Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It explores a highly specific performer, genre of music, and its application to an obscure traditional musical instrument! I study a related instrument, so for the person interested in Japanese music and especially in its transmission through lineages and school, in the student teacher relationship, this book unfolds a wealth of information based directly on the author's experience with the shamisen. Beyond its unpacking of knowledge in an exquisitely rare subject area and even more rarely visited in literature, this book is surely of value to the ethnomusicologist interested in methodologies for understanding direct experience. One of the valuable challenges of this book is its discussion of the validity and appropriateness of conventional ethnomusicological and anthropological approaches. The master performer discussed in the book points to his personal philosophy that life informs music and in so doing connects his practise and ideology to life in broader terms and demands that the ethnomusicologist also finds a way to assimilate the life-framework in the reflection. This is obviously a difficult challenge and, for my taste, the author rises to it delivering a very down-to-earth realisation of a specific context. I commend this book both to students of shamisen and ethnomusicology and also to people more broadly fascinated by Japanese traditional music and the Nagauta genre, e.g. singers, shakuhachi players, etc. We are fortunate that scholarly documents of this quality that partially uncover the knowledge privy only to an "inner" circle of participants is now being published in English. One of the challenges for an aspiring student of Japanese music is that so much is unsaid, or spoken within the confines of a teacher/student relationship and not documented or, at best, documentation in former times has been only in Japanese. This makes the level of involvement by the author very valuable in this thesis.
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Shaped by Japanese Music is an in-depth analysis of the musical world of an individual performer, composer,and teacher. Using an ethnographic approach, this study situates musical analysis in the context of its creation, demonstrating that traditional Japanese music is hardly an archaic song form frozen in the present, but an active sociocultural system that has been reproduced in Japan from the seventeenth century to the present day. The dynamics of this cultural system unfold in the musical experiences of Kikuoka Hiroaki, the leader of a school of nagauta music, who struggled to modernize the art form while trying to maintain the qualities he believed to be fundamental to the tradition. Through the focus on Kikuoka's school, readers will become familiar with conflicts in the recent history of this music, traditional Japanese teaching methods, and the technique of modern composition within a traditional form. Underlying all of these different analyses is the concept of kata (form), a Japanese aesthetic that helps shape musical forms as well as the behaviour of musicians.
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