EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 3 - Nagauta
Genre of the Day - Nagauta 🇯🇵
Album of the Day - The Sounds of Kabuki by The National Kabuki Company (2006)
Like yesterday, today we encounter another genre with visual stylings as a major hallmark of the music’s presentation—white, paintlike makeup contrasted against sharp pops of color. That’s initially where the similarities end, though you probably wouldn’t have expected a single connection between this three hundred year old Japanese genre and electroclash to begin with. There’s always a parallel somewhere, and it’s written on the performers’ faces here. Kabuki theater is arguably the most well-known Japanese performance art, its caricatured aesthetics and ornate, colorful costumes and massive wigs still as visually striking as in the shows’ origins centuries ago. Today, we dive into its musical companion nagauta, a term unpretentiously translating as ‘long song’ in English. Helpful as the translation may be, little do they know I’ve experienced 50 minute songs on this column, so this is light work.
Though theater traditions in Japan go back even longer than kabuki’s establishment and their histories coincide with tectonic political shifts over the nation’s history, the story of nagauta in particular is another tale of a particular instrument’s importance. The shamisen, a three-stringed, thin, banjo-like instrument came to mainland Japan by way of the southern island chains of Ryukyu (which made an appearance on this column early on) and Okinawa’s trade with China. For extra precision befitting an instrument so heavily used in formal performance, players often use a wedge-shaped wooden pick.
Kabuki’s history has been long and fraught; it grew out of noh, a more minimalistic form of theater employing masks popular among the aristocracy. The catalyst was a performance in 1603 by a shrine maiden in Kyoto that evidently electrified the crowd’s view of theater irrevocably, kabuki’s Espresso. In contrast to noh’s elite connotations, kabuki parallelled Shakespeare halfway across the world, bringing theater to the masses often in salacious form. According to William Malm’s “Nagauta: The Heart of Kabuki Music,” Early shows evidently lampooned gender roles with all female casts or male and female prostitutes acting as the opposite sex, and one could imagine this to be a shocker to the elite. This prompted a shift towards all-male troupes with an official ban on female participants in 1629 to try to curb all that uncouthness, though apparently patrons continued to fight over the men as much as they had for the women’s favors, a rare insight into red-life and queer life in medieval Japan.
That doesn’t tell you anything about the shamisen, though: way to digress. How’d the shamisen come to define kabuki theater? As a popular street instrument by this point in time, the shamisen made its way into kabuki simply from moving out of the streets into the theaters. As playwrights and visionaries finetuned the fruitful appeal of kabuki over the next century, the shamisen took center stage for its dramatic sound and accompaniment to the increasingly elaborate dances. A star was born in nagauta as a form. For an effective rhythm section, taiko drums and the smaller ōtsuzumi hip drum took up the job. Nagauta grew into an integral Japanese classical music form as kabuki weathered the government repression of the Edo period and finally got its flowers as a precious artifact of tradition during the Meiji era of the late 1800s.
Today’s album consists of just two performances, each rounding out at twenty minutes. For all the first track’s mournful melisma, it came as a surprise to me after listening to find out that this piece, composed in 1811, is a satirical and humorous number rattling off the dances and products of a particular region. The capability to make what is essentially a high-art, theatrical commercial sound like a beautiful, moving epic is a testament to naguta’s masterful exploitation of the shamisen’s melodic ability, ornamental flute whistles, drumming dance breaks, and rhythmic variety. Though I could find no information about the second performance’s meaning, the shamisen breakdown in the last four minutes is a fantastic exploration of the instrument’s unique, woody, reverberating timbre as the other instrumental pieces and voices swirl in the background before hanging on with a dramatically drawn out note. It’s a reminder that no amount of governmental repression can trample music and performance that entrances people—beloved music can and will outlive the ephemeral and ever-changing social tastes of regimes.