Kabuki

Gentle readers: I am aware that it has been a long time since my last post. Life has intervened. But I have not stopped listening to and thinking about music and will endeavor to catch up, now that my life is not quite as complicated.

At the end of March and beginning of April, I managed to fit in a brief but wonderful trip to Tokyo for my brother’s wedding, a beautiful traditional Shinto wedding held in the lovely Asakusa Shrine very close to the famous Sensōji Temple. The wedding was accompanied at times by great, slow, sometimes dissonant music on the shō (an ancient instrument which can be thought of as a kind of blown reed organ) and also involved a big, beautiful, very resonant taiko (the one that’s used in gagaku and shown in this article is similar in size and decoration to the one at the shrine). On this website, you can get just a bit of a basic idea of what a Shinto wedding at that shrine looks like.

My girlfriend, Maggie – a singer of European-style opera – and I made sure also to go to kabuki while we were in Tokyo. A famous epic was playing at the Shimbashi Embujo Theatre in Ginza: Kanadehon Chūshingura (“The Treasury of Loyal Retainers”), also known as the tale of the 47 Ronin. In the early showing, which started at 11 AM and let out around 3:45 PM, the earlier portions of the epic were played. We saw the late showing, which started at 4:30 and lasted until 8:50. The last 30 minutes of the show constituted the final battle that concluded the story.

Maggie rented a set of headphones that played an English translation of some of the text while we watched the show – a wise investment, as there were many things I would not have understood had she not explained them to me during the intermissions.  The theatre’s description of the play as a whole is as follows:

“On March 14, 1701, for reasons unknown, Asano Takuminokami, a young samurai lord, attacked Kira Kozukenosuke, a high shogunal official, during a ceremony at the shogun’s palace. The shogun was furious and Asano was forced to commit ritual suicide that very day and his domain confiscated. On December 15, 1702, forty-seven of Asano’s retainers avenged his death by attacking and killing Kira and immediately became heroes showing that even after a century of peace, the samurai value of loyalty was not yet dead.”

Of course, there are many complex sub-plots, just as there are in any other epic (think of the Odyssey or the Ramayana, for example).

The experience of witnessing an epic kabuki performance was captivating and fascinating. The actors do not sing most of the time, though that is one of the skills they need and use when appropriate. Instead, what they do is generally much more similar to what Arnold Schoenberg called Sprechstimme, to the point that Maggie and I seriously wonder whether Schoenberg had heard and been influenced by a performance or recording of kabuki. The actors’ voices were supremely expressive, ranging from screams and shrieks to growls, with words often elongated and spoken with exaggerated highs and lows. Singing was heard quite a bit during the Seventh Act (we witnessed Acts 5 and 6, then Act 7, and then Act 11, with two intermissions in between); however, the singer was not one of the actors, but one of the musicians in the orchestra. We saw only some of the musicians sometimes, but their presence was greatly felt. Musical instruments were very important for the emotional character of the play and also to keep a sense of dramatic unity as, for example, a certain set of pitches was used in a variety of different ways on the shamisen (there were two shamisen-players in the orchestra) or the flute, or a melody heard earlier in an act or scene was returned to at its conclusion. The woodblock player kept pace and also varied between single strokes and rolls for dramatic effect.

I wish I could show you scenes from the show we saw. The final scene – a raid in the winter – was particularly beautiful, like a classic Japanese print or woodblock painting come to life, and every time the audience saw a new set, we burst out into applause. I have yet to find any clips of Kanadehon Chūshingura that are long enough to give you much sense of what the drama is like (no doubt in part because I cannot read Kanji [Japanese in Chinese characters], Hiragana or Katakana [the two syllabaries commonly used for Japanese]), but this brief introduction to kabuki is useful in introducing various basic concepts and sounds to you, and this segment about the story of the 47 Ronin and its yearly recreation and celebration at the Sengaku-ji Temple, where the remains of the actual 47 ronin are buried, may help the story come alive to you.

There was great action in the drama we witnessed – especially though not only during the final scene. But by no means is kabuki always mainly about the spectacle, any more than European opera is. For example, a long scene in Act 6 of the show we saw featured a dialogue between Kanpei, his wife, and his mother-in-law, during which not much action was happening but what did happen was extremely important. If you did not understand the words used in the dialogue, however, you were lost, though you could hear that the speech was expressive. And you saw that he eventually committed seppuku – ritual suicide – but you didn’t know why.