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Introduction Western Art Music in Japan: a Success Story? Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 10 (2013), pp 211–222. r Cambridge University Press, 2013 doi:10.1017/S1479409813000232 Introduction Western Art Music in Japan: A Success Story? Margaret Mehl University of Copenhagen Email: [email protected] Japan’s successful modernization on Western premises, in the second half of the nineteenth century, included the introduction and adoption of Western music. So thorough was the appropriation of Western art music that by the mid-twentieth century it had a dominant position comparable to that in the countries of its origin. On a worldwide level, Japan was already a major consumer of Western art music by the 1930s, a fact that is reflected in the number both of gramophone recordings sold in Japan and of leading artists who included Japan on their international tours. After 1945 Japan became an export country for musical instruments, sound technology and even musical pedagogy, in particular the ‘Suzuki Method’ and the Yamaha music schools. Further influence came from the many Japanese musicians active in orchestras and conservatoires around the world. Meanwhile, indigenous music was increasingly marginalized, and today it has a niche existence. Even contemporary popular music owes as much to Western music as to Japanese. Measured against the aims of the government officials who, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, made the decision to systematically import Western music and disseminate it through the military and the education system, this development can be described as a success. Their decision was motivated not by aesthetic considerations, but by the recognition of music’s functions in the nations of the West, including its role in ceremonies representing the power of the modern nation-state and in contributing to physical, moral and aesthetic education in schools. The introduction of Western music cannot be separated from the political, military, economic and social reforms enacted by the Meiji government.1 The educational elite had their own, non-musical, reasons for promoting Western music, as illustrated by their intensive reception of Beethoven and Wagner at a time when most of their music could not be heard in Japan.2 The appeal of Western music for reasons other than its intrinsic musical value is not limited to Japan. Karl Signell, comparing 1 A good introduction to the history of modern Japan, including the Meiji reforms, is Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (2003)). 2 NISHIHARA Minoru, ‘Gakusei’ Be¯to¯ven no tanjo¯ [The birth of Beethoven as the great master of music] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000); Toru TAKENAKA, ‘Wagner-Boom in Meiji-Japan’, Archiv fu¨ r Musikwissenschaft 62/1 (2005): 13–31. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 02 Oct 2021 at 06:58:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409813000232 212 Nineteenth-Century Music Review Japan and Turkey, observes that for both countries Western music represented ‘part of a desired package’.3 It would, be wrong, however, to see the introduction of Western music simply as a question of power politics: the threat of Western encroachment is not sufficient to explain the zeal with which Japan adopted Western culture. As Ju¨ rgen Osterhammel points out in his world history of the nineteenth century, ‘no one forced the Egyptians to found newspapers, and the Japanese to listen to Gounod or Verdi’. He refers to ‘more complicated, non-imperial processes’ in the worldwide dissemination of a Western-style press and Western music, by which tastes are exported but also imported and acquired independently of imperial or domestic official political agendas.4 In the case of Japan, the political agenda included ambitions to promote Western music as an art form and ultimately to create a ‘national music’ that combined the best of Western and Japanese music. This, perhaps the most elusive of aims, was not reached, at least not in the nineteenth century and not in the way the early propagators of ‘national music’ envisaged – another indication that cultural flows are not governed by political measures alone. The most intriguing and (at least until recently) least-researched aspect of the process is perhaps the change in musical sensibilities. As a result, most Japanese find much of the music that was played in Japan before the introduction of Western music just as jarring to their ears as any Western listener.5 If we accept neither Eurocentric assumptions about the universality and superiority of Western art music, nor explanations centring on asymmetrical power relations, how do we explain a phenomenon that seems no less intriguing for having parallels in other countries outside the Western world, most notably Korea, Taiwan and China? Several reasons can be given for the change, most importantly the dominance of Western music in the national education system to the almost complete exclusion of traditional musics until well into the twentieth century, as well as the enormous prestige enjoyed by Western music as a fundamental element of Western civilization and modernization, which were closely linked in most people’s minds. There is remarkably little published research in English (or German) on the subject of Western art music in Japan (and the other East Asian countries for that matter),6 despite the undisputed importance of Japanese as players, teachers and consumers as well as producers of musical instruments and audio technology.7 Among mainstream musico- logists, the notion that Western art music somehow belongs to the West may no longer be consciously embraced, but it nevertheless appears hard to shake off, judging from the fact that scholars still see the need to reassert 3 Karl Signell, ‘The Modernization Process in Two Oriental Music Cultures: Turkish and Japanese’, Asian Music 7/2 (1976): 72–102, here 72. See also James Parakilas, ‘Classical Music as Popular Music’, The Journal of Musicology 3/1 (1984): 1–18. 4 Ju¨ rgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009): 82 (author’s translation). 5 CHIBA Yu¯ ko, Doremi o eranda nihonjin [When the Japanese chose ‘do re mi’] (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 2007). 6 A rare exception is Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau, eds, Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). 7 Cyril Ehrlich describes the emergence of Japan as a leading manufacturer of pianos as ‘the most significant development in modern piano history’. See Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 (1976)): 195. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 02 Oct 2021 at 06:58:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409813000232 Mehl: Western Art Music in Japan: A Success Story? 213 this observation.8 Ethnomusicologists and specialists of Japan, on the other hand, have tended to be more interested in indigenous genres or else modern popular music. The stereotype of the Japanese merely imitating Western models may also be a reason that may have contributed to the limited attention paid by Western researchers to the introduction of Western art music in Japan. Such major works that exist have tended to focus on the official importation of music, particularly singing in schools.9 Luciana Galliano, the author of the most recent comprehensive monograph on Western art music in Japan, examines composers and their works.10 Research published by Japanese scholars has (predictably) been more comprehensive and varied, particularly in the last twenty years or so.11 Among the best comprehensive treatments in recent years are those by TSUKAHARA 12 Yasuko (the author of the first article in this issue) and NAKAMURA Ko¯suke. A groundbreaking feature of Tsukahara’s work is that she examined musical activities (ongaku katsudo¯), that is the creation, performance and consumption of music, and compared and contrasted the reception of Western music with that of Ming-Qing music (minshingaku), a type of popular music from China that came to Japan via Nagasaki in the early nineteenth century and enjoyed immense popularity until the time of the first Sino–Japanese war, after which it never quite regained its previous place in musical life. Nakamura’s work includes a detailed treatment of the reception of knowledge about Western music in the Edo or Tokugawa period (1603–1868); and his final chapter, on the non-governmental import of Western music, indicates that he too intended to go beyond the treatment of the official introduction by the Meiji 8 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007): 562–7; Michael P. Steinberg, ‘Afterword: Whose Culture? Whose History? Whose Music?’, in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 550–61, here 552. 9 Useful, if brief, older overviews are NOMURA Ko¯ichi, ‘Occidental Music’, in Japanese Music and Drama in the Meiji Era, ed. KOMIYA Toyotaka (Tokyo: O¯ bunsha, 1956): 451–507; William P. Malm, ‘The Modern Music of Meiji Japan’, in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ed. Donald Shively (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971): 257–300. The most comprehensive treatment of the significant contributions by German and Austrian musicians in Japan is still Irene Suchy, ‘Deutschsprachige Musiker in Japan vor 1945: Eine Fallstudie eines Kulturtransfers am Beispiel der Rezeption abendla¨ndischer Musik’ (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1992). For the education system, see Ury Eppstein, The Beginnings of Western Music in Meiji Era Japan (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1994).
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