Culture “at Work” in Music: Traditional Japanese Nagauta Shamisen

Challenging Western musical assumptions

This essay aims to question the conventional Western approach to world music and offers a secondhand learning experience that may help others reflect on how they engage with unfamiliar cultures. By comparing a music I know well with one I do not — traditional Japanese music — I hope to uncover some of the internal biases many listeners hold toward world musics and take meaningful steps toward grasping the “musical ideals” of a culture very different from my own. As ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl explains, these ideals are the criteria a people uses to judge its own music.

My example of familiar music comes from the Men’s Chorus I belong to at the University of Toronto. The ensemble is currently preparing for several public performances later this semester. One piece in our repertoire is “Don’t Give Me the Whole Truth,” a TTBB chorus with piano accompaniment composed by Imant Raminsh. In rehearsals, heavy importance is placed on the precision and accuracy of each section’s tone — including subtle differences in vowel sounds — as well as diction, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, and all the other elements expected of a coordinated choral ensemble. In this setting, where the homogeneity of our sound matters most, there is less room for artistic freedom and personal interpretation. We learn to isolate the tricky rhythm that alternates between 3/4 and 7/8 meter, paying close attention to the timings and phrasing marked on the score. Sectionals guarantee that every singer understands their role within the piece’s harmonies. This approach resembles constructing a building: each layer of the music is checked for consistency, stacked one on top of another, until finally a finished artistic product emerges.

First encounter with nagauta

To begin understanding the culture and sound of traditional Japanese music, I listened to an audio recording of a nagauta performed by the Kineya Ensemble. Nagauta — “long song” — is a type of traditional Japanese music that accompanies classical dance-drama theater. The genre took shape during the eighteenth century. It is typically performed with the shamisen, a plucked lute roughly a meter long with three strings, along with drums.

Almost every element struck me on first hearing. The diction of the Japanese language when sung makes an immediate impression — animated and forceful, with clear expression behind every word. The voices, whether solo or singing in what seemed like two-part unisons, slide and inflect effortlessly, rarely dwelling on a single pitch but capable of sustaining a line for impressive stretches. Brief vocal interjections surface for just one or two vowels behind the melody in certain sections. The shamisen produces a twangy, percussive quality, likely from the plectrum held in the player’s hand, and its plucking feels forceful but precise — there is a clear example at 16:39 in the cited recording. Rhythmically, the shamisen is played very consistently, though no stable meter emerges; the playing runs on as an indistinguishable stream of quarter and eighth notes that seem limited to just a few pitches. A flute joins intermittently, and soft drums are present throughout most of the song’s duration. In some stretches, the singing starts to drag, with little obvious development of musical motifs or structural progression. There are occasional instrumental sections that become livelier, allowing the shamisen, drums, and flute to take center stage. At times when the instruments were not interacting rhythmically with one another, I found myself viewing them as dry accompaniment at best.

A deeper cultural perspective

To move beyond these first reactions, I studied research by several ethnomusicologists on shamisen music and especially nagauta shamisen. The teaching process in nagauta shamisen, I discovered, is intensely rigorous. Ethnomusicologist Jay Keister — who himself studied the genre under master artist Kikuoka Hiroaka — describes the experience as a “powerful experience” and a “rite of passage” after undergoing twenty-two months of lessons. The training is “tailored to the individual and results in a personal transformation of the student, which is the primary goal of nagauta.” In traditional Japanese music, like other traditional music of East Asia, the finished artistic product carries less weight than the development and mastery of skills and principles by individual musicians. This distinction helps explain why, as Keister writes, “acclaimed master musicians of nagauta such as Kikuoka have the ability to discern the character and feelings of individual players solely through listening to their performance of the music.” That notion — an innately apparent, personalized quality in the music — differs sharply from the way individual performers are treated in the Men’s Chorus.

A significant amount of traditional Japanese music is written in duple meter. However, the meter is applied “in such a flexible manner that a regular, pronounced alternation of strong and weak beats does not occur. This feeling of rhythmic freedom is enhanced by a tendency of the voice to lag somewhat behind the instrument.” This explains why I could not detect a stable meter and why the singing felt drawn out to me on first listen.

Keister details some of the notable subtleties of the nagauta style: “learning from Kikuoka how to sing properly involved knowing which words receive a special emphasis through the use of slight microtonal pitch movement up or down, special decorations such as glissando or grace notes, timbral modification of the voice, and other delicate vocal techniques not indicated in the notation.” The tendencies to deviate slightly from pitch and to modify the voice’s timbre are stylistic markers that a musician from a vastly different culture might initially hear as jarring or even non-musical. Learning that these elements are actually subtle, unwritten skills and techniques is humbling. It also forces me to consider what qualities in my own culture’s music are so deeply ingrained — in both my mind and in notation — that I do not realize how strange they could sound to an outside ear.

A revised listening

Hearing the nagauta again now, things register differently. I no longer hear the vocal lag or the unstable wavering as flaws, but instead as signs of a distinct style. The emotion present in the voice is not part of a finished product; rather, it belongs to a performer’s long-standing aesthetic and personal quest within the art form. By modifying my own perception, I have come to understand how traditional Japanese arts diverge fundamentally from those of the Western world. Recognizing that these differences show up in the very sound of a culture’s music means moving away from ethnocentrism and embracing other cultures that are just as rich and historically layered as our own.