Actually, of course I'll tell you what kind of CD I bought the other day. We went into a store called "Intelektuāla grāmata", meaning "Intellectual Book". And there - lo and behold - a small stand with CDs. Classical and ethnic music. I, like any decent music lover, couldn't walk past, started browsing. And found a familiar word - Gagaku. This is Japanese music tracing its origins back to the 7th-8th centuries. I already had one of its albums in mp3, which I once downloaded with difficulty from soulseek. And even now, say, on emule there is by no means a lot of such music.
Next - a short quote from a two-page booklet in fine print. (Russian edition).
"Gagaku" is the musical part of "bugaku", the Japanese reading of the musical character "ya-yue", meaning "high music", and also: a type of court orchestra and simultaneously the entire musical thinking developed within this tradition.
The theory of "gagaku" was borrowed from the literature and philosophy of China. As in China, music theory was based on the defining role of a single sound, i.e., a sound taken in isolation (in this it differs from the music of most countries of the Ancient East and the antique world, where all the semantic weight falls on the transition from one sound to another).
This is no Britpop and no Brian Eno, yeah. Pure enjoyment of the sound of each hanging and hovering note. But not only that.
The "gagaku" orchestra (about 30 instruments) includes such instruments borrowed from China as flutes (ryuteki, komabue) and small mouth organs sho. But the most important in the wind section was the hichiriki oboe, a soloing instrument. The string section includes the so (13-string zither) and biwa (4-string lute); the percussion section - bronze gongs drums(taiko, shoko, kakko and tsuzumi). The double drum san-no-tsuzumi is a kind of metronome, played by the orchestra conductor
The oboe is, to some extent, a relative of the bagpipes, and everyone knows how bagpipes sound. That is, descriptively gagaku is an ocean of slow high-frequency noise ambient, supported by rare thunderous strikes of the bass drum and ascetic string plucking.
Despite all its exoticism to us, by origin this is relatively sweet court music, not very difficult to take in. True, when stumbling upon detailed explanations and analysis of gagaku from the standpoint of music theory, you really regret that you understand so little about it.
P.S. Tried asking someone to buy me in Moscow the Grove dictionary of music or an encyclopedic dictionary of music, but they don't have it! Even in some huge store (don't know the details). Educate yourself however you can.
Japanese music Gagaku
2005-10-01