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Scuola Dottorale Di Ateneo Leiden University Graduate School Insitute for Area Studies

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Scuola Dottorale Di Ateneo Leiden University Graduate School Insitute for Area Studies SCUOLA DOTTORALE DI ATENEO LEIDEN UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL INSITUTE FOR AREA STUDIES DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN LINGUE E CIVILTÀ DELL’ASIA E DELL’AFRICA MEDITERRANEA CICLO 28° ANNO DI DISCUSSIONE: 2017 DECENTERING GAGAKU EXPLORING THE MULTIPLICITY OF CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE COURT MUSIC SETTORE SCIENTIFICO DISCIPLINARE DI AFFERENZA: L-OR/22 TESI DI DOTTORATO DI ANDREA GIOLAI, MATRICOLA 809041 COORDINATORE DEL DOTTORATO SUPERVISORE DEL DOTTORANDO PROF. FEDERICO SQUARCINI PROF. BONAVENTURA RUPERTI CO-SUPERVISORE DEL DOTTORANDO PROF. KATARZYNA CWIERTKA TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………i NOTE ON THE TEXT……………………ii INTRODUCTION……………………iii I. A NEW ONTOLOGICAL PARADIGM FOR THE STUDY OF ‘JAPANESE COURT MUSIC’……………iii II. “STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE”: THE CONSTITUTIVE AMBIGUITIES OF 雅楽……………x III. TELL IT LIKE IT CAN BE: GAGAKU DEFINED……………xv IV. WHERE IS GAGAKU? THICK TOPOGRAPHIES, UNCHARTED TERRITORIES……………xxv CHAPTER 1. FLOWS AND OVERFLOWS. GAGAKU’S MODES OF REPRESENTATION……………1 1.1. FIRST STREAM. THE HISTORICAL MODE……………3 1.2. SECOND STREAM. THE PRESENTATIONAL MODE ……………12 1.3. THIRD STREAM. THE MUSICOLOGICAL MODE……………19 1.4. FOURTH STREAM. THE DECENTERING MODE……………33 CHAPTER 2. IN THE LABORATORY OF MODERNITY. THE COMPLEX GENEALOGY OF 21ST-CENTURY ‘JAPANESE COURT MUSIC’……………41 2.1. THE OFFICE OF GAGAKU AND THE SCORES OF THE MEIJI……………42 2.2. THE REORGANIZATION OF COURT RITUALS AND GAGAKU AS ‘SHINTO SOUNDSCAPE’……………49 2.3. CAN THE CHILDREN SING (GAGAKU) ALONG?……………57 2.4. THE BIRTH OF ‘JAPANESE TRADITIONAL MUSIC’……………64 2.5. (COURT) MUSIC AND THE NATION……………72 CHAPTER 3. THE GAGAKU TRIANGLE. ‘COURT MUSIC’ IN KANSAI SINCE 1870……………77 3.1. CONTINUITY? THE THREE EARLY-MODERN AND MODERN OFFICES OF MUSIC……………78 3.2. KYOTO: LOST CENTRALITY, FRAGMENTED MODERNITY……………84 3.3. OSAKA: THE LIVELINESS OF AN ALTERNATIVE TRADITION……………89 3.4. NARA: A GLORIOUS PAST THAT’S ALWAYS PRESENT……………95 3.5. THE APPEARANCE OF THE MODERN GAGAKU AMATEUR……………106 CHAPTER 4. “THE GAGAKU OF THE SOUTHERN CAPITAL”. PRACTICING GAGAKU LOCALLY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN……………110 4.1. “YOU DON’T JUST DO WHAT YOU LOVE”: BEING AN ‘AMATEUR’ IN NANTO GAKUSO……………113 4.2. BECOMING AN AMATEUR: TYPOLOGIES OF NANTO GAKUSO’S PRACTITIONERS……………120 4.3. IN THE PRACTICE-ROOM……………127 4.4. COMMUNITIES OF KEIKO……………137 4.5. DOING FIELDWORK IN SOUND: GAGAKU’S MATERIALITY……………145 CHAPTER 5. HIGH-SPEEDING GAGAKU. SOUND, NATURE, SURVIVAL……………152 5.1. UNDERSTANDING UDONO: THE CONTESTED SPACE OF JAPANESE HIGHWAYS……………154 5.2. HIGH AND DRY: RIVER MANAGEMENT POLICIES AND UDONO……………164 5.3. “SAVE THE UDONO REED BED!”. UDONO’S GRASSROOTS MOVEMENTS AND GAGAKU……………173 5.4. WHAT’S IN A CANE? THE COMPOSITE PULP OF THE HICHIRIKI REED……………182 5.5. TANGIBLE, INTANGIBLE, POLITICAL. GAGAKU AS AN ‘ENDANGERED SPECIES’…………195 CONCLUSION……………209 I. CHANGING SCALE IN THE STUDY OF GAGAKU……………209 II. THE EC-CENTRICITY OF CONTEMPORARY ‘JAPANESE COURT MUSIC’……………215 III. WAVES ACROSS FLUID STATES: GAGAKU IN THE INTERSTICES……………226 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………231 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To an extent, writing is never a solitary endeavor. So much more so in the case of academic writing, where one is not only writing with, but also for, against, and along others. Acknowledgements are hopelessly incomplete. But of course this is not a good reason not to express gratitude and affection. First of all, I wish to thank my Supervisors, Professor Bonaventura Ruperti and Professor Katarzyna Cwiertka, for allowing me to roam free. During my time in Japan, I received expert guidance from Professor Itō Kimio at Kyoto University and from Professor Alison Tokita at the Research Centre for Japanese Traditional Music of Kyoto City University of Arts. Thanks to them, and to the entire staff of the Research Centre, for their warm and welcoming support. In particular, I wish to thank Professor Takuwa Satoshi and Mr. Saitō Hisashi for their assistance and patience. My second year of fieldwork was made possible by the Japan Foundation, which I gratefully acknowledge. For precious introductions and for assistance at various stages, thanks to Dr. Marcella Mariotti, Professor Toshio Miyake (both at Ca’ Foscari University) and Dr. Daniele Sestili (former Sapienza University of Rome). Thanks to Professor Fujita Takanori and to Dr. Diego Pellecchia for reading an earlier draft of this dissertation, and for offering insightful comments. Thanks are also due to Professor Steven G. Nelson (Hōsei University) and to Professor Terauchi Naoko (Kobe University). I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all the music-makers I was able to work with: in particular, many thanks to Professor Suzuki Haruo (Nihon gagakukai), to the members of the Udono Reed Bed Research Centre, to its Director Koyama Hiromichi, and to Professor Satō Kōji (Tenri University). Two years with