms as distinct as China, India, Vietnam, Korea, and Indonesia. From different traditions different purposes are derived-court music from Korea, folk from Indonesia, and Buddhist chant and folk songs from China-the country from which most Japanese instruments are derived. In addition, the use of music, particularly the rhythm of the taiko drum is essential to the rituals and dances used in Shinto, the native animist religion of Japan. Later on in history it become used for historical narrative and drama-all styles with a distinctly Japanese bent, but which are in the debt of the earlier, transplanted forms of music. At the literal beginning of written Japanese history, the rulers of the country were adopting methods of government and philosophies from the highly sophisticated Chinese court.
Buddhism was one of these, and along with it came Shomyo, monastic chanting of the Buddhist scriptures in a kind of “overtone” singing that was to later influence at least one other style of music developed by Buddhist monks, Heike Biwa. The cultural sway held by China was immense-not only in Shomyo and folk songs (which were sometimes actually sung in Chinese, a foreign language with no linguistic relationship to Japanese) but in the music of the court, called gagaku. The instruments of gagaku (primarily wind and string, but also percussion) are based on Chinese ones- koto, a zither, is based on the gu zheng, the four-stringed biwa on the pipa (a lute).
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The shakuhachi flute, mouth organ (sho), gong, and taiko were also used.
Like Chinese music, that of the Japanese also uses a pentatonic scale and follows the same tradition of classifying scales according to the five elements and as “male” or “female.” The diverse sources of gagaku reveal themselves through the two main branches of the style-the music of the right, Komagaku, and left, Toga ku (referring to their positions in the court area).
The latter is the music of the T’ang court-whose influences include India, where Buddhism spread out from, and a kingdom in South Vietnam. The former is Korean in origin. Gagaku was almost always accompanied by dance or storytelling. The glory days of gagaku were not to last forever-during the middle ages it faded out of popularity, although it persisted in rural areas and it lasts up to this very day as the oldest court music still performed in the world. About the same time gagaku was losing ground, a completely different style, developed by a monk to narrate the sad story of a bloody battle between clans, performed by wandering blind outcasts playing the biwa, was starting up.
This music, called Heike Biwa, after the instrument and the name of the defeated clan, was a tragic historical record, and was musically derived from Shomyo. Other styles of narrative song and the more musical lyrical song grew up in the capital city of Edo, whose ports were the first point of contact between East and West not so very long afterward, ushering in the modern age and the change, musical and otherwise, which accompanied it.
