ISSN 2158-5296
Notation system, cross-cultural, semiotics, ancient music, comparative cognition, zoomusicology, analytics of play, environment, philosophy
In this paper, I explore the linguistic-syllabic mapping of sound in Japanese culture, focusing in particular on its presence in the ancient Japanese gagaku tradition and how it resonates with cultural customs, audiocentricity and ontological views of nature and sound in modern Japan.
Gagaku is an oral tradition that had its peak in the Heian period (794-1185), whereby its performers learn pieces by reciting and committing to memory a sung mnemonic called shōga (唱歌), which essentially acts as the blueprints for a piece of gagaku music. I focus on the cultural resonance and the philosophical ramificationsof this linguistic-syllabizing of soundsin shōga. In a similar spirit to R. M. Schafer’s idea of a “soundscape,” though not at all worked out in the same way, there is a long standing custom in Japanese culture of ensconcing oneself in identifying the sounds of nature, not only as a “chirp” or “hum,” but by attributing specific linguistic-syllabic denotations for specific chirping sounds in linguistic kana characters.Similarly, shōga also attribute syllabic-linguistic denotations to specific pitches. In other words, these shōga that denote abstract sounds (i.e., pitches) have a similar cognitive resonance to the deep-rooted Japanese sonic ontology of audiocentricity that involves the linguistic-syllabic mapping of concrete specific sounds from nature and one’s surroundings. Through examining the linguistic-syllabic “scores” and encoding systems of gagaku music, along with their ritualistic contexts that are inextricable to understanding them, I wish to illuminate an intriguing sense of “prayer” found in Japan and its relationship with nature from a more sonic perspective. I will then relate this to gagaku’s musical principles and systems of sonic mapping found in Japan more generally, and suggest reasons why the five-line staff musical notation system did not develop in medieval Japan as it did in Europe, despite both musics having, on the surface, similar musical structures and organizations. Further, in conjunction with the analytics of play, the workings of an audiocentric framework that I explore throughout the paper also have philosophical ramifications that blur the line between the literal and the metaphorical, which in turn have implications for the semiotics of perception and environment and, by extension, questions in zoomusicology and comparative cognition.
Zhoushu Ziporyn’s work as a scholar focuses on comparative cognition and zoomusicology, harnessing a cross-cultural perspective on music as a lens for musing on their attendant philosophical questions.
Click here to read the PDF version
© 2022 by the author. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of this article without requesting permission. When distributing, (1) the author of the article and the name, volume, issue, and year of the journal must be identified clearly; (2) no portion of the article, including audio, video, or other accompanying media, may be used for commercial purposes; and (3) no portion of the article or any of its accompanying media may be modified, transformed, built upon, sampled, remixed, or separated from the rest of the article.