9. Musical accompaniment
• Four main genres:
– Nagauta
– Gidayu
– Tokiwazu and Kiyomoto
– Kage-bayashi
• Nagauta is the most common
10. Musical accompaniment
• On-stage and off-stage
• Small, screened rooms
for geza ensemble
• Underscoring –
fragmented, sound
effects and mood-
setting
11. Nagauta
• Sakata Hyoshiro came to Edo, playing jiuta
shamisen for Kabuki
• This Edo kabuki music was called nagauta
• Accompanies dance; long interludes;
accompanied by No hayashi
12. Nagauta
• Uses the lightest shamisen type, with smallest
neck
• Lyric style (jiuta), with narrative influence
• Accompanies furi rather than mai dancing
• Patterns from No and original kabuki
Kabuki was at the heart of the ‘entertainment quarters’ which grew in Edo-period Japan.
The popular theatre entertainment of the Edo period, starting c.1600 and finding its form in the late Edo, before being frozen in time by Meiji industralisation.
Song-dance-skill / The verb ‘kabuku’ means ‘to act in an unusual manner wearing unusual costumes.’!
Creation myth of kabuki created by the shrine maiden Okuni c.1600 – she made a simple dance drama, accompanied by song and music, based on Buddhist folk dances, and brought it to Kyoto… but this was a common type of performance at the time.
First women’s and then young men’s Kabuki were outlawed due to licentiousness. This led to men’s Kabuki in 1650, which is the modern style.
Women’s kabuki lasted 30 years before being banned; young men’s kabuki another 23, with ‘more sedate’ dancing in the mai style. Then men’s kabuki took over. Women’s was mainly dance, with the no ensemble; young men’s sometimes added koto. The hsamisen was added from the 1650s, created nagauta, which is the main form of kabuki music.
Kabuki draws from many influences – noh, narrative genres (katarimono, heikyoku, joruri), bunraku, and popular dance music (kouta).
Kabuki stages are well decorated and designed.
Dance pieces are often comprised of suites, related by a theme of some kind – one actor will dance a different role for each dance section.
It is dance and drama, music as a third element. Style changed over the Edo period, as it sought to be popular entertainment, competing with tiself and bunraku and others.
Kabuki has jidaimono (period pieces) and sewamono (contemporary, i.e. Edo period pieces)
Two styles of Kabuki performance established in late 17thC – Wagoto, a soft and delicate style for the merchant class, and Aragoto, a hard and brilliant style for the samurai class.
(Also often censored by the government). – Elaborate!
Kabuki has four main genres of shamisen music: Gidayu (or joruri), taken from Bunraku; Tokiwazu and Kiyomoto, which are other Edo-originiated narrative joruri; nagauta, a lyrical style for dance scenes; and Kage-bayashi, which is nagauta with many percussion parts.
The second two are usually used to accompany dance, yet nagauta is far more common.
Kage-bayashi is off-stage music, using an assortment of percussion and even flutes to create a sound-effect style, symbolic texture.
~
Music is in two parts: on-stage and off-stage.
Musicians from different genres sit in different parts of the stage.
The musicians sit on a dais, stage left. Above this dais, and on the other side of the stage, are small screened rooms where joruri is sometimes performed. Offstage right, another screened room houses the hayashi, who perform sound effects and mood music.
The offstage music is fragmented, supportive, does not work outside of kabuki (rather like underscoring)
The geza ensmeble is hidden behind a screen off-stage, and provide the underscore, with shamisen, voice and lots of percussion. They set scenes, moods, offer sound effects, melodic fragments and even full songs, all in a non-diegetic fashion.
A Shamisen player of the Kabuki Theater in Osaka, named Sakata Hyoshiro came to Edo to participate at the Kabuki theatre with Shamisen music resembling the early style of Jiuta.
This actually created a new style in the Edo Kabuki and was called Naga-uta, meaning long song, which became more and more brilliant and took over as the major music of Kabuki, accompanying mainly dance programs.
It has rather long instrumental interludes, and is accompanied by the Hayashi ensemble of Noh instruments (flute and three kinds of drums). This music uses a large number of singers, Shamisen players (in two parts, Honte, and Kaede or Uwajoshi) and Hayashi players (at times 30 members), who sit in specific costumes on a red-covered platform, giving a spectacular audio-visual effect.
The nagauta shamisen is the lightest, with the smallest neck, allowing for virtuosic and rapid playing.
Technically a lyric style, developed from kumiuta and kouta, but it has absorbed joruri and narrative influences; nagauta song suites therefore have a narrative linkage.
Furi (mimetic dance) rather than mai (stylized dance of no)
Nagauta is the majority of kabuki music, used for dance as well as narrative scenes. The onstage hayashi is the four from no, with an equal number of shamisen and vocalists added (2, 4 etc.) These instruments play patterns derived from no, and others originally for kabuki.
Watch the umbrella scene in class – what kind of music? Kato-bushi, or kiyomoto, in close to wagoto style.