the practitioners of Nanto gakuso in Nara have shaped my experience of gagaku. My warmest thanks go to Professor Kasagi Kan’ichi, the Head of the group, for allowing me to sit among the musicians, as well as to the other sensei and all the members. Special thanks go to one practitioner, who decided to remain anonymous. Finally, I thank all of my friends, my family, and Margherita: they are the ones I play with every day. This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfathers, who also loved to play. i NOTE ON THE TEXT All matters of style, including footnotes, in-text and bibliographic references follow the so- called author-date system of the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The only exception is represented by single quotation marks, which signal either alterations of a word’s most common usage (when outside of someone else’s quoted words) or a quotation enclosed within another quotation. Japanese personal names are given in their Japanese order, with the family name first. Transliterations follow the modified Hepburn system for Japanese, and the pinyin system for Chinese. Macrons indicate long vowels except in the common place names Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto unless these appear in composite terms. Japanese and Chinese characters are only used when rendered necessary by the discussion. ii INTRODUCTION I. A NEW ONTOLOGICAL PARADIGM FOR THE STUDY OF ‘JAPANESE COURT MUSIC’ Can ‘what is’ and ‘what are’ questions ever be answered? Should they? Undoubtedly (unfortunately?), a question for the ontologist, the metaphysician, the logician. At any rate, a question for the philosopher. But is that really so? After all, anthropologists too have recently carved their way into formerly restricted areas of the finely trimmed and carefully fenced garden of Euro-American knowledge –and they are, more than ever, happy to raise profound philosophical questions, mingling with ontology1. Mingling…or mangling 2 : regardless of the undeniable success and widespread resonances of this “anthropology of ontology” (Scott 2013), the case has been made before for a “revolt” against the reductive, positivistic intellectual inheritance of simplificatory methodologies, 1 For some of the most recent texts, see in particular (Viveiros de Castro 2004b; 2013; 2014; Mol 2014; Scott 2013; Skafish 2014; Kohn 2015). For a sharp criticism of the so-called “ontological turn” in anthropology, see (Bessire and Bond 2014). Further references can be found at https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2014/10/28/a-readers-guide-to-the-ontological-turn-parts-1-to-4- somatosphere/ (accessed November 22, 2016). 2 A not-so-covert reference to Andrew Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice (1995). iii favoring instead a “messier” methodology that could deal more appropriately with the complexity of reality (see Law 2004; Law and Mol 2002). After all, as noticed by John Law in After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, “simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent”; examples of things that are not easy to simplify include “pains and pleasures, hopes and horrors, intuitions and apprehensions…things that slip and slide, or appear and disappear, change shape or don’t have much form at all, unpredictabilities” (2004, 2). What better ‘object’3 than music, with its paradoxical relation to time and space and its tendency to crisscross the line between material and immaterial, to put this view to the test? A first, underlying issue emerges: do we get to a better understanding of music by giving up methodological simplicity and trying to practice more complex methods instead? In this apparently messy context, and in line with this line of reasoning, I want to try to “keep the metaphors of reality-making open” (Law 2004, 139 emphasis removed) by asking philosophical questions about music anthropologically4. Inevitably, such a stance entails the necessity to ‘position’ or ‘situate’ oneself: to say how a question will be asked is to say from where one is going to speak, to begin to make one’s “situatedness” appear (Vannini 2008; see also Haraway 1988; Strathern 1999). ‘What is gagaku?’ is the fundamental question raised time and again in the course of this dissertation. And to ask this question anthropologically means, I believe, to also ask how this particular object, gagaku, is constructed (or, to put it less bluntly, represented) as an object-of-knowledge5. This is not to say that anthropology is implicitly or necessarily constructivist, but, more practically, that as anthropologists are interested in what things are to the people they work with -or, in more recent terms, in what constitutes a thing for the people they work with. 3 It is worth reminding that bracketing words and phrases serves the purpose of signaling an epistemological violence –that of employing second-order notions that are largely non-isomorphic with the products of Japanese knowledge practices. As noticed by Marilyn Ivy with regard to ‘Japan’ and ‘the West’, quotation marks are used to indicate the “unstable identities” of what is marked (1995, 1). I use them in much the same way, to complicate the idea that conceptual constructs (like ‘music’) have unproblematic essences.
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